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! (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 thirty- or sixty-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” (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 an
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
three-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 students’ audio collages 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
argued 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 of this as an
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, Virginia 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.
published by the university of
michigan press as part of the sweetland
digital rhetoric collaborative book series.