Listening to Audio Pedagogies
Pedagogical Inspirations.
Whether it’s producing radio plays in the 1930s, listening to and
analyzing song lyrics in the 1970s, or creating podcasts in the early
2000s, taking a look back at the history of sound-based pedagogies in
the English classroom can be a fruitful way of reimagining similar
pedagogies in our contemporary moment. Here is a handful of assignment
ideas for working with audio production and reception, inspired by
voices from the past.
- The Mockvertisement. In 1939, Mildred K. Carson
bemoaned the sorry state of radio advertising, but she saw value in
the challenges posed by creating short-form sales pitches solely with
audio:
We accept, with indigestion, most of the advertising that
comes over the air. But suppose each of us was responsible for
writing a selling talk in twenty words for the Chewy Chewing Gum
Company which would reimburse said company with sales enough to keep
their $125,000 advertising money on the air. Try it sometime on your
Saturday afternoon off! (pp. 479–480)
Take Carson up on her challenge (well, maybe not on a Saturday—use
your regularly scheduled class time) and have your students produce
audio "mockvertisements." These strictly timed 30- or 60-second audio
commercials can be based on ridiculous premises that you or the
students come up with, such as a political spot for a goose running
for city council, a commercial for a funeral home done in the style of
a monster truck rally announcer, or a promo for an upcoming fall
sitcom called "Babies With Rabies." Students not only have to devise
the rhetorical strategies for selling their premise, they also have to
script, perform, and edit it using software such as GarageBand or
Audacity.
- You've Come a Long(-ish) Way, Baby. Given the
distance of several decades, the sexist and ableist assumptions that
surface in some of the articles seem quite jarring to contemporary
readers. While we've made progress in terms of this way of thinking,
implicit and explicit biases concerning whose voices are valued, and
in what contexts, still persist. We suggest holding a class discussion
about the politics of gender in audio media to help students become
mindful of such issues in their own production practices. You could
jumpstart this discussion by reading some recent feminist critiques of
how pejorative accusations of "vocal fry" are used to silence young
women (Higdon, 2016; Marcotte, 2015). You might follow up this
discussion with an activity asking students to listen to certain types
of audio content, taking notes about which voices tend to be
privileged and excluded in these programs. This activity could be
followed up with a discussion about how sexist, ableist, racist, and
classist structures influence audio production and reception. (For a
great elaboration of intersectional feminist approaches to audio
writing pedagogy, see Jean Bessette's 2016 "Audio, Archives, and the
Affordance of Listening in a Pedagogy of 'Difference.")
- Don't Touch the Technology. In her article "This is
Station DHS…," Mildred Campbell (1937) described a no-tech approach to
creating radio dramas that essentially relied on a bit of imagination
on the part of the audience and performers alike (the students made
fake microphones and other implements from common household objects).
Today, we might similarly embrace live, embodied performance as a
viable mode of audio composing. You might ask your students to create
live performances of an audio assignment as a kind of rough draft or
pre-writing exercise, complete with background music and sound effects
(using instruments and objects, or even just mimicking them with their
own voices). As an inventional activity, this approach allows students
to focus on nontechnical aspects of the assignment (organization,
delivery, production style, etc.) without getting mired down early on
in the technical aspects of the project.
- Listen Up and Learn. As Max Herzberg (1935) wrote,
"Radio, like the motion-picture theater, provides models for thinking
and feeling; it determines life-attitudes, ambitions, intonations of
the voice" (p. 546). Rather than prescribe those models to your
students from up on high, have them actively investigate what makes
for effective, engaging audio production, be that in terms of vocal
delivery, sound editing, stylistic elements in scripting, and so on.
Have students create their own audio-based listening journals as a
inventional activity, where they gather together clips from various
audio productions that they deem either good or bad examples of a
particular element. They should then assemble these clips into a
3-minute collage with accompanying annotations. (Using Soundcloud, for
instance, students can select segments of the waveform and append an
annotation in alphabetic text; alternatively, they might simply follow
up clips with their own audio commentary in a single audio file.)
Follow up this activity by playing them in class and discussing the
various examples; this follow-up discussion could be used to develop
criteria for a rubric used to evaluate a more formal production
assignment later in the term.
- This [Your Town Here] Life. Inspired by the oral
history legacy of Studs Terkel, Alice Hibbard (1976) was a great
champion of having students take tape recorders out into their larger
community as a way to connect with, and document, the world around
them through the lived experiences of friends, neighbors, relatives,
and other residents. In “Tape Recorders in the Classroom,” she even
argues that such assignments strengthen traditional writing as well,
as students have to take on the challenges of developing interview
questions, transcribing, or editing footage into finished productions.
We can promote that same type of mindset by providing collaborative
opportunities in our own audio production assignments. For example,
have students work in small teams to produce a multi-segment podcast
highlighting various human-interest angles in your community. Ask that
each segment involve at least one interview subject, refer to local
news coverage, and include some call to action. Such an assignment
expects students to conduct both field research and secondary
research, it allows them to work on scripting and audio editing, and
it encourages them to find out more about issues affecting their local
community.
- Talk Radio Critic. In his 1998 article
“Radio: The Intimate Medium,” Lou Orfanella argues that the legacy
medium, which he feels gets overlooked for the snazzier,
visually-oriented media of television, film, and computer, promotes
greater imaginative work for producers and listeners alike. Orfanella
lists several interesting assignment descriptions, among them this
rhetorical analysis of a talk radio program:
2. Talk Radio. The assignment is to listen to an hour of a
radio talk show (recording will help) and study the objectivity of
the host, guests, and callers. Use this to discuss credibility,
political slant, and hidden agendas. Follow up activity: discuss and
debate censorship, free speech, and the First Amendment. (54)
In addition to this solid foundation of an assignment, we might
suggest augmenting it by asking students to produce their analyses as
audio response pieces, utilizing recorded excerpts of the original
talk show as evidence illustrating their points (think: audio version
of The Daily Show, for example). In addition to crafting an analysis,
students should be encouraged as well to consider what production
touches they should incorporate (e.g., theme music, sound effects,
additional soundbytes) in order to end up with a polished and engaging
product suitable for an audience.
- Talking Revision. In 1968, Virgina FitzPatrick
found that tape recording audio comments on papers could be a great
way to spur students to pursue deep revision, because the process of
listening to more global comments in an audio medium helped students
gain some distance from their attachment to the words on the page (and
because Fitzpatrick focused her audio comments on more global
concerns). Today’s teachers might use their internal laptop microphone
and free software like Audacity to record their comments and then
share the resulting MP3 files via their course management system or
via a shared google folder. Teachers could expand Fitzpatrick’s
approach by having students also compose a reflective audio memo about
their revisions using similar free tools. Importantly, however, we
should remember that some students will find audio comments more
accessible and helpful than others. Inspired by critical, flexible
approaches to universal design in writing pedagogy (Dolmage, 2017;
Womack, 2017), we recommend that teachers ultimately work to give all
students choices about what kinds of feedback (spoken, written,
multimedia) they find most accessible and useful.
- Blasts From The Past. In 1974, Bernard Hollister’s
“Tune in Yesterday” advocates looking back to the radio programs,
commercials, and music of the past as a way of better understanding
key concepts including genre, themes, medium-specific elements, and
historical context. In a similar vein, you might consider having
students work with outdated audio recording technologies such as early
digital recording devices and audio editing software, cassette or
reel-to-reel recorders, or even earlier devices (assuming
availability, of course). Students could be asked to do simple, short
recording tasks with a variety of these technologies, with an ultimate
goal of thinking about and discussing how the various affordances and
constraints affect the kinds of recordings typically made with each
device.
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