Listening and Recognition in Education

• In Event: 16.041 - Teacher Listening and Social Justice: Listening to Enact Justice and Transformation in the Pursuit of Education

Abstract

If the demand for social justice includes “the right to be recognized [and] to be accorded dignity,” what does such recognition signify and how to ensure such recognition? This paper draws on Levinas to suggest that recognition means being received without being judged, reduced, and assimilated first; it means to be respected and responsible to unconditionally as a person of dignity. Levinas’s ideas of singularity and multiplicity suggest that true community is a genuine plurality and “Pluralism implies a radical alterity of the other” (1969, p. 121). In such community the unique individual is the “free being” (p. 73), free from conception, manifestation, and reduction. Such “free being” calls for responsibility from me. Levinas suggests that the relationship among individuals is established through language. “Absolute difference, … is established only by language” (p. 195), and “Language presupposes … a plurality” (p. 73). Levinas maintains that the use of language has two functions: the expressive and the presentational. The expressive function of language preconditions the presentational, and it is “in its expressive function [that] language precisely maintains the other” (Levinas, 1969, p. 73).

Drawing on these ideas of Levinas, this paper explores the two forms of expressive use of language: speaking (addressing and responding) and listening, and emphasize that, among our activities and interactions with others, listening is the prime occasion for recognizing the originary, antecedent, and inexhaustible subjectivity of the speaker. It is in listening that we come to realize the impossibility of full and sure understanding; and it is in listening that the speaking other maintains his otherness, spontaneity, and originality—his subjectivity without truncation. Education is where speaking and listening take place every day, and Levinas’ ideas help us find ways through which we can create a school and classroom community where students, newcomers with differences, are all received unconditionally, no matter how little we share in common. Through cultivating good listening and attentive speaking, we can make education a process through which students emerge as singular and irreducible human beings.

References:

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University.

Author

• Guoping Zhao, Oklahoma State University