Pedagogy of Listening Lab expands programming with two grants - Incite at Columbia University

In December 2023 we announced the Pedagogy of Listening Lab, which set out to bring together faculty, researchers, and students from different disciplines at Columbia University to advance understandings of pedagogies of listening.

Since December, the team has hosted monthly meetings between faculty, fostered oral history exchanges with alumni, observed classes, engaged in interdisciplinary discussions, and begun work on a pedagogical toolkit. Over the last months, we've been pleased to support some of this work at Incite. This week, we're proud to announce that the Listening Lab was awarded two grants from Columbia's Office of the Provost that will enable the Lab to expand its work.

Dialogue Across Difference Seed Grant

Awarded to Ovita F. Williams, Lecturer in Discipline, School of Social Work; Amy A. Starecheski, Senior Lecturer, Oral History Masters Program; Sayantani DasGupta, Senior Lecturer, Master’s Program in Narrative Medicine; and Liza Zapol, Lecturer, Oral History Masters Program

This grant—which aims to strengthen skills necessary to confront challenging viewpoints and hold difficult conversations with mutual respect—will go toward the Pedagogy of Listening Symposium, which will be held in the Fall of 2024. It will be a full day symposium, open to educators and students, for the Lab to present on and workshop the Pedagogy of Listening Toolkit: a ten-module guide for teaching and strengthening listening skills. Filled with exercises, resource materials, general knowledge and practical skills, the toolkit enhances our ability to engage in conversations across differences, supports educators in building connection through listening, and centers our lived experiences. Focusing on listening for and across power (where tellers and listeners come from different levels of relative social power), it can be utilized in anti-racist, anti-oppressive educational practices and in research settings.

Cross-Disciplinary Frontiers Courses at Columbia

Awarded to Amy Starecheski, Senior Lecturer, Oral History Masters Program; and Sayantani DasGupta, Senior Lecturer, Master’s Program in Narrative Medicine

This grant, which encourages cross-pollination at the Columbia campus, will go toward a new course, Power, Justice, Praxis: Listening Across Difference, which will introduce students to theoretically grounded listening practices incorporating attention to power, privilege, political difference, and personal identity, and give them opportunities to engage in practical listening labs. This course will examine interrelated questions informing listening and dialogue across difference such as:

• How do we make the internal experience of listening visible and legible to others?
• How do we know we have been listened to? What does the speaker ask of the listener? What are the relationships between witnessing, testimony, and listening?
• How do we make sense of listening as an embodied experience?
• What ways of communicating “count” as worthy of being listened to? How can we challenge and expand these boundaries?
• How does intersubjective listening transform participants? 

This 3-credit course will be open to undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University, and will launch in Spring 2025.

Congratulations again to the Pedagogy of Listening Lab! We'll keep you posted on related news through our mailing list.