This dissertation utilizes qualitative sound methods to explore the ways in which sound and songwriting create place and inspire interspecies engagement in place-based classrooms. Drawing inspiration from decolonial theory, multispecies theory, and the environmental humanities, this dissertation adds to a growing body of research in the field of sound studies that centers sound as an embodied form of knowledge in educational settings. The fieldwork site for this research project was a place-based pre-kindergarten classroom where the researcher utilized tools and methods of sonic geography, sonic ethnography, and research-creation to explore the importance of sound and song in one experiential education setting.

The discussion of this fieldwork is divided into three chapters. The first describes the ways in which institutional and societal pressures, student needs, the built environment of the school, and the forest classroom inspire educational rhythms, sonic ecologies, and placemaking. The second details how listening differently to forest encounters between students, a large rock, and a succession of field mice inspired interspecies perspective-taking and the arts of wondering about the entanglement of human and more-than-human ecologies. The final chapter focuses on a research-creation songwriting project with pre-kindergarten students, community musicians, teachers, and critters in the forest classroom. This chapter explores the idea of place-based songs as multispecies sonic fables, a sounded version of Donna Haraway’s “speculative fabulation,” which encourage rituals of attunement and creativity for relational and environmentally just futures amongst teachers and young students.