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Listening within the framework of Critical World Citizenship concerns listening with the intention of learning, reflecting, and listening to voices that are otherwise left unheard. Rather than just being a recipient of information, the student will learn how to actively engage with others, and to create meaningful moments of reflection, engagement, and interaction.
This way of listening is not only important in the classroom and in communication with other students, but probably even more so in the broader society. Learning how to listen well will help the students in building bridges and establish connections with people from different cultural and national backgrounds. This includes listening to voices and narratives that would otherwise go unheard. At the same time, listening critically will help students unpack implicit meaning and assumptions and allows for critical reflection and introspection.
Tips & tricks
With these tips & tricks, you can introduce students to the skill in an accessible way.
An easy way to encourage listening in the classroom is by regularly changing the seating plan. Students tend to sit next to their friends in class and take the same seat every class. By changing the seating plan (after a break, or before every lesson), students will sit next to peers they might be less familiar with. This will make them more aware of the different voices present in the classroom and more likely to listen to the voices of students they otherwise would not engage with. The aim is to teach students to listen to all voices and encourage them to gain new perspectives on dilemmas and problems discussed in class as well as reflect on their own perspectives and experiences.
A check-in happens at the beginning of a lesson and is meant to give all students a chance to speak during class, and to make them more comfortable. The teacher will ask everyone in class how they are doing and how they are feeling about the upcoming lesson. This way, students will have a chance to express themselves if they are not feeling well or if something is hindering their performance in class that day. Furthermore, it teaches the students to listen to each other, to take each other seriously, and allow all students the opportunity to speak. If this is done routinely, it will help students to listen to each other and pay attention to other peoples’ knowledge and arguments as well as their experiences and wellbeing. Both are part of becoming a critical world citizen.
During classes in which students are behind their desks and on their laptop, they can quickly disengage and lose interest in their peers. To encourage students to listen to each other, and to make them communicate more easily, it can help to set the tables aside in the classroom. Instead, students will sit in a circle (possibly with laptops or notes on their laps) and talk to each other without the obstruction of tables between them. This will make it more accessible to start a dynamic discussion and engage with each other’s perspectives and arguments as students will be less distracted by their laptops, and thus more inclined to listen to each other.
If we take the time to listen to people carefully, we discover that apparently weird behaviour or strange thoughts have a logic of their own. Unless we make the effort to spend time and watch more closely, we will fail to notice this internal logic or alternative perspective. As Howard Becker, says, pointing at “something that seems so bizarre and unintelligible that our only explanation is some form of ‘They must be crazy’ should alert us that we don’t know enough about the behaviour under study. It’s better to assume that it makes some kind of sense and to look for the sense it makes."
One way to tackle this pitfall is to actively engage with what we find awkward, and try to understand from within. “If we spent some time as participant observers, we might find that the viewpoints through which people interpret the political world have merit. We lead ourselves toward a particular set of conclusions by assuming that people are less expert than we are. Why not start from the realization that we do not see the world through the same lens as many of the people we study and try to develop sympathy for those perspectives? We might move closer to understanding, for example, a puzzle that is currently high on the agenda of political pundits and scholars: how people can seemingly vote against their own economic interests. Some scientists may say that people make ill-informed choices. But if we listen to the way people understand their votes or policy preferences, we might conclude otherwise. Are they really not making sensible choices? Or are they just making choices that do not make sense through the perspectives we assume are appropriate?”.
Stimulate and facilitate students to develop skills enabling them to learn to speak and hear the truth and learn them “to honor that there are many truths”, while acknowledging that “everyone isn’t meant to do the same thing in the same space with the same beliefs”. Such skills include meditation as “a way to learn to be in relationship with your mind, rather than trapped in your mind”, mediation “to help people hear each other, find alignment, and clarify boundaries”, as a practiced awareness of one’s own and respect for other people’s boundaries.
Teaching activities
With these teaching activities, you can enable students to apply the skill concretely within your educational practice.
An effective way to train listening in the classroom is by creating a space for debate. This can be an open, unstructured debate, or a more structured one. By means of an open debate, students can be given the chance to form and express their own opinions/thoughts on certain topics. This type of debate helps practicing sound argumentation (i.e. logic). Participants will be encouraged to react to each other, and to respect opinions that are different from their own.
A structured debate can have a similar effect, through different means. Rather than expressing their own thoughts, students can be asked to prepare a certain interpretation on a topic. They will not voice their own opinion but engage in the debate with a designated viewpoint. By doing this they will have to explore opinions other than their own to a level where they can defend them. This works especially well when students are asked to explore and defend a viewpoint that critically interrogates students’ own assumptions and positionalities. As a result, participants will gain a better understanding of other people’s truths and experiences.
Both types of debate are valid and valuable academic pursuits (or: learning objectives), but it is important to acknowledge the difference between them and it may be helpful to formulate which of these is the central goal of a learning activity, as they require students to listen, process and respond differently to what is being said/shared in such a debate.
To practice listening outside of a classroom environment, students can be asked to perform interviews. Ideally, these interviews will take place with people outside of the student’s own social bubble. This will allow the student to get to know and understand the experiences of those that live differently from themselves and will force them to listen critically to what the respondent is explaining and reflect on their own perspectives.
Nevertheless, listening is also crucial when interviewing someone from one’s own social circle. Participants can be asked to perform interviews in different ways. To make sure interviews ask of students to also reflect on what they have heard, consider asking students to write a short analysis of what they learned during the interviews and be asked to share this during the class. The goal of such interviews is not to do them perfectly and produce a coherent research project, but instead to make students aware of different experiences, voices, and opinions.
Feedback and discussion are crucial in teaching students how to (self-)reflect. One way to facilitate this is by making time for a dialogue after grading, ideally in a one-on-one or small-sized group setting. Such (review) sessions should aim at giving students insight into the mistakes they made and how their work (be it a written, oral, or visual piece) can improve. This insight can be provided by peer students and/or by teaching staff involved in the actual grading.
In any case, students should get a chance to look at their performance or submission, how it was graded, and there should be room for constructive suggestions and questions. A key factor here is that the instructor takes adequate time to allow students to learn from their efforts. Alternatively, post-grading dialogue can also take the form of insightful comments and meaningful feedback that does not require in-person consultation. A detailed model answer and extensive grading criteria can be useful in this respect.
Listening to the non-human/more-than-human world could also be suggested as a learning activity. In anthropology, sensory walks have been developed as a methodology for experiential-based learning and research. Sensory walks may include moments of dialogic sharing of experiences, but they depart from and center sensory input other than speech/language/logica. Sensory walks generate learning through awareness of sound as soundscape, rather than merely/mostly language or representation.
Assessment
With these assignments, you can encourage students to further train and develop the skill.
A form of assessment that will make participants practice the skill of listening is having them examine opposing viewpoints of a certain problem or academic discussion. The goal is that students understand that people think in very different ways, and that they can learn how to listen to opinions they do not agree with. Students will get familiar with the extreme ends of a debate and will be expected to then position their own opinion within this spectrum. This can be done in the form of a paper, of a presentation, or even in a more creative way, such as writing a manifesto or making a podcast/video.
Best practice
These examples provide insight into how students and lecturers have successfully applied or can apply the skill in practice.
Interview Analysis
Gender Studies (EUC-IDE205)
This exercise concerns holding an interview with a person from a different background than the students. In pairs, an interview will be prepared in which students should aim to understand the position and life experiences of the person. This interview will then be analysed in a broader academic and social context. Originally, the assignment was connected to Gender Studies, so topics would be gendered experiences and sexuality. However, the assignment can be applied to a broad range of fields.
- Eggenberger, A. L. (2021). Active listening skills as predictors of success in community college students. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 45(5), 324-333.
- Gustafson, L. P., Short, A. K., & Hamilton, N. W. (2022). Teaching and assessing active listening as foundational skill for lawyers as leaders, counselors, negotiators, and advocates. Santa Clara Law Review, 62(1), 1-42.
- Tabieh, A. A., Al-Hileh, M. M., Abu Afifa, H. M., & Abuzagha, H. Y. (2021). The Effect of Using Digital Storytelling on Developing Active Listening and Creative Thinking Skills. European Journal of Educational Research, 10(1), 13-21.
- Becker, H.S. (2008). Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you're doing it. University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 28)
- Katherine Cramer Walsh, 'Scholars as Citizens: Studying Public Opinion through Ethnography', in Schatz, E. (2009) Political Ethnography. What Immersion Contributues to the Study of Power. University of Chicago Press, p. 180)
- Adrienne Maree Brown, Loving Corrections, AK Press 2024: 193-194.
- Kluger, A. N., & Itzchakov, G. (2022). The power of listening at work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9(1), 121-146.
- Ivory, S. B. (2021). Chapter 9: Listening. In Becoming a Critical Thinker (pp. 231-256). Oxford University Press.