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Listening in Public

The table below overviews some of the specific practices contemporary scholars have commended for engaging with others in acts of public listening. Though the word "listening" may not be part of the nomenclature for each practice, each practice has been cast in the Hearing culture not only to involve aural input from others but—even more significantly—as a literate act predicated on open dialogue with others and geared toward building more realistically complex public understandings of issues of shared concern.

Public practice involving listening	Theory, principles &/or techne supporting the practice	Who performs the practice?	At what point in a local public's lifecycle?	What is the practice designed to yield?	Resource
Assessing the rhetorical situation	Activity theory's focus on systems comprised of objects, outcomes, tools, a community, division of labor, rules and subjects	Activist researcher	Prepares for inclusive intercultural inquiry and deliberation	Helps literacy leaders to configure the problem space for deliberation, to identify relevant stakeholders, to assess existing venues, and to analyze current practices used to discuss the public issue	Lorraine Higgins in "Community Literacy: A Rhetorical Model for Public and Personal Inquiry"
Knowledge activism	Saul Alinsky's approach to community organizing	Community partners and the activist scholar as non-interventionist agitator	Offers meeting literacies for all community partners and specific actions that help preserve the integrity of a given community-organizing effort	Helps community leaders create a shared representation for joint action	Eli Goldblatt's "Alinsky's Reveille"
Identifying organizational narratives	Gareth Morgan's theory of organizational identity and imagery	Knowledge consultant - the change agent as "critic, consultant, and [...] community activist,"	Prepares for naming, documenting, and addressing an organizational problem	Pinpoints sources of discord and potential realignment between internal and external organizational narratives	Brenton Faber's Community Action and Organizational Change, especially chapter 4
Ideographic analysis	Michael McGee's materialist rhetoric	Educators	Prepares to achieve warranted assent; practical institutional outcomes	Identifies the fragments of argument—or ideographs—most likely to secure agreement among diverse constituencies	David Coogan's "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric"
Intercultural inquiry	The critical-incident interview technique	Community Think Tank team members and students conducting interviews with residents in advance of think-tank sessions	Prepares for deliberation; informs the briefing books that participants read in advance of Community Think Tank sessions	Helps participants co-construct working theories of community issues—theories that translate principles into actionable plans	Linda Flower's Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, particularly p. 238
	Rivaling & eliciting the story behind the story	Teens, college mentors, community readers, Think Tank participants are all introduced to and encouraged to try their hands at these strategies	Used to both prepare for and also structure deliberation during a community-problem solving dialogue	Helps elicit situated knowledge—that is, alternative readings of the context, actors, motives at work within	Flower's Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, particularly chapter 7
Intentional listening	Listening for music and h(ear)ing metaphors	Teacher-educator	Used retrospectively with an eye toward future, more informed public engagement	Promotes critical transformation, intervention, and honest conversation	Joyce Irene Middleton's "Finding Democracy"
Rhetorical listening	Listening metonymically to public debates	Teacher-educator	Used retrospectively with an eye toward future, more informed public engagement	Resists gendered and racialized silences; fosters accountability	Ratcliffe's Rhetorical Listening, chapter 3

In the discussion that follows, we've worked within space constraints to suggest the public relevance of the DALN narratives. Teachers may intensify the lesson to be about not only learning to listen to these interviews but also learning to listen in public; that is, learning to listen purposefully and perceptively by directing students' systematic, analytical attention toward technai themselves. Such instruction would ask, for example, What do we hear and hear differently when we—in adopting Coogan's materialist method, for example—listen for ideographs, those fragments of argument that structure the history of a community's engagement with a contested issue, as a purposeful alternative to, say, listening for situated knowledge—those "movies of the mind" that dramatize how people conceptualize context, actors and motive (Flower, Community 178)? In a classroom that would make such technai a topic of instruction (and the growing scholarship on listening urges us to make this pedagogical turn), the DALN narratives could serve as a rich site for getting the hang of one or more of these technai while building provisional understandings of an issue at hand in order to prepare for better listening in live conversations face-to-face and soul-to-soul with others who have also had first-hand knowledge of the issue under study.

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