Listening as Pedagogic Praxis, or Putting My Head in a Paper Bag

Academic year 2020-2021 has ended. Stated here without commentary. For posterity, if you will.

I once worked with a larger-than-life Artistic Director who liked to wax philosophical about the “ontological moment”: the very instant of being. In stagecraft—as in life, it turns out—magical things happen when we are present to and invested in our moment-to-moment presence. We slow down; we listen. I’ve been in those moments a lot lately, as I’ve been too numb to take a critical look back on this year and too burned out to plan ahead for the next.

I’ve been inhabiting these now moments with my body, as a kind of mental inertia has taken over—a stretching of time, a dulling of my capacities. Late-stage-pandemic brain, perhaps. I’ve been re-engaging with the being of and in my body that as a dancer is where I am most at home. Listening in and through; mapping, grounding, reconciling. Being still and listening to my grief. Making space for the experience of last year to filter down into my ontological moments, where only the essential bits—the bits that have meaning and relevance—remain.

At the end of last year, a student said to me: “If you’re not expected to respond, you can really listen.” 

I can’t stop thinking about it. 

Students are used to responding. They’re used to generating a product that will be assessed and quantified: required reading responses, “post once/reply twice” discussion board responses, responding aloud in a class discussion. They’re used to figuring out anything at all to say, or at least what they think we expect them to say. We emphasize, and rightly so, the importance of student voice in our pedagogies—the importance of making space for agency. The act of listening is implied. It’s part of the process. We don’t intentionally ignore it, but it’s not given as much weight or value as producing original work to demonstrate one’s knowledge. 

In his work on antiracist pedagogies, Asao B. Inoue writes: “Western White traditions of assessment focus on textual evidence with markers a judge can see. The orientation of this logic is ocular. It’s the same one that feeds common sense such as, ‘seeing is believing.’ It’s a logic that comes from Western European empirical traditions that assume most of what is important or measurable is seen.”

Listening—like learning—is neither visible nor tangible, which needs to be stated loudly in a system so entrenched in documentation and evidence. As a tenet of our carceral academic culture, “seeing is believing” assumes that students are liars and cheaters before learners and humans—that they are inherently suspect. When we consider the racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, and gender biases that are also endemic to the system, the effects of this “prove it” culture are compounded for students in under-resourced, underserved groups. The very possibility that we’d trust a student—particularly a student in the margins—to just be in class, listening and learning without corroborating it, has become somehow anathema.

As a different student pointed out to me recently, listening is a necessary part of learning, but it almost never “counts.”

How do we value listening? I’m not referring to the kind of false listening that’s so often equated with “attention,” but the kind of intentional listening we do when we get in the car for a long drive and put on a podcast or an audiobook. The kind of compassionate listening we do when a friend tells us about an important experience in their life. Even the kind of diverted listening that sometimes takes us away from the subject, into a thought tangent that calls up a memory or experience before bringing us back to the speaker. How many times have we replayed the previous 30 or 60 seconds of a podcast because we just… went off somewhere? There is value in those wanderings. They are where ideas and creativity and connections happen. They are ontological moments.

Facilitating synchronous class discussions online last year, oddly enough, expanded my understanding of what listening is and can be. In the digital space, we listen differently. The rhythm of discussion online is irregular, the tempo slower. There are awkward pauses when we wait together, blinking; and there are moments of overlap (“oh sorry no you go ahead”). When cameras are off, we squint our eyes and turn an ear closer to the screen when others speak, and we launch into singsong greetings to compensate for our darkened rectangles. We exaggerate our communications with Muppet waves, thumbs ups, head tilts, and heart hands. The combinations of audio, text-based, and visual contributions introduce several ways to listen and be listened to, and all at the same time. There were days last year when students entered and left in the dark, and I didn’t hear a word from them. I chose to trust that they were there with us, listening in their own ways. 

The gallery view, with all its faults, provides a visual rendering of a democratic classroom—of how little time and space we’d take up if we truly put ourselves on equal footing with students. Our boxes were all the same size, and mine occupied only 5% of the screen. What would happen if I listened the other 95% of the time? I wasn’t successful at that despite my efforts, but I kept my thoughts to myself more often. I tried to center students’ voices so they could listen to one another instead of me: 
“Would anyone like to respond?”
“That seems related to what so-and-so was saying earlier. Is that accurate?”  
“Can you go further with that?”
“Let’s sit with that for a minute… [wait in the silence until something happens.]”
“Would you like to say more?”
“How should we wrap this up?” 
“Who’s getting the last word?”

I didn’t know students had considered listening part of our course until several of them mentioned it, unprompted, in their final self-reflections. I’d been working on my own listening as I tried to prioritize equity and access and meaning and relevance in what was, for me, a new and uncomfortable learning environment. I must have modeled listening to some degree, or at least my attempts at it. There were at least a few times when I put my hand over my mouth and muted myself to avoid saying too much.

I hadn’t required students to attend our synchronous classes, or have their cameras on, or speak, or take notes, or anything at all, really. I’d designed ungraded, otherwise asynchronous courses, in which most of the students joined our optional classes to discuss readings every week. Perhaps because they had latitude—with my guidance as needed—they’d been willing to opt into listening. To choose listening with agency, as opposed to feeling silenced: “If you’re not expected to respond, you can really listen.”

I’m going to start calling it “listen” instead of “mute.” The action is important. The choice. The possibility for growth.

*

There’s a joke going around the Internet that the in-person version of having our cameras off would be standing in the corner with a paper bag over our heads. I’m thinking about similar strategies as I look forward to in-person teaching, absurdity and all. 

On turning our cameras off:
How can we be present but less visible? Students could close their eyes or find a place in the room where they felt comfortably out of view. Masks, to this end as well as for public health reasons, could be useful too. We’d have to trust that students were present the same way we did online, so why not? Paper bags are certainly not out of the question. Anything to get us laughing together again.

On the chat: 
How can we make space in the classroom for what Jesse Stommel refers to as “backchanneling”? We could encourage passing notes in digital or analog forms. Slack, text, writing on a whiteboard, passing actual (vintage…) pen-to-paper notes, could all play a role. Notes could be passed from student to student, student to teacher, or teacher to student. 

On muting (or listening):
How can we make the option to choose listening explicit? Saying it out loud and putting it in the syllabus are our clearest options—listening as a valid choice that serves to support one’s own learning as well as the community of learners. Configuring the room in concentric circles is another possibility, with one circle speaking, one circle listening, and the freedom to move between them as desired. 

There are implications for students with disabilities in all of these ideas that need further consideration. I’m inspired by the work of Crystal Michelle Perkins, whose approach to pedagogy in dance aims to ensure that no one in the class community is left behind. A real community like that develops when everyone feels valued, which implies that they have access and feel included. It implies that we’re listening.

In teaching, we attend to the doing of things, mostly—of generating knowledge, taking agency, and using voice. Listening, despite its inherent value, can be fraught with issues of privilege and trauma and oppression when it’s imposed from without. As we fold it into our pedagogies and course designs, then, listening must be supported by policies that enable students to choose it from within as an intentional act—as a verb. Because listening is not static. It is not passive, or muted, or without agency. When we step back and listen, students step forward to speak. When students listen to one another, we become a community.

Photo credit: Jr Korpa on Unsplash