Listening Rhetoric in the Diverse Classroom: Suggestions for Praxis

Abstract

Modern college classrooms are increasingly diverse. We face classes where 18-year-olds sit beside grandmothers, native speakers of English sit beside speakers of other languages, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims share classrooms with atheists and agnostics. The question is: how do we take such a varied and ideologically differentiated group of pupils and bridge their differences in order to bring them together into a classroom community? Not only is the creation of such a community critical to the success of the classroom, but in a larger sense it is critical as a model for the effective functioning of a democratic society. My purpose is to suggest that the concept of listening rhetoric, as it informs classroom practice, has the potential to serve this goal. Therefore, in this article I will propose practical methods for incorporating the practice of listening rhetoric into college courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Listening
• listening rhetoric
• diversity
• diverse students
• diverse classroom
• teaching
• pedagogy

Notes

1 I have used the feminine pronoun here as a stylistic choice in order to avoid an awkward he/she construction. There was no intention to exclude men from the practice of listening rhetoric.

2 For a review of the literature, see T. W. Buchanan and R. Adolphs. 2002. Emotional Cognition: From Brain to Behavior. London: John Benjamins; and Stephan Hamann. 2001. “Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Emotional Memory.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (9):394–400.

3 Of course I encourage my students to recycle the letters, and I myself gratefully accept them for my young children who color on the other side.