Higher Education

Professor Michael W. Purdy, Ph.D. Past Vice Chair, Global Listening Centre. Distinguished Listening Scholar, Professor Emeritus, Governors State University. US Listening to music offers clues for listening to a person’s voice; both have some informative qualities that can help transform our listening. Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th-Century German philosopher, said that listening to music was the [...]

Annie Rappeport, Ph.D., M.Ed. University of Maryland. USA Professor Andrew D. Wolvin, Ph.D. Honorable Director (Academic) Global Listening Centre. Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University, Law Center. USA Abstract: While story telling is receiving considerable focus in communication research, story listening should have greater attention. Situated in a narrative [...]

Professor Claude-He le ne Mayer Ph.D. Professor in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at University of South Africa, Johannesburg. South Africa “God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer.” Mother Theresa The author’s voice I sit with bated breath as I listen to the radio, listening to the sound of [...]

Katherine van Wormer Professor Emerita of Social Work University of Northern Iowa Co-Author of The Maid Narratives Listening often poses challenges when we disagree with others who have opposing views and different experiences, but the more different we are or more we disagree, the more important our listening becomes. Over the last year, one such [...]

Professor Michael W. Purdy, Ph.D. Distinguished Listening Scholar, Past Vice Chair, Global Listening Centre. Professor Emeritus, Governors State University. USA This summer I found a fascinating article* that argued for a helpful approach to mental illness and the road to mental health. In general, we can use the listening practice described in this article as [...]

Donna L. Halper, Ph.D. Director (Media Ecology) Global Listening Centre. Associate Professor at Lesley University of Cambridge, Massachusetts. USA For many of us, our typical day is punctuated by frequent interactions with the internet and social media. We check our email, we read our newsfeed, we look at our phones to see if anyone has [...]

Associate Professor Gayle M. Pohl, Ph.D. Senior Vice President (Education Policy), Global Listening Centre. Associate Professor at University of Northern Iowa. USA Public relations is a field where communication practitioners seek to employ a strategic communication process to build mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their public. A seminal theory central to the professional goals [...]

Professor Renee Guarriello Heath, Ph.D. Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire and the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Civil Discourse Lab. USA As we consider one another’s needs trailing in the wake of the global pandemic, I do not need to remind the readers of this newsletter why authentic listening is particularly [...]

Professor Michael W Purdy, Ph.D. Distinguished Listening Scholar, Past Vice Chair, Global Listening Centre. Professor Emeritus, Governors State University In searching for some thoughts on listening and war, note the wisdom in an October 2003 column written by three-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, about how the Iraq war [...]

Carin-Isabel Knoop Executive Director at Harvard Business School, Harvard University “Simply populating your team with diverse perspectives and experiences doesn’t always translate into better performance. In fact, the uncomfortable truth is that diverse teams can underperform homogeneous teams if they’re not managed actively for differences among team members.”  Professor Frances Frei and Anne Morriss  Unleashed: [...]