Complex Listening: Supporting Students to Listen As Mathematical Sense-makers

Abstract

Participating in reform-oriented mathematical discussion calls on teachers and students to listen to one another in new and different ways. However, listening is an understudied dimension of teaching and learning mathematics. In this analysis, we draw on a sociocultural perspective and a conceptual framing of three types of listening—evaluative, interpretive, and hermeneutic (Davis, 1996, 1997)—in order to interpret the listening interactions in a fourth-grade classroom. Using interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to pay close attention to how participants responded to one another during a carefully selected lesson segment, findings reveal that these students listened in complex ways with explicit support from their teacher. From this revelatory case, we offer a framework for understanding the teacher’s role in supporting complex listening.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Both authors contributed equally to the ideas and writing in this article. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Lyn English for their feedback and encouragement through several drafts. We would also like to thank Elham Kazemi and Kristen Umland for their comments and support. Each reader gave us the thoughtful and careful feedback that helped shape these ideas into their current form. Finally, we’d like to thank the Listening Study Group for bolstering the study of listening in education. For more information on this international research network contact Andrea English ([email protected]).