ABS335 - A theoretical framework for studying the experience of listening in learning

Building on the idea that our “social world exists because of participants’ unending and diverse work of reproducing and changing it” (Dreier, 2008, p. 22), I have developed this conceptual framework to identify if and how listening in educational settings produces, reproduces, and/or interrupts social practices that reproduce an education debt (Ladsen-Billings, 2006). My aim is to understand better the role of listening in learning interactions so that we more fully understand current practices, as well as identify and imagine practices will help us to hear and respond better to children’s voices and recognize their value to our public education, our human potential, and themselves. It is also an attempt to answer the question, “what would a pedagogy of listening be like, and how might it matter?”  While there are many kinds of activities upon which one could focus such a study, I have identified listening because of the social nature of the phenomena of listening: Listening is ultimately social, not only because we hear one another, but also because we are heard. I propose that it is being heard and responded to (or not) that ultimately affirms (or not) who the subject is within a local context and what the possibilities are for that subject to come into presence. Such listening, in turn, links to the structures of social practice that guide and are guided by our human activities – and the possibilities of activities (and presence) - within a social context (Dreier, 2008, p. 23).