About my research
Something Understood: an audio pedagogy for complex concepts in initial teacher education
Nick Hood 
But saving the race is nothing in itself. As I say, that’s only being rats. It’s saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing. There men like you come in. There’s books, there’s models. We must make great safe places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books. That’s where men like you come in. We must go to the British Museum and pick all those books through. Especially we must keep up our science—learn more. (the Artillery Man, in Wells 1898, 259–60)
Everybody in society is an expert in education. We all went to school and learned how it works, what is wrong with it, and how it might be sustained or improved. Those of us who go on to become educators ourselves carry all of that baggage with us. We then realise that being a teacher isn’t as easy as we thought it was going to be. We seek to appear knowledgeable, especially in the promotion interview, and latch on to the silver bullets and quick fixes of current popular thinking, especially if those are “research-informed” or “evidence-based.” The white colonial voice dominates the culture and government of schooling, especially state schooling. The independent and academy schools are slaves to market forces which are themselves characteristic of conservative capital and the desire for the preservation of privilege.
The logical, the scientific, the traceable somehow, to some axiomatic truth, is the paradigm of validity we require. Even if we can’t quite trace all of the steps ourselves, we believe in science and the verisimilitude of science that is the foundation of our education, along with those certainties of fact that are written in books. And yet we are dissatisfied.
Perhaps there are other ways of going about it.
To examine this thought, I am going to ask student teachers to listen to a short (a little under 30 minutes) audio sequence as a learning module and ask them to respond to the experience. The sequence will be specifically produced around a broad theme on a complex topic relevant to new teachers, following a general format inspired by the BBC radio programme, Something Understood, in which
“Presenters choose a theme that interests them and then pick pieces of music, poetry and prose. […] The presenter then circles around the grit until the end of the programme, when they may or may not have an answer.” (LOFTUS 2007)
The BBC programme Something Understood was named for a line at the end of George Herbert’s 1633 poem “Prayer” (Herbert 1633). This title reflects the programme’s exploration of themes of religion, spirituality, and human existence through a combination of speech, music, prose, and poetry. This same combination is used in the audio programming created for my research as a pedagogical approach.
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Using arts-based methodology (Leavy 2020; Greenwood 2019; Finley 2008), we will explore and create manifestations of the response to the audio in order to consider what Einstein described as a kind of “pre-knowing” (Root-Bernstein 2002), that way of knowing something before you can write it down (Heisenberg 1974).
