“Thought-provoking and insightful, a compelling and needed tool for the field.”
―Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Colgate University

“Learning about listening gestures could really help students perform better in the classroom. The accessible tone and excellent metadiscursive writing structure make this book terrific for first-year writing classes.”
―Debra Hawhee, Pennsylvania State University

★Traditional rhetoric has long focused on speaking and writing, yet this book innovatively proposes that listening is not passive reception, but a rhetorical force capable of moving, provoking, facilitating, and catalyzing.
★Through the concept of "gestural listening," the author reveals how we actively participate in and shape classroom interaction through bodily movements—nodding, note-taking, eye contact, silence, and more.
★The book also provides exercises, activities, and other materials to help educators, counselors, and all those engaged in communication work develop a new understanding of gestural listening as a rhetorical force.

Attuned to the subtle choreographies of the classroom, Gestural Listening In and Beyond the Classroom investigates how students and instructors show that they are listening to each other―and, sometimes, that they are not. While rhetorical scholarship traditionally focuses on speaking and writing, listening can also be understood as a rhetorical force that makes things happen. Listening has the power to move, bring about, cause, and catalyze. This conductive aspect of listening is its embodied manifestation―termed “gestural listening.”

Laura Feibush first traces the roots of embodied listening through cultural and rhetorical history and then uses findings from a classroom study to inform an insightful discussion of respect, resistance, and self-regulation as the key dynamics that characterize listening in contemporary educational spaces. She reveals how the gestures of listening refract across identity categories in ways that have surprising effects on how classroom participants respond to one another. This accessibly written book attends to hands and faces, nodding and note-taking, and the presence of phones and laptops, as well as other forms of nonverbal backchanneling, such as where people sit, when they interrupt, and when they engage in impactful quietness.

The power of gestural listening is not limited to the classroom. Its quiet yet profound influence can elucidate many sites of interaction: in-person and virtual academic settings as well as those far beyond the educational space, such as scenes of protest, worship, and performance. Gestural Listening In and Beyond the Classroom shows how, when understood as possessing its own repertoire of impressive and expressive capacities, listening emerges as a fascinating site of study and offers exercises, activities, and other materials to help educators, counselors, and all those engaging in communicative work enact a new awareness of gestural listening as a rhetorical force.

Laura Feibush is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, where she teaches first-year writing, public and professional writing, writing across media, and writing in the disciplines. Her research, which focuses on listening as rhetorical praxis, has been published in Peitho, Composition Forum, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal.