2.4 Teaching Listening to the SONG of Life: Content, Learning Goals, and Assessment

The acronym SONG stands for the first letter in each of the following words: Self, Others, Nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine.^[1] SONG represents four conceptually distinct but related contexts of the life-world. Among the resources I consulted in developing this acronym are the following. Research in the peace literature^[2] highlights intrapersonal (Self in SONG) and interpersonal-group (Other in SONG) peace-making. Contexts from the Theistic Spiritual Outcome Survey measures three types of love^[3] that correspond to self, others, and Goddess-God-Divine in the SONG of life. And, a system’s perspective^[4] of the SONG of life describes the relationships among the four contexts of the SONG. I interpret the system’s perspective of the SONG of life to mean four interrelated ways of being in the world, each higher level subsuming the previous levels in a manner similar to the holarchy networks of communication described by Wilber.^[5]

My intention in developing the Listening to the SONG of Life course is for students to discover and cultivate their listening skills by exploring the four interrelated contexts in SONG. By way of illustration, students learn to attend to the inner workings of their mind (self-listening), empathize with others, experience the wonders of nature, and discover Divine interconnections. Course learning goals are described on the first page of the syllabus:

The course introduces students to Listening to the SONG of Life through practices in exploring and developing listening competencies, theoretical perspectives and models of listening, and research about listening. All three areas—practice, theory, and research—are applicable across the contexts of Self, Others, Nature, and the Divine.^[6]

In the Listening to SONG of Life course, I review three theoretical models of listening, cognitive,^[7] behavioral,^[8] and relational.^[9] For listening research, I use Janusik and Rouillard’s^[10] on-line document that organizes claims and evidence for fifteen different listening categories (e.g., meaning, memory, leadership, barriers, and styles).

For listening practices, experiential learning activities are the primary mode of inquiry. To increase students’ self-awareness of their listening strengths and challenges, they engage in a variety of listening practices in and out of class. For these experiential activities, students design, execute, and reflect on ways to improve their listening competencies in each of the four listening domains of SONG. These “mini experiments” are recorded in listening learning journals. In addition, for “home study” each week, students are presented with a list of resources related to one of the listening contexts in the SONG of life. I invite them to explore the resources, record what they have learned in their learning journals, and share one of these learnings in small groups the following class period. To assist students in home study, the following criteria, posed as questions, are provided to guide their journal writing:

After describing the learning goals, and the use of a journal as a method of assessment, the end of this section of the syllabus reads:

The semester long listening course is organized as a sixteen-week SONG of life. The SONG is divided into four verses, listening to self, others, nature, and the Divine. In the middle of the SONG there is a refrain, consisting of a midterm journal assessment, recitation of, and listening to, student learning poems, and individual student conferences. Likewise, there is a refrain at the end of the SONG, an end of term journal assessment, poem, and conference.