2.0 Introduction to Teaching Listening to the SONG of Life

Listening to the SONG of Life Course

How much time do you spend listening during a typical day? One hour? Three or more hours? If we consider the SONG of life definition of listening^[1], then listening includes all communication processes in life except message production as in writing and speaking. But even in the intentional acts of creating messages, there are elements of listening when we speak (for instance, gauging the facial reactions of others) and write (considering word choice for a specific demographic). In our current sender-oriented self-broadcasting social media society, listening is often overlooked as a vital part of the communication process. Conservatively, I hypothesize that listening to the SONG of life comprises over half of our waking hours. For example, we listen to our alarm or song upon waking, news feeds on our phone or television news, listening to the small talk of people we live with as we prepare for the day, billboards and signs draw our attention on our commute to school or work, then at school and/or work there are emails, voicemails, phone calls, video conference calls, lectures, and trainings that we listen to and process before we respond . . . and so the day is filled with listening. Something this large and pervasive in our lives is worthy of our attention, study, practice, and mastery.

For years I asked myself, if listening comprises such an enormous part of our lives, why is there no communication course about listening in my home department of Communication during the first twenty-four years I served as a faculty member? I would ask students this question, and they confirmed the need for a listening course. Some students add a turnabout question, “Why don’t YOU teach a listening course?” After several years of the same student refrain, I finally did offer the first listening course in the Communication department at my home institution. This is the story, an autoethnographic account, of how I conceived, created, and taught the first course in Listening to the SONG of Life.

I developed and taught the first undergraduate listening course at my home institution during the fall semester of 2014. The flyer for the new topics course^[2] depicted a pink conch shell on a sandy Caribbean beach with the following phrases written in big colorful lettering:

In the flyer for the first listening course, the word “SONG” in the phrase “listening to the SONG of life” is an acronym that represents listening to the whole of life in the contexts of Self (S), discern inner wisdom, Others (O), connect with feelings and needs, Nature (N), behold the beauty of nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine (G), discover the deep Divine in all.