Listening Rhetoric in the Diverse Classroom: Suggestions for Praxis

Modern college classrooms are increasingly diverse. We face classes where 18-year-olds sit beside grandmothers, native speakers of English sit beside speakers of other languages, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims share classrooms with atheists and agnostics. The question is: how do we take such a varied and ideologically differentiated group of pupils and bridge their differences in order to bring them together into a classroom community? Not only is the creation of such a community critical to the success of the classroom, but in a larger sense it is critical as a model for the effective functioning of a democratic society. My purpose is to suggest that the concept of listening rhetoric, as it informs classroom practice, has the potential to serve this goal. Therefore, in this article I will propose practical methods for incorporating the practice of listening rhetoric into college courses.