How Do You Teach the Art of Listening?

In a large, wood-paneled room at the Interfaith Center on Riverside Drive, a woman stood at the front of the room and started to sway to music, which had just begun playing.

“For those who are interested, this piece is by Beautiful Chorus, an all-female vocal ensemble that I listen to in the morning. They create a soothing space for me to start my day,” said Ovita Williams, a senior lecturer at the School of Social Work, who is executive director of the school’s Action Lab for Social Justice.

Williams was leading the daylong, November 2024 Symposium on Listening for Educators, along with Liza Zapol, a faculty member in the Oral History Master of Arts Program; Amy Starecheski, director of the Oral History Master of Arts Program; and Sayantani DasGupta, a doctor and co-founder of the Narrative Medicine Master’s Program at the School of Professional Studies, where she is also a senior lecturer.

“Listening is often about what is not being said,” continued Williams. “You can listen through silence,” added Starecheski. “Silence isn’t always neutral.”

A Complex, Full-Bodied Skill

The symposium was part of the Pedagogy of Listening Lab, an Incite program. The program’s goal is to teach the art of listening—not the sort of listening where you’re not fully engaged and things are going in one ear and out the other, but listening that is active and empathetic, a complex, full-bodied skill.

Zapol is director of the interdisciplinary lab, which involves the Oral History MA Program, the Narrative Medicine Master’s Program, and the School of Social Work. Faculty, researchers, and students from these disciplines work in the lab from a core understanding that teaching listening—or any subject or skill—is based not on educators asserting authority, but rather an approach to teaching with transparency, DasGupta emphasized.

The Pedagogy of Listening Lab started in the spring of 2023, when Williams, Starecheski, Zapol, and DasGupta realized that their respective fields (social work, oral history, and narrative medicine) “were all built on, and centralized, listening to clients, narrators, and patients,” said DasGupta. “We determined that, therefore, we had unique insight into the teaching of listening. We wanted to both explore how this type of radical listening in our professional practices influenced our classroom teaching, and discover if we had lessons on teaching listening that could be shared with colleagues beyond our disciplines.”

At the symposium, Zapol discussed the conflicts on campus during the fall 2023 semester. “The events impacted all of us. Columbia became a microcosm of the global macrocosm,” she said. “I found it increasingly difficult to listen. I had become silent to myself and others. How could I teach listening to others if I was stifled myself? This lab has cracked me open.”

A Framework to Build Connection

To date, the lab has received three grants from the Office of the Provost. The first one funded a year’s worth of meetings, in which Zapol, Williams, Starecheski, DasGupta, and others collaborated on developing a 10-lesson toolkit or guide for teaching and strengthening listening skills. These modules formed the basis of the Symposium on Listening for Educators, in which the four lab leaders and their collaborators took participants through a series of panels as well as practical skills and exercises to enhance the ability to build connection through listening.

The two additional grants have supported further expansion of the lab’s work, including a new course—Power, Justice, Praxis: Listening Across Difference—open to both graduate and undergraduate students, which launched with the Spring 2025 semester. The class introduces students to listening practices that encourage them to heed such things as context, structure, power, privilege, political difference, and personal identity.

One day in the class, Nyssa Chow, interim director of the Oral History Master’s Program, asked students, “How do you listen for ways of knowing and being in the world that are the same or different than you?” She said that, as an oral historian, one of the first and key things to do when conducting an interview is to create a space of possibility.

“You want to give your subject permission to author that space, to lead you—as the interviewer—to an understanding of an experience that is not yours. In the end,” said Chow, “oral history is not a set of questions, but an exercise in learning how to listen more deeply.”

“I feel like this innovative and interdisciplinary class is expanding how I approach listening,” said Khalid Antonio Taylor, a student taking the course. “I am a facilitator of storytelling spaces and, in particular, I help people transform their lived experiences into song using a collaborative method called documentary songwriting. At the core of this method is relationship-building by way of honoring a person’s narrative and creative expression. I took this class because I want to learn a variety of listening frameworks and tools to bring into my work and eventually share with others.”