Communication: A Critical/Cultural Introduction, 2e Warren & Fassett
Chapter 4: Compassionate Critical Listening
Lecture Outline
Chapter Summary
The authors work to distinguish the differences between listening and hearing. While
doing so, the authors also push the notions of listening through a discussion of how our
cultural locations, context, and individual lived experiences play a key role in our
listening stance. Furthermore, the authors invite to explore critical compassionate
listening through the work of Performance scholar, Dwight Conquergood. The author’s
end this chapter with a discussion of dialogic listening.
Chapter Goals:
Distinguish between listening and hearing
Explore listening as a stance that is shaped by context, individual experience and
cultural expectations
Explore listening as dialogic engagement
Consider listening as a means of learning
I. In order to understand what happens when we listen, we must make a
distinction between hearing and listening.
a. Hearing is a physiological act in which sounds vibrate our eardrums.
b. Listening requires our active attention and focus.
c. Sometimes we passively encounter sounds (hear) and sometimes we
actively engage with those sounds (listen).
d. Listening is a stance that is shaped by context, individual experience, and
cultural expectations.
II. Listening as a Stance: An approach to experience rather than simply a matter
of hearing or listening in ways that are passive, active or skills in need of
development.
a. We begin to account for the ways content, individual experiences, and
cultural expectations shape our listening.
b. We can begin to move away from thinking of listening in terms of a
physiological act of hearing.
c. Listening is a way to encounter the world and others fully present and with
your whole body.
d. Modes of listening are listening competencies or strategies that we
develop to relate to specific learning situations.
i. Shaped by cultural and social factors.
ii. Emerge in relationship to and with the cultural and social
expectations of the situation.
e. There are three ways to think of modes of listening.
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Communication: A Critical/Cultural Introduction, 2e Warren & Fassett
i. Help to clarify the notion of listening as a stance by pointing to the
ways our relationships to listeners is shaped by the context or the
listening situation.
ii. Help to clarify the notion of listening as a stance by pointing to the
effects of individual experience and knowledge on the act of
listening.
1. Our stances as listeners is shaped by our individual
positions as listeners.
2. Monson (2007) introduced the concept of “perceptual
agency” as a way of thinking about the ways our sensory
experiences are shaped by individual practices.
iii. Helps to clarify that our listening stance is informed by context and
our individual practices.
1. Always linked to questions of culture and cultural
expectation.
2. How we might listen or the agency we have as listeners is
filtered thorough and influenced by our cultural locations.
f. Modes of listening help us start to define and understand what it means to
take on the stance of compassionate critical listening.
1. Critical compassionate listening is focused on dialogue and
dialogic communication.
2. Dwight Conquergood (1995) argues that dialogical
performance is “one path to genuine understanding of
others” (p. 9).
3. Conquergood’s dialogic performance has four major
dangers that a performer might encounter when attempting
to engage with others across difference.
a. The Custodian’s Rip-Off: engaging with others for
selfish reasons.
b. The Enthusiast’s Infatuation: differences of the
other are superficially oversimplified or ignored.
c. The Curator’s Exhibitionism: focuses almost
exclusively on the differences of the others.
d. The Skeptic’s Cop-Out: Avoidance of the other
where no interaction across difference is possible.
III. Listening as Double Articulation: Listening is always linked to and shaped by
a variety of cultural values.
a. Our listening is often shaped or structured by physical structures and
locations.
i. Think of the ways a music hall is structured or a college lecture
hall versus a traditional classroom.
b. The stance we take as listeners is structured socially, culturally, and
historically.
c. Our practices as listeners can begin to produce or constitute or change
existing structures.
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Communication: A Critical/Cultural Introduction, 2e Warren & Fassett
i. This process is called “double articulation.”
ii. The structure – given conditions of existence, the structure of
determinations in any situation – can be understood from another
point of view.
iii. Taking a stance as a critical compassionate listener is an
opportunity to enact change.
IV. Public Advocacy: Listening to Learn: If we strive for dialogic engagement in
our listening, our opportunity for learning increases.
a. Paulo Freire (1970/2003) explains that dialogue changes the relationship
between the students and teachers.
b. Listening to learn from others requires an awareness of your
c. position in the world.
d. Cornwell and Orbe (1999) explain that dialogic listening requires
awareness of the impact of culture, privilege, and power on our
communicative interactions.
e. Listening to learn from others requires an awareness of our position as the
listener.
f. Listening to learn from others also requires an awareness and recognition
of the cultural position and differences of others.
g. Listening to learn from the other is a way of enacting change in our
relationships and positions in the world.
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