Conversation
Photo: Petri Oldervit, “Conversation” from “Barcelona Street Photography 2008”, http://framingthestreet.com/contact/.
Nothing stymies growth more than a made-up-mind. We begin to think reflexively, even if it serves us poorly. The ready path beckons, even if it leads to nowhere of use any longer. Your ideas become tired and stale. You become stuck. William Beveridge investigated the intuitive, creative side of scientific investigation over 70 years ago and recognized two solutions to getting un-stuck:
“…to abandon the problem temporarily [or to] discuss it with another person, preferably someone not familiar with our work. (Beveridge, 1950, p. 66).
Conversation helps us jump the rails of mind.
Consider:
How might you use conversation as a tool to enhance creativity?
In school, with the requirements for these interactions fully understood and exploited, we can teach the coursework, but also empowerment and self-esteem.
The foundations of this view lie in work by Dr. Carl Rogers and his “Person-Centered Psychotherapy Approach”. In explaining the relationship between therapist and client, Rogers requires congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding from the therapist. Congruence means the therapist is open, transparent, genuine and authentic, without mask or reserve, or sense of impenetrability, or dispassionate pretense or protective veneer. Unconditional positive regard requires the therapist to honestly hold the client in high esteem, no matter what they say or do (that strikes me as challenging). Empathic understanding asks the therapist to adopt the perspective of their client: to appreciate their views. Rogers asserts:
As persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude toward themselves. As persons are empathetically heard, it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of inner experiencings. But as a person understands and prizes self, the self becomes more congruent with the experiencings. The person thus becomes more real, more genuine. These tendencies, the reciprocal of the therapist’s attitudes, enable the person to be a more effective growth-enhancer for himself or herself. There is a greater freedom to be the true, whole person (Rogers, 1980, p. 130).
Rogers himself highlights the similarity between education and therapy. In his view, the aims of education and psychotherapy coincide in that they both intend to produce people who are independent and creative. The relationship between therapist and client thus finds analogue in the relationship between teacher and student. This relationship is constructed on foundations of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding. It is built on conversation.
Paolo Freire, in his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2006, p. 89-91), calls conversation, or dialogue, “an existential necessity”. To him, the requirements for dialogue are as follows:
1. Love: of the world, of life, of people. Otherwise, there is power, not understanding.
2. Humility: to agree that neither are ignoramuses, nor sages, but seekers.
3. Faith: in the creative and transformational power of man.
4. Hope: that a search is only possible in communion with others.
In posing conversationalists as fellow seekers, Freire too demands congruence. By insisting on Love, he echoes Roger’s requirement for “Unconditional Positive Regard”. Freire, writing in Brazil in the 1960s about educating the poor and dispossessed, intuited much the same approach as Rogers to his patients. Ultimately, each had to confront this question: “How am I to be”?
Consider:
How might you create the time and space for one-on-one conversations with your students?
The substance of a conversation hinges on what we say, but the quality of a conversation hinges on how we listen. I want to discuss three types of listening, and how they each contribute differently to building a conversation.
Dialogic Listening keeps the focus on what is said, on the concept. This approach, as described by Stewart and Thomas (1995), emphasizes conversation as a shared activity, presumably among equals. It requires participants to attend to all views presented in the conversation, their own and others, but does not focus on the person offering their perspective. Everyone at the table keeps their attention on the construction of a shared understanding, not on the sensibilities of the individual builders (Stewart, 1995, p. 184-201). Thinking critically, identifying issues, accepting, modifying and rejecting ideas all play an important role in Dialogic Listening.
Reflective or Empathic Listening, in contrast, requires the listener to reconstruct what they hear in their own words in order to confirm that they understood the speaker. Only after the speaker acknowledges an understanding can the listener add further to the conversation. Thus every contribution to a conversation is validated, as is the speaker. This crucial result, personal validation, too easily disappears from conversations, as disagreements can become personal or as subtle or even overt shaming accompanies wrong assertions. Nothing shuts down inquiry or discussion like shame.
Consider:
What happens to your interactions when you fail to first acknowledge the speaker and confirm what you heard?
What happens when you fail to first mention the positives and the agreements before offering a critique?
Generative Listening has the listener actively join forces with the speaker in order to co-create a collective understanding. While an empathic listener can still take a critical stance, focus on disagreements, identify logic gaps, emphasize weak arguments, and so avoid fully enrolling in the ideas under discussion, generative listeners engage an entirely different contract with the speaker. This contract feels more like a co-conspiracy than an inquisition, and engages both speaker and listener creatively. C. Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT with a Ph.D in economics, explains this stance in his book Theory U, Leading from the future as it emerges (2016). For Scharmer, how we pay attention and what we pay attention to is the key to what we create: our future possibility. He calls Generative Listening, “Listening 4”:
This level of listening requires us to access not only our open heart, but also our open will—our capacity to connect to the highest future possibility that can emerge. We no longer look for something outside. We no longer empathize with someone in front of us. We are in an altered state. “Communion” or “grace” is maybe the word that comes closest to the texture of this experience… when you choose to operate from Listening 4 (generative listening), you realize that by the end of the conversation you are no longer the same person you were when it began. You have gone through a subtle but profound change that has connected you to a deeper source of knowing, including the knowledge of your best future possibility and self. (Scharmer, n. d., p. 2-3)
Consider:
Can you feel the difference in your stance and in the results when you adopt a generative ear in lieu of a strictly critical ear?
Is it possible that the 21st Century Learning focus on “critical thinking” is already outdated, that our problems require a generative mindset far more than they require a critical one?
Do you see how teaching your students this skill serves creativity and collaboration far better than just critical thinking?
The importance of understanding and validating the contribution of the speaker so crucial to Empathic Listening, puts some focus and effort on the speakers instead of the concept. Dialogic Listening sticks to the concept, evades the fact that we are all emotional creatures, and misses an opportunity to reinforce a sense of validation and self-esteem. Luckily, conversations are fluid and Dialogic, Generative and Empathic Listening may all be employed. Aware of the emotional state of the students, a teacher can choose to reinforce empathically those students needing the support, actively build understandings when the ideas are rich enough for a generative stance, while leaving the conversation otherwise to proceed dispassionately with a dialogic approach.
Consider:
How might you use the distinctions between empathic, generative and dialogic listening to improve the conversations you have with your students?
What does conversation mean for the classroom? Arthur Applebee in his text Curriculum as Conversation (1996, p. 11-12) compared knowledge-in-action with knowledge-out-of-context, citing the former as the well-established intention in school, and the latter as the typical result. Knowledge-in-action, as Applebee explains it, is open-ended, relevant to the present and focused on exploring the future. It is a process of knowing and doing while knowledge out of context typically manifests as multiple-choice facts rooted in traditional frameworks. It is the difference between learning to ride a bike and learning how a bike is ridden. Conversation is a powerful way to keep knowledge in action.
25 or 30 kids facing a teaching wall in a traditional classroom are not going to have a conversation. The room is designed for lectures. Flexible furniture, multiple teaching walls and breakout spaces all help. A fundamental issue however is the number of students present. In a paper on conversation dynamics, Mastrangeli et al (2010) proposed a mathematical model to predict that cocktail party conversations would schism with more than four participants. A captive audience behaves differently however. At Phillips Exeter Academy, the Harkness method recommends eight students around an oval table. For structured conversation and a captive crowd, this is the “state of the art”: stark contrast to classrooms crammed with 25-30 kids.
References
Applebee, A. (1996). Curriculum as conversation. University of Chicago.
Beveridge, W.I.B. (1950). The Art of Scientific Investigation. Norton.
Mastrangeli, M., Schmidt, M. & Lacasa, L. (2010, October 31). The Roundtable: An Abstract Model of Conversation Dynamics, Journal of Artificial Societies & Social Simulation 13 (4). http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/2.html
Rogers, C. R. (1980). A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin.
Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition. M. B. Ramos (Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1970).
Scharmer, C. O. (n. d.). Addressing the blind spot of our time. [website] https://solonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Exec_Summary_Sept19-Theory-U-leading-from-the-emerging-future-copy.pdf
Scharmer, C. O. (2016). Theory U, Leading from the future as it emerges. Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Stewart, J. & Thomas, M. (1995). Dialogic listening: Sculpting mutual meanings. In J. Stewart (Ed.), Bridges Not Walls (184-201). New York: McGraw-Hill
Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!