“One of the most needed radical shifts in education is to bring ALL life to the centre. Charlotte Hankin, Matthew Bejtlich, and Unfolding Aliveness are co-curating learning experiences that honour our entangled realities by expanding our awareness of them. I can't wait to share this learning. Rewilding Education requires us to rewild ourselves. Unfolding Aliveness offers an array of experiences aimed at attuning ourselves with the entangled ecosystemic reality of the living world.“

“This week's journey of Sound Strories for Multi-Species Justice took me up the Way Biha River in Lampung, Sumatra to experience sounds of Place. I loved meeting boatman Udo Ferry who shared a deep love for the river ecosystem. He seemed to embody the foragers 'poised alertness' Susan Ericksen speaks of in 'The Mushroom at the End of the World', as he pointed out to me a nearly invisible python in a nearby tree; the informous White Monkey of Way Biha and the embarrassingly bulging sacks of mushrooms he foraged compared with my humble bounty. This week's experiences provoked a remarkable expansion of my attunement to Place where I became aware of the mind-boggling volume of species in my presence. 

— Nick Lane, Geography Teacher at SJI International School, Singapore

“ Charlotte and Matt took us on a deep journey through interspecies relationships with sounds and music. They built a framework that took the least technical among us and enabled them to produce interesting content, full with their own audio recordings and wisdom, while also continuing to inspire those with more skills to go above and beyond. Matt and Charlotte stayed with the group. They never lost contact with the conversation, keeping everyone on board, while also being open to everything that comes on the path.  

Building a community in ten weeks! Its not a small feat but that is what I witnessed around week seven of this course. We where helping each other learn, generating powerful content, and being challenged to do so. Every week our creations grew more interesting. Interactions became deeper and our sensed Relationship with the natural world grew, day by day.

This course is a work we created together and this is felt by everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to grow deeper in my skills, wisdom and passion.”

⭑ A beginner with sound, but are curious about its potential to tell multispecies stories about places.

⭑ If you are an artist, you might like to learn alternative, more sustainable ways to express yourself and move towards a more regenerative, creative practice.

⭑ If you are an educator, you might like to discover cutting-edge, innovative pedagogical approaches towards learning (and teaching). 

⭑ If you are an activist/ environmentalist/ conservationist, you might like to learn new ways to communicate, respond and create with issues concerning planetary health.

⭑ If you are a researcher, you might like to find out how to generate data with multispecies participants in creative, expansive ways. 

⭑ If you are a student, you might like to explore creative ways to express your understanding, knowledge and skills, not about the world, but as the world. 

And, and, and…

We invite you to join us in an artistic and ecological unfolding, a process that helps to create the conditions for more life to reveal itself.

Sound Stories for Multispecies Justice is a slow, exploratory practice to cultivate more open, creative and responsible capacities for planetary thriving. 

— Focusing on the sounds of multispecies slows us down to cultivate our attentiveness, alertness and sensitivities with place. 
— Noticing sounds of multispecies increases our interconnectedness with the world/s around us, illuminating ways in which we are all enmeshed and co-exist.
— Sound challenges our more dominant sense of sight, illuminating alternative ways of being less human-centric and more eco-centric.
— Learning to listen deeply is a reciprocal practice, a way of giving space and reverence to those who are different to ourselves, which helps us to be more responsible for them. 
— Creating art with multispecies is a creative and hopeful way to respond to environmental issues of personal concern. 

Technical & Creative:
— Develop your audio storytelling skills, from sound recording, to sound design and composition, to mixing and final mastering for distribution using audio software like Ableton Live or Audacity
— Craft expressive narratives with sound through a form of your choice: e.g. soundscape, spoken word/poetry, song, podcast, or short film
— Receive support, encouragement, and inspiration from expert mentors and coaches

Projects & Transformation:
— Work on a sound project of personal significance to you that is tailored to your unique place and needs
— Incorporate perspectives and tools from multispecies, regenerative, and posthuman theory into your creative practice
— Explore relationships with beings in the natural world through sound storytelling.

Listening & Reciprocity: 
— Hone your listening techniques and create a personal listening practice 
— Gain a greater appreciation for how multi species co-exist, and tips on how to make more room for these perspectives in our work  
— Tune in to the aliveness around you 

Community & Care: 
— Meet like-minded folk who all care, as you do, about the healthfulness of our planet
— Fall in love with your place and the life that you co-inhabit with
— Join a community of care
— Build a sound archive. Transfer your new tools for noticing to other areas of your life, such as education, other artistic endeavors, professional contexts and more

You will get:
— Ten 90 minute sessions

• — Live sound design tutorials in Ableton Live
• — Video, audio, and supporting transcriptions
  
• — Curated learning resources (e.g. books, articles, films..)
  
• — Weekly individualzied and group feedback
  
• — Community discussion on Telegram 
  
• — Personalized mentorship
  
• — Final work creative showcase 
  
• — 2 teachers

We have a few partial scholarships for those with lower access to wealth. Please write to matt@unfoldingaliveness.com.

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Week 1: Unfolding community

We will start the course by orientating ourselves in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch known as the ‘age of man’, employing posthumanist theory to explore questions such as ‘how did we get here?’ and ‘how are we responding?’ to the increasing precarity of our world/s. We will share stories about our relationships with place, considering ways in which we experience our ecosystems and the multispecies life that co-inhabit our environs. In this session, we will dip our toes into the magical world of sound, considering its potential for cultivating greater ecological awareness. 

Week 2: Exploring our relationships with sound

This week we will dive deeper into sound and the art of listening, exploring tools and methods to hone a deep listening practice. We will be considering how multispecies sounds can teach us about our world/s and why so much knowledge is created (and also ignored) through listening.  In this session, we will be considering how we might employ sounds that are generated with multispecies in our place/s as creative and personal storytelling devices.

Week 3: Concept-ing with sound

This week we will submerge ourselves with different sound stories, discussing how we might engage with narrative, audience, medium to shape meaningful expressions with our world/s. Participants will start to consider a concept for their personal expression and outline a multispecies sound project that they will develop throughout the course. In this session, we will explore questions such as ‘what story could you tell about your place?’ and ‘who and what will you co-create your story with?’

Week 4: Creating and communing with sound

This week will be an active one where participants will learn more about how to record with their place/s and refine their listening practice/s. We will consider how everyday digital devices can be utilised to record sounds and co-create with multispecies companions as well as learning new tools and methods through our mentorship. We will explore questions such as ‘who and what are you listening with (the living and non-living / the material)?’ and ‘what is your personal and ecological significance for this curiosity?’ Participants will flesh out ideas for their personal sound projects and begin to experiment with their expressions. 

Week 5: Deepening relationships with sounds

This week takes a deep dive into the sounds we have recorded so far by learning more about sound editing and processing. We continue to practice deep listening techniques as we share our multispecies sounds and consider how our personal expressions are developing according to our project plans. We explore questions such as ‘What are our sound expressions unfolding for us?’ and ‘have we learned any new knowledge?’ With expert mentorship, we learn tools and techniques to refine and deepen our understanding of tensions, challenges, opportunities with our place/s.

Week 6: Creating space/s for multispecies contributions

This week continues with sound ideation as we delve into the intricate worlds of composition and mixing. We consider what we will do with our sound expressions so far to take care with our multispecies stories of place. Together, we will explore how stylistic choices can amplify the contributions of others and how this shapes and expands our narratives. Through our audio this week, we return to the question, ‘How can we make more and more space/s for multispecies expressions?  

Week 7: Open studio for sound storytelling

This week, we arrange opportunities for personalised attention in our open studio as each participant works with a mentor on their multispecies sound story. We continue to refine narrative techniques using sound and explore the potential impact of our expressions so far. We discuss questions such as ‘how will our sound expressions deepen awareness of place?’ and ‘how successfully are we bringing in multispecies contributions?’ Together, we reflect on our journey so far and sprinkle nuggets of support, encouragement and inspiration throughout and within our sharing practices. 

Week 8: Sound as archive

This week, we explore the concept of a sound archive, a space where we can share, inspire, provoke responses to the ecological crises we find ourselves constantly responding with. We explore questions such as ‘how can multispecies sound stories bring us closer together?’ and ‘how are we learning with each other?’ In this session, we consider how we can keep our communion going and how our personal sound expressions might support global knowledge-creation. 

Week 9: Sound showcase

This week is a time for showcasing our learning, telling our multispecies sound stories and considering how effectively our creative expressions support our project intention/s. We plunge into the world of audio sharing through spaces such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and so on to consider how we might expand our ideas through ripples of influence. In this week, we continue to work on our sound projects, receiving expert mentorship to prepare for the final showcase. 

Week 10: Sound expressions for planetary health

This week, we present our sounds for with each other and external guests and collaborators. This is an opportunity for celebration, feed-forward, reciprocity and care as we tell our multispecies sound stories and hear the personal and ecological expressions of place. We consider questions such as ‘what has sound taught us?’ and ‘how have we learned more about planetary health through an auditory unfolding of place?’ We give thanks to ourselves for our creative and vulnerable expression, to one another for the support and collaboration and to our place/s for inspiration and its multispecies gifts. 

— A notebook, smart phone, and laptop
— An open-mind
— A desire to connect with the more-than-human world
— Vulnerability to learn with others
— Curiosity about sound
— Care for the world 

MEET YOUR MENTORS

Charlotte is an international educator with twenty two years’ experience in a variety of roles including teacher, leader, school-to-school consultant and education policy advisor for the UK government, working in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Bali. Charlotte has dedicated her professional life to championing the lives of children and the natural world, deepening knowledge, wisdom and finesse in curricula design, professional development, sustainability for education, and creative and critical dispositions for learning. 

Charlotte is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Education, University of Bath working at the nexus of theory and practice. Her doctoral inquiry explores animal-child relations to consider how international schools might shift from human-exceptionalism to more regenerative pedagogical practices. Charlotte employs posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories and practices to co-create playful, arts-based research with animals and children. 

In an increasingly fragile and precarious world, Charlotte believes that educational ecosystems could design more learning experiences that help us all to notice and attend to the living and non-living contributions to the world around us. Exploring and expressing the complex relationships in our world with creativity and sensitivity helps us all to develop care, responsibility and hope for more generative, flourishing futures. 

Matthew Bejtlich is an educator, data scientist, and artist who dances across disciplines and institutions—teaching ecological design, systems thinking, data science, and storytelling at Rhode Island School of Design, Northeastern University, and Curry College. With playful curiosity, Matthew crafts tools, platforms, and stories that invite dialogue, collaboration, and spontaneous encounters. He is particularly drawn to artistic and sound-based methodologies that help us attune to the subtle ecologies of place, inviting deeper, more intimate relationships. 

Matthew is interested in creating spaces for improvisation, exchange, and polyphony—softening boundaries and making space for voices often unheard. He is co-founder of Unfolding Aliveness, an educational-ecological-artistic space, studio, and practice which attends to and creates with multispecies worlds, and serves as an AI Fellow with the Transformations Community. He is currently a PhD student in Management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, studying regenerative strategy and sustainability transformations, with a focus on ecological and multispecies literacy.

He was mentored in sound design by Bradley Zero, founder of Rhythm Section International in London, and DJ at NTS Radio/BBC Radio.
He holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and an MSc in Data Science from Brown University.