SoundWriting Pedagogies

Soundwriting Pedagogies
Edited by Courtney S. Danforth, Kyle D. Stedman, & Michael J. Faris

Soundwriting? 



Sound writing is writing in sound. It's composing an audible text....audible text that applies what we know about writing to the affordances of sound. Soundwriting includes and defies other genres . . .layering words, music, and sounds together.

There's a lot going on right now with sound in rhetoric and composition studies. This book zeros in on one specific aspect of that groundswell of interest: using sound in writing studies pedagogy.

Throughout this collection, contributors draw on the affordances of sound to theorize and share practices, so that they (and we) can make sense in ways that might not work in traditional, alphabetic written prose.

I found soundwriting very new teaching pedagogy using non-traditional approach--using technologies. 

Soundwriting pedagogy is very multimodal. 


Contents:

Introduction

by Courtney S. Danforth & Kyle D. Stedman
History
Lit. review
Especially focus on pedagogy
Sound writing experiments

Chapter 1: Do You Hear What I Hear? A Hearing Teacher and a Deaf Student Negotiate Sound

by Jennifer J. Buckner & Kirsten Daley

The sound is voices, music, texture.
Our rhetoric shapes our understanding of sound.
We must avoid approaches that privilege hearing/speaking bodies and other deaf bodies. If we don’t, we limit our understanding of what sound writing is, how soundwriting occurs, and why soundwriting matters.

Our History

We first met in a first-year composition course (Fall 2013) and had the privilege of working together three semesters later (Spring 2015) in Multimodal Composition, an upper-level course for English majors.

(dis)abling Soundwriting

Soundwriting is perhaps one of the most democratic of composing modalities, integrating a range of otherwise strange voices and cultural artifacts in academic discourse communities. We welcome popular music, remix, and dialects as unique as fingerprints into tracks of sonic assignments. The more unique the sound composition, the more likely teachers are to recognize student voices present. Yet, our scholarship theorizes about sound in ways that privileges speaking–hearing bodies whose boundaries are "shored" by physiological deviations, such as deafness.


Chapter 2: Recasting Writing, Voicing Bodies: Podcasts Across a Writing Program

by Jeremy Cushman & Shannon Kelly


Chapter 3: A Pedagogy of Listening: Composing with/in Media Texts

by Milena Droumeva & David Murphy

Engagement with sound included both listening activities, such as sound walks, sound maps, various ear Various sound walks, listening activities, various ear cleaning exercises that come from Armory Safer’s sound pedagogies as well as written reflections, such as sound journals. And, they have also included audio production assignments that connects that connect modes of communication in media problematics. Those include recording interviews, creating public service announcements, podcast, audio-based narratives, and sounds keep composition.

Chapter 4: Sounding the Stories of Isla Vista: Archives, Microhistory, and Multimedia Storytelling

by Patricia Fancher & Josh Mehler

In this chapter, we provide a historical overview of the concepts that underlie our listening-oriented audio-based curriculum and share a series of practical examples of soundwriting assignments that bridge soundscape composition work and media production with communication studies. We contextualize these practices in John Dewey's experiential educational philosophy as well as a pedagogy of listening (Hua, 2012; Schafer, 1977/1994; Westerkamp, 2015), set within larger new media culture ecologies (Burn, 2009; Ito et al., 2010; Jenkins, 2006). Particularly, we discuss how we conceptualize the role of applied projects in interdisciplinary media studies programs—through allowing students to embody real-world professional roles such as those of a "producer," "media storyteller," "radio host," "composer," and so forth. Our courses incorporate a range of listening exercises to familiarize students with a variety of formats and possibilities in using sound production and soundwriting as a communicative medium alongside traditional writing work. We address the use of different recording tools, approaches to instruction in field recording, mixing, production quality, and interviewing techniques. In addition, we share several concrete examples of audio assignments and discuss successes and challenges in implementing and teaching through listening and audio production.

Chapter 5: Soundwriting and Resistance: Toward a Pedagogy for Liberation

by Michael Burns, Timothy R. Dougherty, Ben Kuebrich, & Yanira Rodríguez


Chapter 6: Sleight of Ear: Voice, Voices, and Ethics of Voicing

by Bump Halbritter & Julie Lindquist


Chapter 7: "English via the Airwaves": Recovering 1930s Radio Pedagogies

by Jason Palmeri & Ben McCorkle

While digital audio composing is often positioned as "experimental" or "new" within the field of composition (Comstock & Hocks, 2006; Dangler, McCorkle & Barrow, 2007; Jones, 2010; Selfe, 2009), our contemporary digital audio moment is not the first time that English teachers have become enraptured with new audio technologies. In this scholarly audio essay, we turn our ears back to the last great heyday of sonic writing in the discipline of English: the "golden age" of radio in the 1930s. Drawing primarily from a corpus of texts published in English Journal, we detail what today's compositionists can learn from recovering 1930s English teachers' experiments with radio production.

An interaction between Ben and Jason

Jason: In the 1930s, we had a moment in the field in which audio writing blossomed… and then that moment… it faded. You know, if we actually look back at how English teachers responded to radio in the 1930s, we can find some pretty cool insights about audio writing pedagogy. I mean, everything we need to know about digital audio, we can learn from 1930s English teachers.

Jason: For 1930s English teachers, the proliferation of radio was a humongous cultural shift—HUMONGOUS!


Jason: Anywaaay, so radio was huge for English teachers, not just because it was pervasive, but also because it was powerful. In a 1939 article, Bernice Orndorff explains this power. 
We are becoming more and more conscious that radio is a powerful agent of propaganda, more effective even than the printed word; and it is the obligation of teachers to use this instrument for education in the right direction by teaching pupils to distil the good, the beautiful, the true from the array offered them. (p. 621)

Jason: You know, I usually introduce an audio documentary assignment by having students listen to NPR podcasts that I think are more aesthetically pleasing and more robustly fact-checked than the awful propaganda of right wing talk radio. So… in my own way, I'm still using audio to push my own version of the "good, the beautiful" and—dare I say it—"the true."

Chapter 8: Composing the Artist–Medium

by Trisha N. Campbell
Composing the Artist--Medium
        Introduction
        Background
        Performance
       Assignments
       Example (reflections)
       Discussion Stories

       

Chapter 9: Writing Dirt, Teaching Noise

by Steven R. Hammer

Noise???

Definitions of noise exist within and between many institutions and disciplines. There are legal definitions of noise, medical definitions of noise, mathematical definitions of noise.

A common definition of noise is some variation on noise as a phenomenon that creates displeasure, or noise simply as an "unwanted or undesired sound" (Kerse, 1975; Taylor, 1970). In other words, noise may simply be a subjectively negative reaction to sonic stimuli.

First: Noise requires work.

Rhetorical noise is an event–agent that demands increased expenditures of energy from audiences in a given communicative situation.




Noise makes us work harder.


Second, Noise is Always (Al)Ready.


Noise is an essential feature of all nodes and paths within a communicative system.



Third, Noise is Relational.

Noise exists only as deployed in the world among other events–agents. If its relations change, so too may a sound's existence as noise.

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