What does it mean to listen in a time of war, distraction, and deep division? As voices grow louder and more fractured, the answer feels increasingly urgent. The practice of listening has never been more difficult, or more necessary.
The Paideia Program’s Community of Practice convened for its final session of the semester on March 20—an interdisciplinary gathering that meets monthly to foster a supportive environment in which faculty discuss classroom experiences, challenges, and best practices related to the Paideia Program’s goal of promoting dialogue across difference. This extended session featured Ernesto Pujol, SNF Paideia’s inaugural Practitioner-in-Residence, who led a meditation on the crisis of listening in America. Pujol shared reflections based on his Listening School Project, addressed some of the challenges faced by educators as publicly designated listeners teaching through a socio-politically convulsive time, followed by considerations for listening sustainability. For a deep exploration of these ideas, we invite you to read Pujol’s full presentation below.
Listen through storms like deeply rooted trees, giving shelter.
Part One: American Zeitgeist
1a-Today is March 20th, and after a long harsh winter, we are finally at the Spring Equinox. But sadly, we are also at war. It is the 21th day of our war with Iran. So, we meet during a time of war.
And, as I continue listening to human voices, even when at war, I have never found it harder to listen to our students because of the many distractions and filters standing between us: distracting hand-held technologies, diagnosed and medicated conditions, and AI reading and writing for them, having its voice stand as theirs. And all this within an end-of-empire cycle, exposing the crisis of our American democracy, at war with itself and others.
1b-Democracies depend on the collective commitment to patient and generous dialogue across difference. A crisis of democracy is the result of a crisis of dialogue, which immediately places difference at risk. As a lifelong listener, I approach a crisis of dialogue as the result of a crisis of listening. In our noisy culture of spectacle, we have confused hearing with listening. We hear many voices but listen to none but our own. Hearing comes naturally, but listening is always a choice.
1c-Envisioning my first Paideia Practice Fellowship during spring 2026, I imagined myself sharing listening skills with Paideia-sponsored professors, administrators and staff in order to support them as listeners to our student community. In being admittedly dedicated to “dialogue across differences”, Paideia classes are expected to listen more, and much more fairly. I was impressed by how Paideia’s classes seem flagged as safer spaces led by trusted listeners. Therefore, during a convulsive socio-political period, Paideia classes and their instructors seem to increasingly act as vessels for rambling rage and pilgrim pain, because they hold the zeitgeist of this American moment. You all hold the zeitgeist of this American moment, every one of you.
Part Two: Lightning Rods
2a-Through individual and group exchanges, I have found myself listening to Paideia-sponsored professors: teaching through a war on free speech, which is a war on education; teaching through a war on culture, which is a war on identity; and now teaching through a surprise war in the Middle East, which is a war on hope. A war on Hope.
2b-The storms blowing through American society find the Paideia teaching community listening to voices at war. In my perception, I see you as embodying the role of psychic lighting rods. And as with lightning rods, the bolts of human rage attempting to pass through you are supposed to continue deep into the Earth, where they will, theoretically, do no harm. But I sincerely wonder: do they pass through you inflicting no harm?
2c-This spring, I have found myself at Paideia facing the complexity of the educational challenge of witnessing you containing the American zeitgeist. And the critical question that has surfaced for me concerning your pedagogical sustainability has been: how can we listen to our designated public listeners so that they can listen on (so that you can listen on)? Because there is a psychic cost to be paid by individual instructors for their psychic service to the collective, which can result in classroom burnout unless regenerative supports are empathically put in place starting now.
Part Three: Regenerative Space
3a-Designated listeners need to regenerate so as not to crack or break under the human intensity that is increasingly attempting to flow through them. It is not easy to perform day after day as psychic vessels bearing our diverse students’ burdens, listening through a landscape of fear: to your students’ fearful questions about the current socio-political situation, regardless of whether your class is about politics or not; to your students’ fear of unemployment and inability to pay their student loans, resulting in impoverishment; to your students’ fear of potential mistreatment as illegal and even legal immigrants (the students themselves, their friends, family, neighbors); and to the voices of radicalized students, from the left and from the right, expressing what may constitute discriminatory statements in writing assignments and class discussions.
3b-Prejudice is based on fear of the unknown and the so-called Other. So, what does it mean to teach during a time of fear? To teach through fear? Because we too may be afraid, of being professionally penalized, if we do not handle student fear according to old and new institutional directives?
3c-How do we listen to our designated public listeners in order to support you during a time of such difficult listening, supporting you with something other than tools and strategies for best practices? How can we offer you more emotional support, a support that provides you with ongoing opportunities to confidentially share not just feelings but emotions triggered by their current and future classroom experiences; regenerative times and spaces where the pedagogical burden of performing “neutrality” and performing “objectivity” can be trustingly placed aside? Because as African-Americans, as Hispanic/Latinxs, and as Asian educators; as American educators with roots in Southeast Asia and the Middle-East, as Palestinians and Jews; and as immigrants or children of immigrants, as LGBT, feminists, and progressives, we may not-so-secretly embody, we may wear these issues as flesh, features and dress, incarnating the very issues discussed. Which hurt. Which make us hurt. Deeply.
3d-Can we curate, launch and sustain individual and group-restorative opportunities? In my field experience, public listeners in psychic battlefields need pedagogically-confidential, restorative opportunities in which to listen to each other’s classroom experiences without shame. In this way, anecdote by anecdote, we can draft a pedagogical map to help us see more clearly the scale, depth and complexity of what we face together. Together. Because no one can or should face this sociopolitically convulsive psychic map alone.
3e-No one should feel pedagogically alone across the aggressive and violent psychic territory of this moment. Because to be experiencing anxiety and stress, to come up against a sense of one’s limitations and secret feelings of inadequacy are not signs of failure. Quite the contrary, these symptoms tell me that these listeners (that you) are truly listening. If they were continuing in a business-as-usual manner, then, I would be pedagogically concerned. But the fact that many educators are hurting is because they are listening, listening at a time when listening is harder than ever, so they must be more emotionally supported than ever.
Part Four: Contemplative Practices
4a-I would like to share four contemplative practices that help me to sustain listening through difficult times: My first practice is the exercise of tracing one’s personal history of listening. Because each of us brings a different form of listening to this moment, to this academic table. So, it is important to understand the evolution of your life-listening, by way of your personal and professional history, revisiting the readings and experiences that have made you the unique listener that you are. I founded a project called The Listening School in 2015, and one of the first exercises we ask of participants is to write The History of Your Ear, and then to share it with each other, both to bond as a listening community, and to benefit from our listening diversity.
4b-In my case, my history of listening has two main sources. My first source is monastic listening. There was a Western monastic tradition of pilgrims making rest stops in abbeys and monasteries, requesting to speak with cloistered monks and nuns. These monastics pursued lives of manual labor balanced with meditation and contemplation. They had vows of silence, yet they lent themselves to listening to visitors. And what these silent listeners learned from these experiences was that longcontained narratives could be like wounded large animals in small cages, so that the act of release outside the prison of the mind was cathartic, providing psychological relief.
4c-My second source is the Zen Buddhist tradition which understands life mostly as loss, does not theologize about a god but seeks to live ethically as if there was a god to account to, addressing lifelong losses through detachment. When you cultivate detachment, most of your listening is going to be a calm form of witnessing, of creating and holding a safe space for the speaker to speak. If there is a response other than silence, it may be in the form of a koan, a paradoxical anecdote, even a riddle, to expose the inadequacy of seeking logical reasoning as the solution of it all.
4d-A second practice that sustains my listening through difficult times is a meditative mindfulness. I believe that deep listening is not sustainable without mindfulness. Because listening to people who seem to believe that one is not worthy of freedom of speech, of citizenship, of basic human rights, of life, takes more than research, reason, the intellect—it requires mindfulness. That is, being mindful of the fact that our ultimate reality is that we are One.
4e-Cultivating mindfulness is humbling. Because mindfulness requires a methodology of vulnerability. To be mindful starts with an admission that one can hurt, be offended, be angry by what one listens to. Being mindful requires the psychic divestment of the armor of de-emotionalized professionalism we have been taught. It starts with the admission that, as a listening vessel, one is a broken vessel full of cracks, no matter our titles, degrees and publications. You see, there is wisdom in selecting broken human vessels to contain human sorrow and rage, because the vessels can then never attribute their containment ability to their “smarts”. The ability to truly contain human sorrow and rage lies beyond us, it rests in Nature. This is not an anti-intellectual stance or a New Age, neo-spiritual stance. It is ancestral wisdom across cultures.
4f-A third practice that sustains my listening during difficult times is pure listening, which one could describe as listening for listening’s sake. In The Listening School project, we refer to this as the practice as listening like a tree. I believe that most of humanity walks around feeling unlistened, not listened to. Yet I believe that one cannot develop a full self until one has been listened to. Because being listened to completes us. But let me clarify I am not talking about being listened to by others, although that is vital too. I am talking about me listening to myself, about you listening to yourself, to complete your self. Because the first listener in a human exchange is not the appointed listener, but the speaker listening to herself/himself. The speaker is the first listener, listening to the articulation of the self. And that is why in a human exchange, sometimes a speaker will stop in midsentence and say things like: “I can’t believe I’m saying this; I can’t believe I just said that”.
4g-We need to voice the self to ourselves, first and foremost, in order for the full self to be known, to be achieved. Yet many people have not been able to listen to themselves, so they do not know their own deepest thoughts and emotions. Which means that they do not have a fully-grounded self for dialogue, for the sake of dialogue across differences; which also means that they do not know the psychic weight and thus the effect of their deepest thoughts and emotions on others, the impact of them, the beauty or horror of them upon others.
4h-A fourth practice that sustains my listening through difficult times is the practice of silence. I inhabit short and long periods of silence throughout my days, even without any form of meditation. I do so in order to regain the value of language, the weight of words. We are surrounded by words, drowning in words as texts, posts, and emails. Words are cheaper and more expendable than ever. We surf through and dismiss and delete them constantly. So I inhabit silence in order to regain their power and possibility. Because the first words to come out of my silence are significant, as are the last words before I walk into silence.
Afterword: A Collective Listening Body
5a-No single listener is capable of listening and responding to everyone and everything at all times. But coming together as listeners creates wisdom, in the form of a collective listening body that is greater than any one listener, and thus, much more capable of listening to everything and everyone when needed. And if this collectivity of listeners has explored the listening histories and trajectories of its constituents, deepened by their mindfulness, hold on to the belief in the healing effect of the listening act long before there is “advise”, and practice periodic silence, this collective will effectively sustain its listening through difficult times.
5b-We should be able to provide you, our educators, our designated public listeners, with safe and sustained emotionally-supportive spaces to regenerate and achieve the wisdom of the collective. If we do so, the Paideia community and this university will be ready to listen through the difficult times that lie ahead, the challenging times that await us in America and beyond.
Addendum: See Ernesto Pujol, Listening Manifesto, (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2021).
Ernesto Pujol is the first Practice Fellow of the SNF Paideia Program. Click here to learn about other publications by the author.
This entry is part of DiaLogic: Thinking Through Big Questions for Dialogue, a monthly series in which SNF Paideia Dialogue Director Dr. Sarah Ropp and guest contributors from the SNF Paideia community explore key questions and share ideas, experiences, resources, and practices related to diverse dialogue topics. We invite you to respond with your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. If you’re interested in contributing an essay or if this post sparks any ideas about collaborating to create more dialogue at Penn and beyond, please reach out directly to Sarah Ropp at sropp@upenn.edu. For more DiaLogic posts, visit this page here.
