2.2 Reviewing Listening Pedagogy

A review of listening pedagogy indicates that my home institution is typical of many institutions of higher education in the United States that relegate the teaching of listening to a unit in an undergraduate survey or interpersonal communication course.^[1] Data from 1995 show only five percent of eight hundred institutions (forty total) had an entire course in listening.^[2] About ten years later, two convenience samples of institutions of higher education in the U.S. (thirty-six in one sample and twenty in the second sample) report that less than half of the institutions surveyed (thirty-nine and forty-five percent, respectively) have an entire course devoted to listening.^[3] While over a decade has passed since these two research studies, my limited personal network of colleagues, and my informal review of over 1000 U.S. colleges and universities, indicates that there is still a considerable gap in the development of listening curricula in many Communication departments in the United States.

I realize that my personal network is quite limited when compared to the national data-based samples of listening curricula in U.S. colleges, but my personal network does represent a limited set of real people, and so I advance the claim about the lack of development of listening curricula as informed speculation with one caveat. By development of listening curricula, I mean a series of listening courses. The first course should introduce students to the listening literature (theory and research) and provide opportunities to develop listening competencies.^[4] There should also be at least one additional listening course at the intermediate or advanced level that builds on the knowledge and skills learned in the introductory course. Finally, one notable exception to the lack of development in listening curricula is the well-developed “Integrative Listening Model” curriculum taught across the curriculum at Alverno College.^[5]

Why is there such a gap in the development of listening curricula when most Communication educators would probably agree with arguments supporting the necessity of developing listening courses in the undergraduate curriculum? There are probably many reasons for the gap, such as a lack of faculty who specialize in listening pedagogy, high faculty workloads, lack of institutional funding for the development of new courses, and competing curricular agendas.

For those U.S. institutions of higher education with at least one listening course in the undergraduate curriculum, many of these courses are centered on learning about listening knowledge and skills in a traditional lecture-discussion format. Knowing about listening knowledge and skills is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a comprehensive listening education. The missing component in most listening courses is “. . .how to teach listening so that students could not only comprehend­­­ but also apply effective listening skills.”^[6] Simply put, knowing about listening is experientially distinct from engaging in listening. For example, defining the concept of empathy and listing the steps for displaying empathy is a phenomenologically different experience than empathizing with a real person in face-to-face, real-time dialogue. The lack of emphasis on personal engagement in many listening courses is a shortcoming I address in this autoethnography by suggesting an alternative approach that teaches students to listen to the SONG of life.