The practice of listening and humanistic education today

By Thomas Flowers, S.J., and Amy Uelmen

Joseph Orlando, special assistant to the provost at Seattle University (SU) (left), listens to SU colleague, Jennifer Loertscher, professor of chemistry (right), during the third day of the 2024 AJCU Faith, Justice & Reconciliation Assembly. Photo courtesy of the AJCU.

We live in a time in which it has become particularly difficult for people to listen to one another. Why is developing the skills of listening so important for our students today? What can instructors do to help cultivate listening and demonstrate it to students? And what is the connection between the act of listening and the purpose and aims of humanistic education?

Two scholars at U.S. Jesuit institutions reflected together on these questions earlier this year. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Flowers, S.J., a historian, is assistant professor of Ignatian formation in the College of Philosophy and Letters at Saint Louis University. Amy Uelmen is the director for mission and ministry, special advisor to the dean, and a lecturer in religion and professional life at Georgetown Law, as well as a senior research fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

Thomas Flowers, S.J.: We see among students involved in protests today a particular concern about how they are being seen and heard, and in this context, I’m thinking about the value and importance of listening. I also want to say that, at least in my experience, academics are not always good models of listening. We often listen only in preparation to counter the other person’s argument.

Concerned with how they are seen and heard, among other things, students gathered in front of College Hall at Gonzaga University in May of 2024 (above) to call on the institution to “disclose the extent of its relationship with Israeli-linked arms manufacturers and to divest from such companies.” Photo courtesy of the Gonzaga Bulletin.

So, I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about these questions:

How can we faculty teach listening to our students?

And how can we model it for them, too?

Amy Uelmen: Your question brings to mind a document in which St. Ignatius of Loyola advises fellow Jesuits headed into the Council of Trent:

“Be slow to speak, and only after having first listened quietly, so that you may understand the meaning, leanings, and wishes of those who do speak.”

While the Woodstock Library space at Georgetown University is currently closed and materials are in the process of being re-shelved, important Ignatian resources such as selected letters from Ignatius of Loyola are still available digitally. Photo courtesy of the Georgetown University Library.

I think this is good advice for all of us, faculty and students, especially today when we run a high risk of the tenor of our communication becoming performative. When in a classroom, at a protest, or online, there’s this sense of being on stage in order to perform a sense of conviction or the message that you feel like you need to deliver. This can create a lot of trouble and confusion.

In addition, I have heard from students and others that they fear that when they try to express respect through an effort to listen, this might be misunderstood when viewed through a performative lens. If a person gives the appearance of listening to someone else who may be saying something they don’t agree with, they worry that their friends might think that they actually agree with the other person. This limits the capacity to hold space for disagreement, and that’s a big challenge for us today.

And getting to your point about academic discourse and listening, another challenge that I see, especially in law schools, is habits formed when we are training students to listen through an adversarial frame, taking in the information in order to win an argument. In legal education, and also in many academic environments, we often collect bullet points in our heads as we get ready to shoot back. In these contexts, it’s not surprising when a person feels that their conversation partner is not really available to what they are actually saying, or that they’re not truly willing to receive and understand their reality.

In the classroom, one way I try to counter these tendencies is to have students work frequently in small groups. Reducing the size of the conversation can give people a better context for listening. When we get into smaller settings it helps to bring the pace and temperature of the communication way down. In these settings, the performative can more easily fall away, and you can feel the impact of the simple act of being present and receiving the reality of the other person.

A group of smiling law students from Georgetown University (above) savoring the simple act of being together by posing for a photo. Photo courtesy of Georgetown Law.

As instructors, another way to model and convey how we listen is through thoughtful feedback — both in writing and in conversations, on assignments and in office hours — which aims to help the students clarify and express their own ideas, their own concerns and questions. When students feel like they are actually being seen and heard through feedback, the dynamic of the conversation changes, and it can even help them to take some risks.

Flowers: All that resonates, especially your points about performative communication and the concern about being labeled as part of a camp. That has a real impact on how we listen. We don’t even want our body language to betray that we might be listening attentively because that could signal assent to the other person’s ideas. That’s a real fear.

And to move beyond that fear, I think, we need analytic skills which give us the ability to recognize that our polarized interpretations can often miss not only the complexity of the other person’s argument, but also the reality of the other person standing right in front of us. There is a need today to teach people listening skills and analytic skills because these skills actually help us to honor the persons who are speaking. I think that’s a definitive element of humanistic education— putting the human person at the center of things. And I’m not talking about a specific discipline in the humanities, but a broad swath of disciplines.

Humanistic education is, at least in part, about forming human persons who will actually be able to pay attention to other human persons. Your point about performative communication is a reminder that we can’t forget to look beyond the performance of ideas to the persons who are having those ideas. With the right analytic skills, we can begin to wonder why that person would think something so different from what I think and to recognize that maybe there’s more to the story, that maybe the way they arrived at their ideas is not the way I arrived at my ideas. That kind of picking apart can really help us to become humanistic in our approach to everything, but especially to one another.

Uelmen: As you talk about complexity, it brings to mind concerns about a breakdown in the capacity for critical thinking. I am also concerned about how a desire to punish those on the “other side” of very strong disagreement pushes out the capacity to appreciate human complexity and the need for mercy. At times to me it feels like an uphill battle to make psychic space for the complexity that humanistic education invites.

How do you manage in this context?

Flowers: Making that space is undoubtedly a lot of work because it means making room for a deep listening to students and to what they care about. It’s hard work because it’s the work of building a genuine rapport between them and us. But in terms of the return on the investment of work I do in the classroom with my students, that return is so high. It makes the engagement and discussion better. It makes students’ reading better. It makes their papers better.

So, to answer your question about how to carve out psychic space for humanistic education, I think it comes down to understanding the students before us and what matters to them. The invitation, I think, is to give them a space to say what they are actually worried about, what they are actually thinking about. And I think you can do this with almost any subject.

Saint Louis University (SLU) students (center) share a moment of levity with Fred Pestello, president of SLU (left), during a holiday gathering. Students are more likely to share what matters to them when they feel free enough to be themselves. Photo courtesy of SLU.

I find that, when I do that, a million things come up. I can’t always predict where their concerns will lead. But I do know that engaging with those concerns can open them up to humanistic education, and I do know that showing them that we care really matters to them and helps them get into that psychic space you’re talking about. Once we’ve created a space where they feel listened to and attended to, then we can cultivate a space where we have actually slowed down enough to listen, to engage, to analyze, to do the kind of critical thinking so central to humanistic education.

It’s in some ways as simple and as complicated as that.

And further, when I can get students away from the performative space, away from opposing slogans and camps, when I can get somebody to talk about what matters to them — it’s amazing how my own heart changes. Then, it’s my students that allow me to enter the psychic space of humanistic education, to see things as more complex and more beautiful, which also gives me hope.

Uelmen: I would also add that, when I’m able to make space for sharing some vulnerability, some sense of the limits and limitations that I myself experience, and at the same time, to create conditions where the students can feel comfortable facing their own limits or vulnerability — all of that can be very freeing.

One tiny example: In my seminar this semester there was one assignment that I didn’t refine, so it ended up being way too long and unfocused. I came into the class the next day and apologized to the students, admitting that the assignment was objectively way too long and that I should have done better.

Being more intentional about modeling a capacity to recognize and work with our own limits can in turn help students to recognize and work with their own limits. From a faith perspective, I experience that this also opens a space of hope that God meets us right there, in those limits, and is the one to carry us.