ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to integrate ideas from the art world, such as connective aesthetics and enlightened listening with ideas from feminist pedagogy, including caring, connections, community, modeling, dialogue, practice and confirmation. It also explores connective aesthetics since a collaborative strategy for achieving such an aesthetic is a listener-centered practice of artmaking. In a connective aesthetic, enlightened listening which seeks shared understanding, would encourage each of us to recognize and understand our interdependence as we give voice to ourselves and to others. Connective aesthetics and feminist pedagogy overlap in many ways. Both are concerned with collaboration, community building, caring, social purpose, listening, dialogue, modeling, taking responsibility, nurturing and social action. Feminist pedagogy recognizes the importance of relationships in teaching and as a result, the daily stories of our ordinary lives and the lives of our students become important, each story needing to be told and heard in order to enhance our understandings of ourselves and of each other.
