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Abstract
In response to the task of designing curriculum that helps youth engage thoughtfully with digital stories of human rights violations, the authors articulate the central tenets of a pedagogy of listening that draws upon elements of oral history, concepts of witnessing and testimony, the work on listening of Dewey, Freire and Rinaldi and the philosophy of listening. These tenets are explored in relation to the five curricular units for secondary schools that they produced as part of a large oral history project that documents the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violation. The pedagogy of listening aims to: promote more democratic relations, build a listening community and foster close and attentive listening, develop an ethics of listening, support critical reflexive practice and movement towards social action, explore the multitude of listenings, explore listening as curation and foster students’ historical imaginations.
Notes
1. As Wulf (Citation2007) describes, ‘We are interpellated by [the sense of hearing] before birth. We hear others before seeing, smelling or touching them. Through this sense, we hear speech prior to speaking or understanding’ (679, translation ours).
2. We recognise the limits of generalising a (not listening) ‘we’ given the continued existence of predominantly oral cultures across the world, despite their marginalisation by print culture.
3. The Life Stories in Education working group was organised around partnerships with LEARN (a Quebec curriculum development and support organization), Equitas (a human rights education), and CITIZENShift (at that point, an arm of the [Canadian] National Film Board that focused on the digital delivery of community media). The Life Stories in Education working group also worked closely with other groups across the project, searching for educational applications of their work.
4. More information about this project, funded by a Community-University Research Alliance grant from the [Canadian] Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and led by principal investigator Steven High, and oral historian at Concordia University, can be found at http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca
5. Webster’s course project is particularly relevant to this paper since promoting attentive listening is key to her notion of human rights education; in order to prepare her students to interview two survivors of the Cambodian genocide, Megan led them through a series of deep listening workshops.
6. Formally known as the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, this commission was struck in 2008 in response to a popular (and media-fostered) sense of cultural crisis in which central tenets of Quebec collective identity were imagined as under attack by demands for ‘accommodation’ by various groups outside the dominant majority of French, (culturally if not religiously) Catholic, white francophones. A series of public forums and consultations were at its heart. The commission fell under immediate critique for confirming some people’s sense that Quebec society was being violated by outsiders demanding accommodation, so that the concept of accommodation shifted from being about legal policies and practices to immigrants themselves, and cultural, racial and religious difference. Despite the ways the very notion of the Commission suggested that immigrants as well as racialized and other minorities posed a problem requiring investigation and resolution, the Commission’s final report is quite helpful in understanding and moving beyond ‘crisis’: as well as recommending an oral history project of Quebec’s immigrants, it made clear the media’s aggravating role, and argued Quebec needs to take seriously the poverty and underemployment that are real barriers to integration for newcomers. The Montreal Life Stories project pre-dated the Commission, and sent out a press release upon the publication of its recommendations saying that the project had already begun the creation of such an oral history archive.
7. Auscultare has further significance for this discussion. It is the root word of the medical term auscultation, which means listening to the sounds of the body for diagnostic purposes, usually through a stethoscope. In its relationship to the body, listening becomes in part an instrument of caring and intimacy, though also, potentially, of an invasive diagnostic probing. For at the beginning of the 19th-century, the stethoscope also accompanied a paradigm shift in attitudes towards listening: listening becomes a tool for reason and rationality, for the seeking of knowledge, in the manner of vision (Sterne Citation2003). Prior to the 19th-century, listening was mostly associated with listening without being seen, with stealth and secrecy, as in eavesdropping. Only in the 20th-century did listening develop its current general meaning, along with, and closely tied to, the development of the telephone and radio. Listening also took on the sense of being open and responsive to the needs of another, as in ‘être à l’écoute de quelqu’un’ (Lauxerois Citation2008).
8. In a telling correlation, the English roots of listen (which bear no relation to the French ones) also connote extension, attention, and care. As Waks (2011) explores: ‘The modern English word listen has roots (OE lustnen from OS hlust) associated with the ear—to hear, to lean or list (in the sense of inclining one’s ear to, or ‘giving ear to’). In its simplest sense, to listen is to give ear to, that is, to hear attentively. In a second sense, to listen is to pay heed, or hearken—to give careful consideration or obedient regard to, to allow oneself to be persuaded by, to hear attentively in order to obey. It is in this sense that father threateningly tells junior, ‘Listen to your mother!’ or the teacher commands, ‘Listen up!’ ‘To listen’ also has a root (AS hlosen) associated with waiting in suspense. To listen in this sense is to attend (within an indeterminate auditory field) in order to hear (2744).
9. The members of the Montreal Life Stories project who were themselves survivors were committed to going beyond death and morbidity in their explorations. The project’s culminating exhibition at the Centre d’Histoire de Montréal, Nous sommes ici, makes this clear in its description of the journeys taken by immigrants and refugees to Montreal which places emphasis on the continued lives of survivors of human rights violations.
10. The sharing of authority was also a structuring device in project governance, as all significant decisions were made collaboratively by a steering committee made up of representatives from all of the various working groups, in concordance with the Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) Programme established by the [Canadian] Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in 1999.
11. One implication of the subjectivity of listening is that no one listens in quite the same way. In describing his relationship to music, Peter Szendy (Citation2008: 3) describes how much he values the thought that his listening is his alone: ‘(...) It is more simply as a listener that I want to sign my listening: I would like to point out, to identify, and to share such-and-such sonorous event that no one besides me, I am certain of it, has ever heard as I have. There is no doubt about that. And I am even convinced that musical listening exists only insofar as this desire and conviction exist; in other words, that listening-and not hearing or perception-begins with this legitimate desire to be signed or addressed to others’. Here musical listening is always arrangement, re-writing, and signature. If we generalise this understanding of musical listening to include listening to testimony and life story, we might think of the student as ‘signing’ her listening, arranging what has been heard in sharing it with classmates or a larger community.
12. As the various partners write about their experiences with the Life Stories project, it becomes clear that we have been exploring similar themes. For instance, Edward Little of the Oral History and Performance group describes how traditionally, performers in Playback Theatre (a popular theatre genre that dramatises people’s stories) ‘work to shut down “self-talk”—to put aside their personal responses to the stories told in order to concentrate on listening deeply to the story and playing it back “objectively”’ (Little Citation2009). Through the project, they developed an approach that demands a more complex approach to deep listening to both self and the other. It foregrounds the potential for both positive and negative implications proceeding from personal subject positions relating to bias, assumption, and judgment. The [Bridge] requires that each member of the ensemble attempt to meet the teller in the story rather than simply playing it back—to approach, in Greenspan’s words, becoming ‘partners in a conversation’.(Greenspan Citation2010: 7)
13. The conference was organised by the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence, August 16–19, 2009, at Concordia University: http://www.cerev.concordia.ca/events/curating-difficult-knowledge.
14. The original French interview with Manuel Borja-Villel can be found at : http://www.groups.google.com/group/paris8philo/browse_thread/thread/d631c350e07ac8b3/5f1d11120afe87c4
15. In his book on the project, High (Citationforthcoming) describes how the concept of curation is shaping oral history practice as well: ‘The impulse to collect life stories and to preserve them for future generations, always strong in oral history, is starting to give way to a desire to curate spaces of conversation and collaboration’. (36, ch 7).
16. As part of the process of selecting particular texts to be drawn upon in the curriculum, we considered their accessibility to a youthful audience in terms of audibility and visual quality, but recognise that a number of them might still pose challenges to classroom use.
17. We also recognize that the curricular units themselves are limited by our inability to pilot them prior to publication. Due to the project’s timeline, we were writing the materials while the working groups were conducting interviews and creating the digital stories. Towards the end of the project, we selected from these stories and integrated them into the LES; this meant there was no time to test any of the completed materials prior to their launch.
18. See High (Citationforthcoming b)for a full discussion of the creation of the audio walk, which he describes as ‘ an extended period of directed or intentional listening’ (24). High contrasts the embodied experience of listening to the audio guide, in which one encounters ‘a series of subjectivities’, with the voyeuristic quality of some tours due to the ‘outward act of witness[ing]’ accounts of human rights violations.
19. Wordle is a web tool that allows one to create word clouds from text, available free at http://www.wordle.net/
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bronwen E. Low
Bronwen E. Low is an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education in McGill University’s Faculty of Education, 3700 McTavish, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1Y4; e-mail: [email protected]. Current research includes community-media projects, the multilingual Montreal hip-hop scene, and the pedagogical implications of the life stories of human rights violations. Her most recent book is Slam school: Learning through conflict in the hip-hop and spoken word classroom (Stanford UP, 2011).
Emmanuelle Sonntag
Emmanuelle Sonntag is a doctoral candidate at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in the Department of Sociology, exploring listening in its social dimensions. Research areas of interests include listening, sounds, online listening, digital traces, collaborative practices, knowledge sharing, co-creation, innovation, higher education, digital humanities and digital sociology. Her explorations can be found on Twitter @lvrdg. Defining herself as a knowledge organizer, she also offers consultancy services in communication, education, curriculum design, information management and knowledge mobilization.