By listening to various sounds and in various ways during the early weeks of the course, students exercise their ears and, along the way, some even realize that you need more than just ears to listen. Their eco-listening results in their creating individual listening booklets that record the sounds we hear and our occasional reflections on them. The idea is to notice the sounds our ears have become deaf to as we’ve become accustomed to a space. Students also tune their attention to eco-listening – listening with intention to the natural or man-made environments in which we find ourselves. They do the same in a space where they are less comfortable. They visit a space in which they feel most like themselves and tune into the space’s acoustics. Rutger Zuydervelt’s Take a Closer Listen, an excerpt from the opening pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and the New York Times Magazine prose and audio essay, “Whisper in the Wind” are our inspirations for this assignment. In the first month of the course, students practice low stakes listening and writing: they go on short listening walks and record by hand what they hear in their sound journals. Thus, it allows us to begin exploring the possibilities of listening as an approach to reading and writing. The song, a tribute to Moran’s mother who would stand over his shoulder taking notes as Moran practiced piano as a child, amplifies a sonic life that more often lingers within the printed word. Moran plays the Carl Maria von Weber-composed lullaby on unaccompanied piano the urgent scratching of a closely miked pencil on paper writes slightly ahead of the calming melody. On the first day of class, I play Jason Moran’s “Cradle Song” from his most recent album, Artist in Residence. In this course, we grapple with essential questions such as: How might we read and write with our ears? What happens when we take the risk to do so? As I design assessments and moderate the course, I keep in mind my own essential question as an educator: How can my scholarly interest in listening as a significant mode of cultural and social engagement translate into sound study learning opportunities for my students? The assignments students complete in A Listening Mind, a few of which I share next, are my response to these questions–a response that is in constant development. In many ways, the class resonates with Liana Silva’s discussion of sound as significant to writing and learning. It aims to heighten students’ aural attentiveness in general, and particularly in relation to the sonic life that inhabits the lower frequencies of the printed word. Don’t Tell.” This course, then, creates preconditions for a new kind of learning. For my students, at least initially, writing is ruled solely by the mantra “Show. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1996 National Book Award acceptance speech, “The Dancing Mind,” the course title signals my interest in challenging students to practice writing and reading in ways that are collaborative and cognitively (and otherwise) dissonant with their usual English classroom habits of mind. I’ve taught A Listening Mind, a trimester course for high school juniors at Princeton Day School in New Jersey, for two years. “Writing” by Flickr user filipe ferreira, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
I want them to experience how listening enhances their understanding of literature, that listening is learning. As my high school students read works by Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Michael Ondaatje, Jonathan Safran Foer, James Baldwin, and Lucille Clifton, I want their ears to become increasingly attuned to the sounds, silences, vibrations, and other sonic significance embedded within printed words. How can listening, which I’ve come to understand as an essential way of knowing, enhance the learning experience? My pedagogical challenge over the past few years has been to develop a heightened awareness of the ways our ears are not necessarily, as Robert Frost asserts, “the only true reader and the only true writer,” but certainly an essential mode of reading and writing that is too often underdeveloped.
World Listening Day is a time to think about the impacts we have on our auditory environments and, in turn, its affects on us. To read last week’s post by Maile Colbertclick here and Regina Bradley’s discussion of listening, race, and Rachel Jeantel (and to read more about World Listening Day) click here. This is the third post in Sounding Out!’s July forum on listening in observation of World Listening Day on July 18th, 2013. “Listening is little short of a synonym for learning.”
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