Editors Introduction: Acts of Listening Author(s): Andy Kaplan Reviewed work(s): Source: Schools: Studies in Education, Vol. 6, No.

1 (Spring 2009), pp. 1-9 Published by: The University of Chicago Press in association with the Francis W. Parker School Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597652 . Accessed: 18/02/2012 07:52
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Editors Introduction
Acts of Listening
ANDY KAPLAN
Francis W. Parker School, Chicago

Listening is an activity that is both reective and reexive. The ways in which we listen not only make us receptive to the sounds and meanings of others, but they also provide the contexts for shaping speech acts that make it possible for others to listen to us. Listening begins with a certain openness and availability, but it is far more complex than mere receptivity. Listening is a form of attention, not only in the sense that we await and focus on what someone else is saying but also in the sense that the utterance of another takes shape in our own mind. Listening is then a mental as well as an aural activity. In Galileo, Brecht imagines the great scientist trying to show the young Prince Cosimo de Medici the moons of Jupiter that his telescope has revealed. The court philosopher and Lord Chamberlain give the appearance of listening to Galileo, but they refuse to let the prince look. Galileo pleads his case on the grounds of experience: Your Highness! My work in the Great Arsenal of Venice brought me in daily contact with sailors, carpenters, and so on. These men are unread. They depend on the evidence of their senses. But they taught me many new ways of doing things. The question is whether these gentlemen here want to be found out as fools by men who might not have had the advantages of a classical education but who are not afraid to use their eyes. I tell you that our dockyards are stirring with that same high curiosity which was the true glory of ancient Greece. (Brecht 1966, 69) To no avail: the court will not listen because classical learning does not need to listen: the evidence of the senses is nothing compared to the accepted truths. Insulated by their classical learning, the Lord Chamberlain and
Schools: Studies in Education, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 2009). 2009 Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. All rights reserved. 1550-1175/2009/0601-0001$10.00

philosopher dismiss not just Galileo but the whole possibility of learning from experience. The act of listening is social as well as physical. In addition to hearing the sounds that others produce, the act of listening implies an interaction that creates context and meaning. I know something about listening as interaction from my passionate dedication to making music. For many years, I played guitar and sang in any number of semipro, semiskilled bands. While my tastes in listening to music have ranged from classical to jazz, from chamber music to rock and roll, I never had much interest in playing anything but acoustic instruments. I have played in bands that made extensive use of electric instruments, but I have seldom done more than strum a few chords on an electric guitar, only to put it down in favor of my trusty Martin. Since I grew up during the great folk music scare of the 1960s, you might think the preference was some kind of purist statement, the kind of moral high-handedness that led so many of my peers to equate electric with selling out. But in my case, the preference was driven not by ideology but by listening. There was something lacking in the electric tones, something that I missed and sorely needed, something that only an acoustic instrument could produce. If you strum a note or a chord on an electric guitar, you produce the same notes as you would on an acoustic instrument; the difference is that the acoustic guitar produces not just the notes but the overtones. As I said, I played and sang: the instrument provided a shape, a context for melody and harmony. An electric instrument produces the notes without the overtones, and without listening to the overtones, I couldnt nd the proper pitch for harmonizing my singing voice with the voices of my band mates. I said before that listening is a reective activity: we attend to sounds and meanings in ways that make us sensitive and appreciative. Just as we listen to the overtones of an acoustic guitar for the full shaping of even a single note, so we listen most acutely when we are sensitive not only to anothers voice but also to the intention and implications of what were hearing. Listening is also a reexive activity: when I raise my voice in a part song, I am trying to harmonize my voice with other voices. I can hear my own voice most fully only in the context of a musical conversation. Listening is a dialogic art. The art of that listening, broadly speaking, takes two different forms. On the one hand, we often nd ourselves listening for something. Every time a teacher asks a question to which she knows the answer, she is listening for an answer. She attends not only to the students voice but also to the answer she is waiting to hear. When we are listening to others, we are also attending, but I would call our attention
2 Schools, Spring 2009

open, as distinct from the closed attention that awaits a specic connection. Let me explain why I think this distinction is important. Listening for is intense but tendentious: when we listen for responses and resonances, the fulllment of our expectations reshapes the present moment, connecting it to thoughts and images that dene larger meaning. Listening for something constrains, to be sure, but it can also be expansive. For example, in Coleridges The Aeolian Harp ([1795] 1961), he describes a quiet evening at home with his wife, pensive Sara. In an open window lies a wind harp by the desultory breeze caressd, evoking in this wildly imaginative listener gorgeous images of the witchery of sound. Coleridge toys with the notion that listening in this way is evidence of a pantheist divine breath in all things: O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where He asks rhetorically: And what if all animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? A glance from Sara is enough to dispel these musings as the shapings of the unregenerate mind, Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophys aye-babbling spring. (1012) The poet stands rebuked and ends meek and devout, but the contrast between this submission and the wild ights of fancy suggest that the struggle will be ongoing. Sara reminds the poet of his Christian faith, but pantheism seems like a lot more fun. Listening to another is a process that leads the listener away from expectations and ideas and toward something new, unexpected, and different. When listening to another, we focus on the relationship that speech creates: we not only share the story or the concern of anotherwe assist in its creation. Robert Coles prefaces his reections on a lifetime of listening to the call of service with the distractions and escapes that competed for his attention. As a young man, he wanted ercely to escape his life, to end
Andy Kaplan 3

up someplace new and different, a place where Lady Day rather than Dorothy Day ruled the day; a place where I could listen to jazz or big band concerts and read Zane Grey westerns (Coles 1993, xxv). Fortunately for us, Coles chose to listen to the call of service. But the listening itself has never come easily, and part of what makes this extraordinary man so rare is his deep humility in the process of learning to listen. After medical school and residency, Coles spent ve years working in the South, joining the civil rights movement in those crucial post-Brown years of the early 1960s. Coles was fascinated with the courage and the commitment of extraordinary people, both young and old, constantly wondering at their resilience in the face of hatred and violence. A grandmother of one of the youngest students explained her resolve this way: You have to listen to the right people; otherwise you get yourself into trouble! Working with young and old led Coles to see his research and his role differently: My job had always been to listen, but now I was aware that at times we can be deaf listeners, thoroughly unable to hear some remarks while all too attentive to others. We can even take what we dont want to hearwhat we are unprepared to acknowledge because of our own preconceptions and turn it into what were expecting to hear (8). Coles learned through hard work how to listen. His rst efforts to interview members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee met with silence: the young organizers refused to talk to him. Coles had offered to help the young men by writing letters of support and contacting important people but the leaders were simply not interested. At the end of an unproductive hour with these leaders, Coles asked just what he could do to help. The answer came quickly: You can help us keep this place clean! It took a year of steady work with broom and mop before Coles recognized that the janitorial work was not a rebuff or diversion: For some time I kept thinking that they were testing me, maybe cutting me down to size a little, and letting me know who was boss. In fact, they were teaching meor, better, enabling me to learn, putting me in a situation where I had plenty to do, yet could listen to my hearts content. I was constantly learning through experience rather than through abstract discussions (12). Coles has sketched here not only the mission of his own life but also the goal that good educators strive for: the development of habits and practices that will enable students to create meanings and connections in their own experience. In the essays collected in this issue, educators reect on the ways in which we overcome the resistance of authority, dogma, and position in
4 Schools, Spring 2009

order to listen artfully. We begin with Melissa Kobelins reections on teaching mathematics in a multiage lower school classroom. As a public school teacher in Massachusetts, Kobelin had to contend with a six-volume set of textbooks and a densely packed curriculum guide mandated by her district. In addition to those strictures, Kobelin entered the year with a commitment to differentiated instruction as best practice. It was not until she faced the very real and very different needs of children in her classroom that Kobelin began to experiment with the materials and methods of differentiated instruction. Kobelin learned how to make use of curriculum materials without slavishly enacting each and every lesson. She learned by listening and observing how to create multiple activity centers in a single classroom, when to gather some or all of the children together, and how to build a scaffold under student work so that each child could contribute meaningfully and learn. Maryanne Kalin-Miller has listened to her students and her colleagues throughout a distinguished career. But she argues that we need to listen to still more voices if we want to remain true to our deepest commitments as educators. Kalin-Miller reects on the great educational opportunities provided by visiting scholars. She begins with the most recentNobel prize winning physicist Leon Lederman. Listening to Lederman and to others during her tenure has helped Kalin-Miller see new ways for a school community to address one of its most compelling needs: to train all students to be literate and knowledgeable about science so that they can participate meaningfully as democratic citizens. Kalin-Miller demonstrates the good effects of listening to voices from the greater community, educators who can help us see new possibilities and challenge us to try out experiments on our own. Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Elizabeth Meadows have been researching and writing about the arts of listening for many years. In 2004, Haroutunian-Gordon contributed an essay to Schools about the ways in which her former graduate students had applied their own lessons in listening to their practice as teachers. In this issue, she and Meadows present two conversations that test their new concerns about the ways in which interruption becomes part of the act of listening. Along with a third teacher, Lucius Bell, they reect on a conversation Bell has had concerning the use of masks in rap music. Haroutunian-Gordon and Meadows rst talk with Bell about his project, then they present parts of Bells conversation with middle-school students concerning Tupac Shakur but more broadly concerning the line between artistry and integrity.
Andy Kaplan 5

Martin Moran found his plan for a course in practical politics sorely interrupted, and in this case, the interruptions did not promote listening. Quite the opposite: Moran found that a course designed to bring students closer to the front lines of election-year politics was interrupted by rude, dismissive, even abusive behavior. Moran listened to his students taking up polarized positions during last falls presidential campaign, but when he nished admonishing them to be nice, or lecturing them on the morality of tolerance, he also knew that he wasnt getting anywhere: more important, he knew the course wasnt progressing. Moran then began to create new course activities that would stretch his students and lift them out of wellworn platitudes and insults about liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Obama and McCain. He introduced them to methods of inquiry that helped his students observe political activity more fully and more richly. These methods detached his students from the need to hew to a certain dogma and suggested alternatives to the polarizing and reductive bifurcations that had dogged their earlier work. Moran helped his students become better citizens by giving them ways of listening more broadly more democraticallyto American politics. In our regular feature, From the Archives, we listen to the voices of schoolchildren. We reprint here some of the contributions British teenagers submitted to a prize competition organized by a British newspaper in the late 1960s. Their writing is fascinating, pellucid, and challenging. Many things have changed, but now that these same people are grandparents, I wonder just how far they would say our schools have come. What would the young people in your care say to complete the phrase, The school that Id like . I hope you will nd their contributions so provocative that you will ask those young people you work with to complete the thought themselves. And when you do, Id be very interested in hearing from you about the discussion that ensuedand then Ill ask you to write an essay for Schools about the whole process. It is January 24, 2009, as I write this introduction, and we have a new president. One of the most sweeping, and I would say one of the most destructive acts of the previous administration was No Child Left Behind. I call it destructive because every public school teacher I have met in the past eight years has commented on the menace of this policy, especially its reliance on the Big Test to settle all evaluative matters. Absent from the public discussion of this act were those same teachers. Instead, we heard from governmental secretaries and any number of administrators and researchers. I am convinced after all these years that the most important way
6 Schools, Spring 2009

we can counter the reductive, demeaning, and essentially antieducational force of the Big Test is to let teachers tell the stories of their own experiences. I believe in the power of the narrative imaginationit is really the commitment of this journal to give educators the public space to ponder the meanings they have uncovered as they work with students. It is not isolated performances on external tests but continuous patterns of daily activity that mark the educational growth of our children. Darla Shields toiled for many years in the most demanding of our public schoolsa tough urban school in one of our nations large cities. While nearly everyone who talks about public education makes politically correct bows to the importance of teachers, Shields challenges the obeisance as hollow unless we make a determined effort to retain our teachers. She mixes stories of her own experience with policy formulations in a compelling argument for the reconstruction of the job as well as the public importance of our teachers. Her concerns range from the concerns for the basic safety of our schools to the importance of class size to the salary scale. Shields is talking about standards but not in the way public gures have talked about test percentages and the ways in which we can punish schools that dont perform. These standards have never had much to do with the daily life of schools. Shields asks us to turn instead to the kinds of standards we should be asking of public policy: smaller class sizes, a meaningful mentoring program for new teachers, higher salaries, safer classrooms. Here is the kind of change a career educatorand a citizencan believe in. When Dan Frank and I rst discussed the title of this journal, we agreed that our focus would be on the subjective experience of school life. We wanted the journal to demonstrate the practical value of subjective inquiry as a complement rather than as opposition to the predominant public concern for objectivity. We hearkened back to the spirit of the rst series of Studies in Education, written and published by the founding faculty of the Francis W. Parker School beginning in 1912. They shared with other progressive reformers of that period a concern to reconstruct school life by creating programs rich in present meanings, meanings that the children would create out of their shared interests in common experience. Like their peers, John Dewey most famous among them, these educators struggled against externally driven standards because they robbed the present moment of all meaning in the lives of children. They feared that the objective testing of their day, the adult-centered rewards of grades and test scores, would only serve to separate and stratify children. They aimed all their efforts in a very different direction, toward the inner life of the child and toward the
Andy Kaplan 7

shared social life of the school. These are the dimensions that Dan and I had in mind when we dedicated this new series of Studies in Education to subjective inquiry. In recent years, we have witnessed a rekindling of those same concerns in many other educators. Some of these educators focus now on what they call school climate. Members of the psychoanalytic community have been especially strong advocates of a holistic approach to the issues and problems facing a school. They bring to the study of schools the skills of clinical training as well as methods of inquiry that help schools see the connections and underpinning structures that articulate a present moment or a present problem. We present four essays about school climate in this issue of Schools, each one focusing on the same story of a school in trouble. These essays together mark the addition of a new feature for the journal. They provide a lively exchange of commentaries on a common theme. We are calling this exchange Symposium, and we hope to publish exchanges on this and other themes in upcoming issues. Jonathan Cohen introduces these essays and provides a brief narrative, asking each of the essayists to formulate what they see as the problem and then to suggest ways in which an understanding of school climate might help the school address the issues involved. The range of responses here shows the power of analytically informed inquiry to raise the consciousness of all concerned educators to the intricate web of social and psychological factors. I hope that youll nd these essays both inspiring and provocative. They provide a rich new theme for future writers to examine in light of their own experiences in schools. I encourage our readers to contribute their own stories and reections on school climate to what I hope will become an ongoing stream of essays in this journal. Shanti Elliott contributes a book review to conclude this issue. Elliott reviews a book by our colleague Mary Dilg about the opportunities and dangers of teaching in a multicultural classroom. Elliott reviews the book from a pragmatic view: she looks for help as a classroom teacher and program organizer of social justice curricula. Elliott nds in Dilgs work a wise intelligence and a sensitive classroom guide. Elliott explores some of the ways that Dilgs approach and insights can support educators as they organize student experiences that will help students see and be willing to talk about their differences.

Schools, Spring 2009

References Brecht, Bertolt. 1966. Galileo, ed. Eric Bentley, trans. Charles Laughton. New York: Grove. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1795) 1961. The Aeolian Harp. In The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge. London: Oxford University Press. Coles, Robert. 1993. The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism. Boston: Houghton Mifin.

Andy Kaplan