Learning to Listen (Being Versus Doing)

I would like to provide my students a set of skills and concepts related to the psychology of being human.  The curriculum would include the following topics, each to be introduced, modeled, practiced and assessed on-going, in accord with a teaching for understanding framework:

The art of listening

What is listening?  What does it look like/taste like?  What are the range of distractions (internal and external) which interfere with listening?  How does the posture of the body enhance or obstruct one's state of active listening?

The internal and external:  Two worlds, two landscapes

We inhabit two worlds.  What are they?  What are the features of each?  Why live in both worlds?  What are the consequences of living more in one that the other?  We learn about the external world from school, study and experience?  How do we learn more about the internal?

Losing ourselves:  The physics of identification

What is identification?  What does it look/feel/taste like?  What are the ways in which I identify with elements of my life?  Is identification always directed outwardly?  How do I become less identified?  What are the steps?  Why should I care?

What I do today will determine what I do tomorrow:  Habit, conditioning and schemata

What is a habit?  How is it formed?  What are the habits which shape my life?  What's wrong with a habit?  How do I resist habits?  What are the implications for the processing of food?  What is a schema?  How do they operate our lives?  Why should we know about them?  A primer on observing habits? 

You are what you eat:  Forms of food & its digestion

What is food?  What does it do for us?  What are the varieties of food (gross food, air as food, the food of impressions)?  What are the consequences of changing what we eat, and how we eat it? 

Three forms of attention:  Active/focused, attracted/repulsed, meandering/wandering

What is attention?  What are different forms?  What do they look/feel/taste like?

A three-brained being:  Thinking, feeling, and moving

We have three brains which operate simultaneously:  one which thinks, one which feels, and one which moves.  What re the features of each?  Can I observe them/distinguish between them in action?

The aim here is provide a toolkit for understanding ourselves and our relations.  It is a primer on being a human being, and the foundation for the rest of the standard curriculum.  Clearly, it more than just about listening, though listening, and the observation of oneself, is a central feature.

At a time when children are increasingly plugged-in to and bombarded by digital media, a curriculum centering on the internal -- on listening, observing, the body, and habit -- is critical.