Stories Need Listeners: Constructivist Listening for Transformative Storytelling
I haven’t been writing here lately. Instead, this past winter I committed to listening more. So, I have been listening, and reading, and reading about listening. Much of the reading and listening have been anchored in a desire to better understand how groups can address conflict, mistrust, and open hostility in sectors tasked with improving conditions for children and families. The graphic above is a proposed model of constructivist listening built from a review of scholarly evidence in the fields of communication studies, linguistics, psychology, and education. I am not the first person to use the term constructivist listening. In fact, education scholars have used the term to describe intentional listening strategies that acknowledge the role of emotion in understanding group members’ experiences [1]. Communication scholars have used the term to acknowledge the conscious and unconscious cognitive processes listeners use to make se...