This is where we’ll discuss Cynthia L. Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.”
I assigned this essay for a couple of reasons. First, it is indeed about sound– “aurality” as Selfe puts it– and its history in writing studies. Second, there are a TON of resources here. And third, this essay has been the subject of some recent academic debate in the journal College Composition and Communication and a “webcast” debate/discussion between Hesse and Selfe.
To me, I think that while this is kind of a long essay, it isn’t a particularly complicated one, and I very much appreciate the history here. A lot of what she’s talking about in terms of 18th and 19th century writing pedagogy in the US is stuff I knew before, but it makes me think that the next time I teach this class, I ought to include some of this information at the beginning of the term. Actual “speaking” and other speech acts gave way, turned into an idea of a sense of “voice” in writing, and now (in part because of technology, in part because it never really went away), aurality is making a comeback.
I think Selfe is trying to push the envelope here a bit though. As she points out in a couple of places, composition teachers have been wiling to include audio (and the same is true with video and other multimedia) in their classes, as long as there is some kind of “words in a row” writing that comes out of it. We writing-types tend to think that the best way for our students to demonstrate what they’ve learned and how they have thought about stuff is through writing– not to mention that this is something of an expectation of the field. So part of what I think she’s suggesting here is that maybe we need to rethink this a bit, and give students the opportunities to try out some “different compositional modalities.”
Now, as I’ll post about next (probably Wednesday morning), there has been some debate about this….
Incidentally, I will be giving you audio comments on your final projects. This has been something that my graduate students seem to like, but it also seems to be something my undergraduate students have found unnerving, to be honest.
heh I’m first!
Selfe makes lots of great points. The pressing issue of having faculties multimodal work accepted by departments was in the back of my head this entire read.
I think she may be addressing this problem indirectly. But people can’t just walk up and say, “hey dean! read this article”. I guess everyone can contribute like Selfe by allowing their students the opportunity to use other mediums to write aurally.
It seems that the literacy that binds aural and written communication has already been developed. It’s like a second language for students.
I didn’t think Selfe would go into the styles of writing that are closest to our speech but she briefly touched on it. I hoped she would talk a little more about the issues surrounding things like loose rambling styles and there was one other. dimunitive? I have no idea what that is. I am fond of loose rambling styles. Some of the best ideas come out of loose writing.
One last point that enjoyed was her speak of voice. I never thought of “voice” as in writing “voice” as anything but a uniqueness of a person’s thoughts.
But now it seems it is more like the language a writer uses and how they use it to say what they want to say.
The word voice sets a certain bias in writing doesn’t it??????
It’s an excellent argument for multimodal and aural writing in the classroom especially with the acknowledgment of the power relationship with aurality. Everything changed with the printing presses and pencils and the drive to be a statesman. Does anyone think that avoiding aurality in pedagogy kind of shows a class discrimination or a racism of some kind? There was this guy on youtube who used the computer voice to recite poetry.
That’s new, isn’t it?
Renee, I think the practice of recitation (one English departments kind of got away from a lot in the 20th century and poetry slammers of the past decade have revived) is what has always held the written and spoken word together. There are some genres that are explicitly meant to be read out loud, like speeches, and often poems–though not always. These genres can help students see the connection between the two incarnations, because words on paper can have a very different effect from words spoken out loud in the world. Just to give a quick example from my own life: I did an undergraduate thesis in poetry and had to give a reading at the end of the term where I presented my year(s) of work to the public. While reading, I actually became so effected by one of my poems that I choked up and almost began to cry–something that hadn’t happened during the writing or silent reading of the poem ever before. I had to pause for several seconds in the middle of the poem before I could keep reading. Hearing myself speaking those words in front of those people just completely overwhelmed me, so it’s really powerful stuff! Anyway, this is all just meant to say that you bring up a good point with recitation, and while my example is very low-tech, I think technology is definitely upping the aural ante, so to speak. Thanks for bringing it up!
Thanks, Carrie, you’re right. I don’t know why I did not focus on that example.
It’s important to draw that connection between poetry and the development of written/aural literacy.
Poetry can change a person’s life. I think I put mental blocks on things that upset me and I really do not understand why the uni would try to move away from poetry. Maybe they think that because it started as an oral practice, that it had less value. Or maybe inspires people to feel too much.
Anyway,I can relate to your experience with reading poetry. It’s supposed to move you and it sounds like that one did.
Poetry is emotionally potent and charged.
Renee, I could talk for hours (well, in this case pages) about poetry and the university! I’ll spare you all for now, since it’s pretty tangential, but let me just say that I think English depts should model more of their literature courses on composition, new media, and other writing courses. To better understand the nature of writing and the thought processes of writers, students should PRACTICE the forms in addition to studying them. This makes infinite sense to me, but in so many literature courses, students are never encouraged to write creatively or practice the forms they’re studying. Of course, in a course about the modern novel, teachers can’t ask students to write a novel of their own. In a poetry course, though, this is much more feasible, and I think it’s especially appropriate in courses on prosody, where the form is so important. I’m incredibly interested in new media approaches to creative writing, so just for fun, let me share a couple cool digital poetry projects I’ve come across:
My friend Scott Hamm from UM’s Instructional Support Services worked with (omg, so brilliant) poet Thylias Moss to create this Flash application called VectorPoem: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hamms/workshops/vectorpoem/vectorpoem.html Try it out — it’s super neat!
Thylias did an iPhone poetry presentation last month, which I sadly didn’t know about until after the fact, but here’s the link to the event info: http://www.artsonearth.org/email/newsletter3-10/index.html
And bringing the discussion back to writing and aurality, here is an online journal called TextSound which emphasizes the orality/aurality of poetry and includes only audio files (some digitally manipulated): http://textsound.org/ I think some of Christine Hume’s poetry is available in the earlier issues.
Anyway, hope all this wasn’t super tangential. Enjoy!
I could spend all day on the VectorPoem, Carrie. That is amazing!
ArtsonEarth is a good one too! Thanks
Thanks for these Carrie! I’ve been meaning to look more into the flash poetry!
What I like most about Selfe’s piece is the rich history she provides on the gradual separation of voice and writing. This history provides support for reconsidering the role of aurality in composition. However, the examples she provides, all sound essays, set limits on the kind of composing with sound that is suitable in composition. In some ways this piece leaves the impression that only sound in relationship to voice is what is appropriate in the writing classroom. I’m wondering if there’s a place for pure sound composition in a writing context?
I like the way you put it, Brian.
I, like Renee and Brian, though it was interesting to read the history of aurality and voice in the context of composition study. I think, like a lot of things in education, it’s very cyclical. We move from valuing oral speech over written text, to valuing the written word over speech. Now, as lines of communication open up through technical advancements, we begin to rethink aurality and visuality as effective means of demonstrating knowledge and understanding, even though they never really went anywhere.
As Selfe touches on in her article, I think a big part of the resistence is found in the academic tradition, but also our obsession with quick, uniformed, quantitative assessment and on-demand writing, which isn’t always a bad thing, but certainly limits the means by which we can show understanding. Producing a multimodal project that combines visual and aural representation can certainly show a profound depth of understanding, but isn’t easily measured in a standardized format. And, as school superintendants and deans look for ways to quantitatively show results and cut spending, mulitmodality falls by the wayside as teachers are forced to focus more on keeping their jobs than finding ways to think outside the box.
You bring up a ton of good points here, Dave. I think you’re right when you talk about teaching and risk-taking. Selfe is tenured and very well-respected, so it would seem that she is in a safer place to take risks in her teaching than, say, a recently-hired Lecturer I teaching a five/five course load at a less-resourced institution or community college.
I often wonder about how much of this kind of teaching goes on under the radar, you know? Selfe, for example, is really high profile, so the work she does gets noticed. In places where multimodal or non-traditional assignments are not valued as much, I wonder how many teachers are actively subverting the status quo and teaching them anyway. These teachers can’t publish on the work they’re doing, since they’re not technically supposed to be doing it, and they’re not VIPs, so they don’t have as many venues for publishing their ideas anyway. At Eastern, I get the sense that the Power-That-Be are a lot more open and cool with teachers being creative and trying things out. I think we’re a pretty lucky bunch!
Totally Carrie! At EMU the FYWP especially is really open (within limits I guess I have to say) to let GA’s and others try out new things. They really value new and innovative ways of thinking and teaching and there’s a whole group of them that meet once a week or so to talk about how to teach with using comics in the classroom. It’s not quite the technologically advanced stuff we’re dealing with here, but they are open to new things and I think Steve has mentioned in the past that he brings a lot of this stuff in whenever he can as well. If I were to stay at EMU next semester, I would feel a lot more comfortable using some of these practices since I would be a bit more familiar with the curriculum.
This is a really good point. I agree with Angie that EMU’s program is pretty open-minded for instructors to experimenting with/playing with different pedagogical approaches, but when all is said and done, the vast majority of people who teach first year writing aren’t as “empowered” as tenure-track faculty like me. I mean, graduate assistants, part-timers, and lecturers all are under certain pressures– mostly unstated, sometimes not– to do or not do certain things per the directions of the Writing Program Administrator. And if there are too many complaints, particularly for a part-time instructor, well, they might be out of a job.
So innovation/experimentation is one of those things that can be really hard for people teaching first year writing to do because these things can cause mistakes or other unexpected things to happen. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why innovation in things like the teaching of writing is so slow.
Incidentally, when I teach first year writing, I kind of see it as my job to try to do some kind of “out there” things because as a full professor, I know that I won’t lose my job for trying some approach to teaching that doesn’t work out right…
I think a lot of Self’s ideas come back to things we’ve already discussed in this class, like disciplinarity and who is supposed to be teaching what. I hate to bring it up again, but I still think integrated courses might have a huge advantage in the area of teaching sound with writing, as they would in a writing course developing visual literacies.
Just to give some background on where I’m coming from on this…I was taught at home up until my junior year of high school, at which point I began college. During my home education, all subjects were covered in a way that was thoroughly integrated, both in a disciplinary sense and in connection with daily life. Literature was prevalent, and my family read almost everything aloud. In that way and other ways, oral language and written were merged. When I began writing poetry, songs or other things, I heard it all read aloud in my head – just as I had spent years hearing other things read aloud. This isn’t a tribute to any natural abilities to learn on my part but to my parents’ natural teaching abilities.
I think what Self says here is great in that we might be able to offer students the opportunity to make those connections between sound and writing as well. However, I think it would be even better if students were making these connections earlier…like in elementary school.
Andrea you bring up a really good point here. Your family read everything out loud and so it was pretty natural for you, but have you found that it has been nearly impossible to get students to read their papers out loud, even to themselves when they’re alone? I find that they are incredibly resistant to the idea and many have said they don’t read anything out loud. I wonder if there could be a correlation between students who were read aloud to and those who weren’t and their comfort level with aurailty? I don’t know, but it seems like it could make sense…
Andrea! Kudos to your parents. I have always admired parents who felt they could home-school. As a teacher, I think I would have been way too tough on my own kids and not nearly as patient as I am with other people’s kids, so I never tried it.
Back to Selfe-I remember having to memorize some pieces of literature and reciting them, mostly in junior high school-which I absolutely hated, as I was quite shy. However, I now see that the practice gave us the charge of using someone else’s voice as kind of our own. And I do believe that those assignments had value. Selfe never mentions whether or not she believes that rote memorization is/was an effective aural modality, and I wonder what she would say about that.
In my own class, when we read certain pieces of literature, for instance, some of the Native American literature, I ask the students to read it aloud because I think the tone and naked simplicity really affect the students in a way that silent reading cannot.
I, too, appreciated her historical references, especially as to why we have, for the most part, dropped rhetoric from the English Department.
She mentioned that during the ’70′s writing became associated with “deliberate” and “intellectual” and speaking more “haphazard.” I wonder if that is because so much education during that time period WAS actually “haphazard.” It was the ‘feel good era’–make students feel good about themselves and you have succeeded as a teacher.
I love her mention of a PSA. I had just begun to re-organize my last students’ lessons (in my head, at least) and decided to change their last persuasive ‘paper’ to a PSA! I think this series on aural modalities has affected me more than anything else we have read this semester!
I admire in this article how straight-forward Selfe is in stating her opinion and making her case. Granted, before reading this I already agreed with part of her opening statement where she says that the current system makes it so that “collegiate teachers of English composition [...] lose sight of the integrated nature of language arts.” She then continues and says, “… A single-minded focus on print in composition classrooms ignores the importance of aurality and other composing modalities for making meaning and understanding the world.”
I don’t know about my other classmates, but I have connected writing with sound for years now. I was raised with some really excellent English teachers (a miracle, since as a military kid I changed schools almost yearly) that really drummed in the idea that writing on the page is something powerful– something that is visual and sound oriented. That “sound” came from the ability and the importance of reading things aloud. And, since I was a young child, I always have read my compositions allowed constantly while writing them. And, I find that it lends to incorporating my voice better in the writing. It baffles me if others don’t get how this is a part of writing and an ability/power found within writing.
Now we have jumped a little further in the technology area and can go beyond just the human voice to incorporate some of what Selfe discusses in this article– things like music– that will really add to the art of composition. I understand the reluctance some teachers have for stepping out of the bubble, but there are ways around having to 100% change your curriculum. For instance, we were just discussing in 585 how a reflection essay can be built into multi-modal projects that still require a student to put their thoughts on the page and physically write something.
English is an art! We sometimes forget that and get too scholarly, stodgy, and academic on the poor students. Don’t stifle creativity and let the students know that writing is about expression and there is more than one way to get an end product.
One of my biggest worries is that when I implement these things into my own classroom, how do I know I’m using technology in a meaningful way and not just technology for the sake of using technology? Maybe I’m the only one, but I’m not sure how obvious it is if one is using these things just to “pad” the words-in-a-row texts students are already creating, or if they are being used in a meaningful way on their own? I’m not sure that makes sense, but I’m still wondering logistically when and where I can fit all this stuff into a secondary curriculum. I know I want to, but making sure I do it well is important to me.
I really liked her point that, “Even with the renewed emphasis on visual and digital rhetoric, however, we as writing teachers are still very text-centered in our classrooms.” Even though we have been so excited to incorporate technology into the classroom, we’re still favoring texts rather than multi media literacy. How do we move away from this? I think it’s super interesting that she said, “However, we both believe sonic literacy–the ability to identify, define, situate, construct, manipulate, and communicate our personal and cultural soundscapes–should become an integral part of any course aimed at developing students’ skills in writing and digital literacy.” I mean, I’ve been such a huge advocate for visual literacy and digital literacy these last few months, but have paid little to no attention to sound literacy. It makes sense that we need to fuse that into the curriculum as well. Students need to know how to use sound and their own voices as compositional tools. The way we speak represents who we are, what we stand for, and the position we take on any given subject. This article made me see just how much the ELA classroom needs to take into consideration when teaching! There are so many possibilities that I’ve learned over the past year, I wish i made a list of all the “important” things I learned to make sure I use when I go back to having my own classroom.
That is a hard thing to figure out if we are just doing something just to say we are doing or if it really is serving a purpose in the classroom. Sometimes I feel like that is what I do but then other times when i see students have that lightbulb moment i realize it is more than that.
So the idea or thought that kept coming up in my head was the idea of voice when reading this article. How does a piece of paper with words on it have a voice? It really does not, but the voice comes from the person saying what is written on the page. A song has not tune to it when it is just on on the page, it takes a singer to sing the song to give it life, give it a voice to the words. The reason we talk about voice is because we can feel something in the words that are written, sometimes, but that does not mean that it really has a voice like the way that Selfe talks about. Using the multimodal idea and presenting it with the idea that words on a page in a row is not the only way to write. That rhetoric is more than writng, and if we think about it has its roots on the spoken word, speaking out loud what one has to say. So for me this makes perfect sense.