The Listening Project
The pandemic through which we continue to live is often charged with being an agent of disconnection. The safety measures that have been enacted over the past year and a half in the name of public health—lockdowns, distancing, masking—have often had the concomitant effect of isolating us, and pushing us into our own technological cocoons. The pandemic has only accelerated a tendency in our technological, media, and social environments that rewards superficial and snap judgments, promotes egocentricity and status-seeking, and risks dehumanizing all that participate in it. There is nothing more human than conversation, and yet societal forces so often encourage us to issue judgments, interrupt, and dismiss, as if genuine engagement with another were an existential threat.
As a community predicated on interpersonal connections and the power of relational teaching, Browning seeks to be decidedly countercultural in this regard; indeed, our entire enterprise of learning and development requires that our students and our teachers are open and receptive to people and stories that are not initially their own. While this effort has long been a cornerstone of Browning pedagogy and programming, we are excited this year to initiate a partnership with The Listening Project in support of this vital aspect of our mission.
An extension of New York University’s Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, the Listening Project was founded in part by Drs. Niobe Way and Joseph Derrick Nelson, two scholars in Browning’s “Today’s Boys, Tomorrow’s Men” speaker series. Under the current guidance of Dr. Way, the aim of the project is to foster and strengthen commitments to curiosity and connection between individuals and among communities. Through a protocol of “transformative interviewing,” participants learn to listen deeply, to see themselves and others in fuller and more empathetic ways, and to find abiding appreciation for both individual differences and common humanity. Through this engagement, interpersonal connection is enhanced, and a greater understanding of oneself and one’s community neighbors emerges.
We intend to utilize the interview protocol this year in both our Middle and Upper School Modern Masculinities courses; in years following, we expect to apply the Listening Project approach to parts of our advisory curriculum, as a complement to English classes, and even to select Lower School activities. It’s exciting stuff that will not only engage and empower our boys emotionally, but intellectually as well. To be sure, a young man who develops the skills of deep listening and attentiveness is not just a good interviewer--he is an improved analyst, organizer, interpreter, and narrator. He is, categorically, a more capable student.
In a culture that too often asserts that superficialities are truth, relationships are disposable, and any sense of a “common good” is a myth, introducing the Listening Project is sure to have salutary benefits for our boys and adults alike. But beyond its ability to combat a baleful “crisis of connection” at large, the Project is a decided fit for our school in particular. We cannot imagine the survival of the authentic relationships that we prize without a commitment to our core values of honesty, curiosity, and dignity. In joining an effort to truly hear those around them, our students engage in activity where truth emerges from real listening, genuine questions always precede reasoned conclusions, and respect is necessarily extended to stories and the people that tell them. This promotes learning, this promotes wholeness—and this helps us deliver on our mission to foster young men of intellect and integrity. The Listening Project, in short, is an exciting effort that is wholly congruent with the fundamental purposes of our school, and offers a partnership that will help us realize the most essential goals of the Browning community.