Toward a Pedagogy of Materially Engaged Listening
Abstract: As writing teachers increasingly engage students with audio media, it has become crucial to coach listening explicitly in the classroom, activities that students may otherwise approach passively. In this article I suggest that a rhetorical approach applicable to (or derived from) print texts is not enough to help students listen actively, and offer instead a materially engaged practice of listening that helps students to understand their interactions with compositions on a material level that involves bodily activity. My proposed pedagogy moves students toward a reflective awareness of their practices, encourages purposeful listening, and acknowledges the role that attention plays in listening. Such a pedagogy can help students to engage with audio compositions on their own terms, encourage them to understand listening as a dynamic practice with critical heft worthy of their time and attention, and open insights into affordances of sound that are obscured by print-centric approaches.
Recently I taught an elective digital composing course at my university, the first course I had taught that was entirely focused around digital literacies. In addition to creating video, audio, and web-based compositions, I asked students in the course to interact with—or to read, listen to, view—course materials that ran the gamut from traditional print genres (book chapters, scholarly articles) to radio podcasts, video clips, and experimental new media webtexts. As I open all my courses with explicit conversations on rhetorical reading strategies and thought a rhetorical frame would be useful for students approaching nonprint modes, in the first week of class we discussed a go-to reading of mine, Karen Rosenberg’s chapter “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources,” from the open-access textbook Writing Spaces. Rosenberg frames rhetorical reading as “a set of practices designed to help us understand how texts work and to engage more deeply and fully in a conversation that extends beyond the boundaries of any particular reading” (212), and the conversations her chapter inspires are largely organized around strategies for first recognizing the rhetorical situation—identifying the intended audience, discovering the main argument, observing how the composer situates herself within a larger conversation, and so on—and then adjusting reading practices accordingly. Rosenberg grounds these rhetorical moves in suggested practices like reading the abstract, paying attention to section headings, or using the introduction to discern the structure and direction of the text.
Because Rosenberg (like many other scholars and textbook editors) frames reading as a rhetorical practice, my rationale for assigning her article in a class where only half of our “readings” would be made up of traditional print texts was my thinking, my insistence, that these ideas could travel. I thought that over the ensuing weeks my students would see connections between purposeful, rhetorically aware interactions with scholarly print texts and purposeful, rhetorically aware interactions with audio media, like podcasts from NPR.{1} But this transfer did not happen: it seemed that our rhetorical—and on reflection, medium-specific—conversations around reading in the first week of the semester were not enough to help students to critically and productively engage with audio media. For despite our discussions on active, rhetorical reading strategies, I found that students in my course had trouble making it through the length of a podcast and missed crucial details that betrayed they hadn’t paid close attention while listening. In fact, in talking with them I discovered that they were browsing the internet, even trying to read other texts, while listening to class assignments and so were tuning out what they were listening to.{2}
I discovered that semester that for my students to be successful listeners, my instruction had to go beyond rhetorical interactions with a composition; it was also necessary to help students consider the very nature of the medium as well as what listening might require of them in terms of bodily activity. And so while I agree with the prevailing wisdom that writing instructors should introduce to students the rhetorical layers of engaging with compositions like recognizing how composers reach their intended audiences or discovering a composer’s main intervention in a conversation, I argue that there is not enough in a rhetorical approach applicable to (or derived from) print texts alone to help students shift their activities and disrupt their passivity. Students also need to understand how listening is intimately connected to the materiality of audio media and therefore demands bodily interactions related to but fundamentally different from reading. In a way, my argument echoes a key concern that Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes express in their book On Multimodality. We have not yet sufficiently embraced multimodality on its own terms, they write, and instead limit multimedia with print-centric perspectives:
our embrace of new and multimedia for composing often ignores the unique rhetorical capabilities of different media ... [and] we often elide such considerations—consciously or not—in order to colonize the production of multimedia texts with more print-driven compositional aims, biases, and predispositions. In the process, we hamper our students' appreciation of and ability to manipulate multimedia texts. (19){3}
To impose text-centric frames onto multimodal work, as I did by coaching listening through a reading model, is to ignore the material differences, affordances, and constraints of nonprint media; and students need to understand these differences in order to engage with these compositions productively. Or, to put this all another way: a rhetorical framing influenced by print texts is a start, but unless it is paired with an awareness of the materiality of audio compositions and the bodily activities of listening—like considering one’s listening environment or what to do with one’s body while listening (e.g., walking, cleaning, sitting still)—students may have difficulty developing effective material listening practices. Such material practices are crucial for helping students pay attention to the form and affordances of the mode and for helping them to see listening as an active, dynamic practice with critical heft that is worthy of their time and attention.
Indeed, though listening is a familiar practice for our students, I found that students in my digital composing course had limited experience in parsing audio media in critical, analytic ways—something I was slow to realize in my early efforts to teach audio compositions. While students typically spend twelve years before coming to college learning strategies for approaching a print text (like sitting in a distraction-free space, annotating, or reading in multiple passes with varying speeds), I found that students in my digital composing course had naturalized as passive their engagements with the kinds of audio compositions (like interview clips and podcasts of Radiolab and This American Life, to name a few) that seem to appear more and more in college writing classrooms, whether or not they are courses explicitly centered on digital and/or multimodal forms of composing. For example, the first-year composition curriculum at my institution asks students to recast their research papers into a new, often multimodal, form; such an assignment is benefitted by—perhaps even necessitates—modeling through examples. And for instructors like me who are coming to listening without an explicit research background in sonic rhetorics or with limited experience teaching nonprint texts in writing classrooms, it is crucial that we continue to develop pedagogical frames for teaching listening.
To that end, I argue in this article for supporting student engagement with audio compositions through a pedagogy of materially engaged listening. This pedagogy views listening as a materially sensitive practice that involves bodies and responds to material objects. Its aims are to move students toward awareness of (and careful reflections on) their listening habits; to encourage students to listen with purpose; to acknowledge the role that attention plays in engaging with audio media; and to consider the affordances of sound. By building such a pedagogy, we can help students to engage with audio compositions on their own terms, which may not only help shift their bodily activity when listening in more effective directions but also open possible insights into affordances of sound that are obscured by print-centric approaches.
After exploring current scholarship in sonic rhetorics and listening pedagogies, I will establish that the material differences between audio and print texts call for medium-specific instruction in listening. Then I look to my digital composing class and present both my recollections of an in-class discussion about listening and also student reflections on their listening practices, which they wrote following that same discussion. Finally, I outline some suggestions for classroom practice that point students toward material engagement with audio compositions.
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