Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen: How Diversity Works on Campus (review)

An Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Tulsa, Susan E. Chase, shapes her own narrative and her analysis of student narratives in a powerful way. While her book is not an oral history, it takes a sociological approach to narrative inquiry—one called narrative reality—to analyze chosen excerpts from student interviews and other sources. The result is a fascinating book that will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience who are concerned with how we learn to speak in a voice that others can understand and how we learn to listen in a way that facilitates understanding. Chase highlights our natural tendency to uphold our existing preconceptions, especially on emotionally charged issues, and suggests circumstances that may make it less likely that understanding will be overwhelmed by the emotional intensity of anger, frustration, fear, and defensiveness.

Chase takes on a formidable job, aiming to outline factors that shape narrative reality. In the preface, she informs readers that her goals are three-fold: (1) to reveal the “complexity of voices and stories” (4); (2) to expose the complexity of listening to those stories; and (3) to understand the social context in which speaking and listening occur, including the conditions that encourage students to speak (especially those students whose voices are typically stilled) and the conditions that encourage and allow other students (especially those who regularly take center-stage) to listen. A hard reality that forms the core of Chase’s message is that these complexities are dynamic, often unpredictable, and impossible to generalize perfectly from one context and set of individual circumstances to another. Still, while the possibilities for and the consequences of specific speaking and listening contexts cannot be predicted, Chase does shed light on the characteristics of narrative environments that may make understanding more likely.

Chase has focused her account of speaking and listening on diversity, an issue that is often emotional, heated, and contentious—characteristics that make dialogue challenging. As a result, this book will be especially interesting to those who care about the ways that diversity issues are addressed on campuses. She uses interviews with students at a small (fewer than 3000 undergraduate students), private university that she calls CU, where less than 20 percent are students of color. In addition to student narratives, she includes additional evidence and documentation from “multi-year content analyses of . . . student newspapers, student government minutes, curriculum, calendar of events, and web site” (9) along with other official University documents to make her case. Using excerpts from these sources, Chase shows that students’ stories about diversity were dictated by students’ “theoretical” point-of-view. That is, whether students approached diversity from perspectives based on social justice, abstract inclusion, or political difference, conceptual frameworks profoundly influenced their narratives. Often conflicting narratives not only embraced completely different points of view but also indicated no awareness of the actual factors comprising the others’ conceptual framework. As such, speaker and listener by necessity failed to come to similar meanings. Moreover, even when narrators did recognize the perspective of another, they were often unable to see the merit in that position from the others’ view.

Through her own engaging narrative style, Chase tells stories of students’ practical experiences that sometimes resulted in a more empathic understanding, and she makes clear that without such experiences, mismatched communication may be inevitable. She also shows that these existing differences in cognitive conceptual structure make speaking and listening inherently challenging, even as she outlines the ways in which speaking and listening are influenced by these very complexities. One especially intriguing example is the manner in which those from one perspective often co-opt the conceptual principles of another in order to discredit their arguments.

Additionally, Chase shows how narrative landscape can shape narrative possibility. A primary example at CU was how the issue of racial diversity was in the forefront across campus life, while sexual orientation or gender equity were less often...