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Rice, Suzanne; Burbules, Nicholas C.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201106pmid: N/A
Background ContextDespite its significance for learning, listening has received very little attention in the philosophy of education literature. This article draws on the philosophy and educational thought of Aristotle to illuminate characteristics of good listening. The current project is exploratory and preliminary, seeking mainly to suggest what a virtues orientation might offer in terms of understanding and fostering good listing in educational contexts.PurposeThis work examines how listening in educational contexts may be understood when examined through an Aristotelian lens. Virtue ethics provides a systematic orientation for the analysis of a familiar but underanalyzed phenomenon: good listening.Research DesignThis is an analytic essay.Conclusions/RecommendationsIt is possible to identify characteristics of good listening, and at least some of these would almost certainly be counted among the virtues by many working within an Aristotelian framework. We have mentioned a few already—patience, tolerance, humility, and various intellectual virtues. Our aim is not to offer a new menu of virtues as a possible replacement for those advocated by others, but rather to give some sense of how virtue ethics can inform thinking about listening.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201109pmid: N/A
Background/ContextAlthough the concept of listening had been neglected by philosophers of education, it has received focused attention since 2003, when Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon addressed it in her presidential address to the Philosophy of Education Society.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyHaroutunian-Gordon offered a cognitive theory of listening, according to which an act of listening involves raising questions about both the speaker's utterance and the listener's own beliefs.Research DesignThis article draws on the methods of philosophical analysis to provide a competing account of listening. This account distinguishes between two types of listening, a cognitive (thinking) type and a noncognitive (empathic feeling) type.Findings/ResultsBy considering a number of familiar classroom incidents, I show that both kinds of listening have important roles in teaching and learning.Conclusions/RecommendationsI conclude by questioning whether the empathic type of listening can directly be taught. I conclude that it cannot be, but that teachers can provide three kinds of “helps” indirectly to foster its growth in learners.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201102pmid: N/A
Background/ContextListening is largely overlooked in cultures constituted on the basis of the freedom of speech, such as we find in the United States and elsewhere.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThe article explores compassionate listening as a creative spiritual activity. Such listening recognizes the suffering of others in ways that open up possibilities for healing and transformative communication. It is particularly important for a caring profession like teaching and critical for good teaching and learning relationships.Research DesignRelying on philosophical reflection, the article mixes some of the basic ideas of Eastern thought revolving around the image of the Bodhisattvas as they who constantly ameliorate suffering. The article concentrates on the Bodhisattva “Perceiver of the World's Sounds.”Conclusions/RecommendationWe can only relieve suffering if we attend carefully to the needs, desires, interests, and purposes of others and respond in terms of their best possibility in the situation. Such self-eclipsing allows caregivers to avoid the horrors of conditional love. Such listening lies beyond theory and ideology in the immediate, directly involving sympathetic response, but not pity. It is not the kind of sympathy that assumes that the pain in others has the same characteristics or source as our own.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201101.2777pmid: N/A
Background/ContextThe reconsideration of reverence was proposed by Paul Woodruff's 2001 book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. In examining reverence, we draw on moral philosophy, particularly the revival of virtue ethics, and acknowledge Woodruff's cross-cultural studies of reverence, particularly in ancient Greece and Confucian China. We propose the revival of reverence and reverential listening in teaching and leading in schools.Purpose/Focus of StudyWe take Woodruff's philosophical and historical analysis of reverence and extend it to education, particularly for teachers and school leaders. We delineate the traits of reverential listening for teachers and describe the importance of ritual, ceremony, and shared deliberation for school leaders. Our purpose is to show what reverential listening is and how it can be part of best practices in schools.Research DesignThe research design is a philosophical study of reverence and listening in the context of education. We analyze each term and describe its traits as we form a description of reverential listening in education. This analysis is supported by examples taken from our own experiences as teachers and from well-known theorists of reverence, teaching practices, and school leadership.Conclusions/RecommendationsWe conclude that small acts of reverent kindness, like the acts of reverent listening accomplished by teachers and leaders in schools, can be transformative. As Albert Schweitzer noted, many of us do this modest though important work well every day. Reverent listening is certainly not a panacea for the concerns and problems of our schools, but it is part of a simple act of paying regard and attention to others that is too often ignored in today's schools.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201105pmid: N/A
Background/ContextTaking up an issue explored by John Dewey, Austin Sarat, and Walter Parker, as well as many others, I continue my study of the conditions under which people choose to listen to a perspective that challenges their own beliefs.Research QuestionIn my book, Learning to Teach Through Discussion: The Art of Turning the Soul (2009), I present a case study that shows students and teachers learning to listen. The reader sees that as they engage in what I call “interpretive discussion”—that is, discussion about the meaning of texts—they become more eager to understand their meaning and to understand the ideas of others in the group. In some instances, people work to listen to ideas that challenge their own, rather than eschewing them. The present article continues my investigation into the conditions under which people try to listen to a challenging perspective and draws implications for the challenge of so doing for teachers.Research DesignThe research described in Learning to Teach Through Discussion moved me to examine a fictional case and assert five hypotheses about the conditions under which listening to a challenging perspective occurs. Then, I examined a nonfictional, introspective case that focused my attention on the second of the five hypotheses. Next, with Elizabeth Meadows and others, I studied two nonintrospective, nonfictional cases. These analyses helped to clarify four conditions that obtain at the point identified by the second hypothesis. Clarification of the four conditions enabled me to identify a challenge that teachers face in trying to help students and themselves listen to challenging perspectives.ConclusionsThe evidence that I have collected suggests that when one listens to a challenging view, it is because one is trying to resolve a question and seeks help in doing so. Then, one allows one's listening to be interrupted; that is, one stops trying to answer the initial question and starts trying to resolve a new question. The shift occurs because one hears, in the other's words, an idea that challenges a heretofore tacit belief. The listener then starts listening to determine whether the belief should be accepted or rejected. I argue that when teachers allow their listening to be interrupted by a challenging perspective, they open themselves to recognition of heretofore tacit beliefs, to new questions, and to new ideas about the resolution of those questions.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201104pmid: N/A
Background/ContextThe literature on classroom discussion often undercuts itself by treating discussion only as an instructional method, confining its role to the instrumental. Although discussion does serve as an effective means to other curricular ends (teaching with discussion), the capable practice of discussion can also be considered a curriculum objective in its own right (teaching for discussion). The latter is justified on the grounds that listening and speaking to what Danielle Allen called “strangers” about powerful ideas and public problems is crucial to democratic citizen formation; indeed, it defines democracy, signaling a citizen's coming of age while at the same time creating the public sphere that democracy requires—a space where political argument and action flourish.Purpose /Focus of StudyThe author outlines a discursive approach to the cultivation of enlightened political engagement in schools. He argues that schools are the best available sites for this project because they have the key assets: diverse schoolmates (more or less), problems (both academic and social), “strangers” (schoolmates who are not friends or family), and curriculum and instruction (schools are intentionally educative places). Ambitious classroom discussion models—for example, seminars and deliberations—can mobilize these assets; but new habits, especially those that build equity and trust, are needed.SettingTwo empirical cases of classroom discussion ground the argument in classroom practice. In one, high school students deliberate whether physician-assisted suicide should be legalized in their state. In the other, suburban middle school students conduct a seminar on Howard Fast's novel of the American revolution, April Morning.Research DesignThis is an analytic essay/argument.Conclusions/RecommendationsSchools in societies with democratic ideals are obligated to cultivate enlightened and engaged citizens. Helping young people form the habits of listening to strangers, at that very public place called school, should advance this work.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201101pmid: N/A
Background/ContextStudents spend a large part of their time in schools in silence. However, teachers tend to spend most of their time attending to student talk. Anthropological and linguistic research has contributed to an understanding of silence in particular communities, offering explanations for students’ silence in school. This research raised questions about the silence of marginalized groups of students in classrooms, highlighting teachers’ role in this silencing and drawing on limited meanings of silence. More recently, research on silence has conceptualized silence as a part of a continuum.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThe purpose of this project was to review existing literature and draw on two longitudinal research studies to understand the functions and uses of silence in everyday classroom practice. I explore the question, How might paying attention to the productivity of student silence and the possibilities it contains add to our understanding of student silence in educational settings? Silence holds multiple meanings for individuals within and across racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. However, in schools, silence is often assigned a limited number of meanings. This article seeks to add to educators’ and researchers’ tools for interpreting classroom silence.Research DesignThe article is based on two longitudinal qualitative studies. The first was an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of high school students in a multiracial high school on the West Coast. This study was designed with the goal of learning about adolescents’ literacy practices in and out of school during their final year of high school and in their first few years as high school graduates. The second study documents discourses of race and race relations in a postdesegregated middle school. The goal of this 3-year study was to gather the missing student perspectives on their racialized experiences in school during the desegregation time period.Conclusions/RecommendationsUnderstanding the role of silence for the individual and the class as a whole is a complex process that may require new ways of conceptualizing listening. I conclude that an understanding of the meanings of silence through the practice of careful listening and inquiry shifts a teacher's practice and changes a teacher's understanding of students’ participation. I suggest that teachers redefine participation in classrooms to include silence.
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201103pmid: N/A
BackgroundA typical account of listening focuses on cognition, describing how a listener understands and reacts to the cognitive contents of a speaker's utterance. The articles in this issue move beyond a cognitive view, arguing that listening also involves moral, aesthetic, and political aspects.Focus of StudyThis article attends to all four dimensions but focuses on the political. I argue that listening requires attention to the social identities inevitably communicated through speech. My account of “listening for identity” moves beyond typical approaches by construing listening as a collective, public process, not one located in an individual listener's mental states. To listen is to respond sensibly to others, such that participants can build a coherent interaction. Once we adopt this pragmatic account of listening, we must acknowledge that listening requires attention to patterns beyond the event of listening itself. Some of the signs and behaviors that cohere to form an instance of listening depend for their meaning on patterns from outside the event of listening. In addition to arguing that we listen for identity, then, I also argue that we must “listen beyond the speech event.”SettingThe case study presented in this article comes from a yearlong study of a ninth-grade English and history class in an urban American school that served ethnically diverse working-class children.Research DesignThe research involved 3 years of ethnographic research in an urban American high school, 1 year of intensive ethnographic research in the classroom described, and discourse analyses of 50 hours of recorded conversation from this classroom.ConclusionsSpeakers inevitably identify themselves and others when they talk, and this identification can only be successful if people listen and respond in appropriate ways. We certainly listen for the cognitive contents communicated by speech, but we also listen for the identities established through speech. The two central claims made in this article and illustrated by the case study are that we inevitably listen for identity and that listening requires attention to patterns beyond the speech event.
Burbules, Nicholas C.; Rice, Suzanne
doi: 10.1177/016146811011201108pmid: N/A
Background/ContextThis article is part of a series of studies carried out by the authors in this special issue on the general topic of listening and its specific relevance to teaching.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyWe examine the common activity of pretending to listen and argue that thinking about it carefully reveals some important insights into the practice of listening more generally. Then we turn to the question of pretending to listen in the context of teaching.Research DesignThis is a conceptual and normative study drawing from relevant philosophical literatures.Conclusions/RecommendationsA romanticized view of listening suggests some kind of totally encompassing focus and understanding: The good listener is hearing everything, understanding everything, blessed with profound insight and infinite patience. Having set up this ideal type, however, we then judge every deviation from this perfect model as a moral failing. This way of thinking about moral conduct, we conclude, is often misleading and counterproductive.
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