Community listening sessions: an approach for facilitating collective reflection on environmental learning and behavior in everyday life

Collaborative research approaches can promote social learning by curating a structure that facilitates inclusive dialogue and reflection. Within an epistemological frame that upholds notions of emergence rather than extraction, such modes can foster collective reflection in ways that contribute to reversing traditional notions of expertise. In this paper, we describe ‘Community Listening Sessions’, an approach drawing on focus group, learning circle, and participatory research literature. We developed Community Listening Sessions to study the interactional contexts of environmental learning – an inherently social, collective process. In our initial application, through 14 listening sessions hosted across the San Francisco Bay Area (California, USA), we engaged more than 100 community members in discussing how they learn about and take action related to the environment in their daily lives. We make recommendations for future use of Community Listening Sessions for collecting qualitative data in a participatory, equitable way in what can be challenging, high-social-cost discussions, yet those that are critical for addressing issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, socio-environmental justice, and others that are essential to the future of our species and planet.