Planning Tools

Audience as Listener-learner

Consider these four propositions:

  1. If health promotion goals are concerned with transformation and change to bring about wellness, then health-promoting radio program horizons support those goals.
  2. If the health promoter’s role is firmly defined as collaborative and participatory, giving priority to learning from the community, then the role of health-promoting radio is to include communities as participants in and a catalyst for change.
  3. If we are to be committed to empowering communities in health promotion, then we health-promoting radio practitioners must reformulate our perceptions of those who tune into our programs and of our role as message producer.
  4. If we are to operationalise theory into health-promoting radio scripts that will help individuals and communities to learn then the starting point is our understanding of those whom we call "listeners" and how they learn.

Learning

The constructivist theory of learning suggests that people construct knowledge as opposed to merely collecting data. Learning is an active process of assessing incoming information and re-constructing it. Past experience is compared with present stimuli. If it is considered to be useful, the information is committed to longterm memory and the cognitive map is refined, reorganised, changed or altered to accommodate the new reality. In this sense then, an individual or a community tuning into the radio program is a "learner", selecting, sifting and deciding what to do with what is heard.

Listening

We refer to a person who listens to radio as a "listener". Listening is the process of hearing, attention, perception and memory.

The listening process
Example
Hearing—physically able to detect a range of aural stimuli that we are exposed to A radio listener in a car can hear the health radio spot, other vehicles, ambient sound from the movement and engine of his own car, perhaps static on the radio due to poor reception conditions
Giving attention to (isolating) a specific aural message of value or interest after scanning the available multi-sensory stimuli The radio listener gives specific attention to the health spot, ignoring (mentally tuning out) other distracting stimuli such as ambient noise. The listener will continue to scan the multi-sensory stimuli (sound, sight, smells), ready to give attention to something else
Comprehending and assigning meaning to that stimuli (perception) The listener must cognitively process or "fit" the information into previous experience, assess it, understand it, decide it’s relevance to his needs, then decide whether to do something about it or not
Remembering or storing it for use at some time in the future (cognitive mapping) The listener then stores it into memory

Listening is a processing activity. To experience this, when you next listen to a speaker in a public place try to mentally tune that person out and give attention (listen) to other ambient sounds such as the noise of an airconditioner, birds in a tree outside and so on. Ask yourself why you hadn’t heard those sounds before. The answer is that attention was applied to the speaker at the expense of other stimuli.

The Listener-learner

When we combine listening and learning we rightly position the radio audience as Listener-learner. The Listener-learner is a component of a systemic Learning Environment in a cycle of what Bandura called reciprocal determinism —an agent of change as well as an object of change. The concept of the Listener-learner reclaims in health-promoting radio terms those emphases of community empowerment and enabling. We can define the Listener-learner as:

Operationalised into radio programming, a sharp distinction is created between the new Listener-learner paradigm and the old paradigm of audience as a receiver of information. The Listener-learner is firmly positioned as a participant in and a catalyst for change, involved in the process. The health communicator’s role is firmly defined as collaborative and participatory, giving priority to learning from the community. The focus is correctly on community transformation and using radio in an appropriate way to achieve that result, not using radio as an end in itself.