Sounding, Listening, Remixing Pedagogy

Ben Harley

[StarMob “Mooncaves”]

In spring of 2020, I was teaching one section of English 101, two sections of English 201, and one section of English 490. That’s four classes, three preps, and about eighty students moving from face-to-face to remote instruction.

Luckily, I had some experience with teaching online, and I decided immediately to go asynchronous with all of my courses. I chose to post really short weekly audio lectures, with transcripts, for all of my classes because that format takes little bandwidth to download, and the student can listen to it while they are doing other things—though, I found out later that a lot of my students liked to read and listen to the lecture at the same time.

I also converted all of my one-on-one conferences to individual Zoom meetings, which was exhausting for me but great for the students. I made a bunch of cuts to content in order to give students more time to complete major assignments. I also tried to make myself pretty much always available to students via email or Zoom—I really only didn’t respond to student messages during my morning yoga, my afternoon walk with the dog, dinner, sleep, and Saturday afternoons with my partner.

I also spent a lot of time on academic Twitter, so I was inundated with reminders that students didn’t sign up for remote learning and were nervous about school work, scared about the virus, experiencing mental health issues, and dealing with an increase in extra-curricular obligations such as work and family stuff. I was also constantly reminded to be patient, kind, and generous with my students—and that messaging really helped.

Of all the classes I was transitioning that semester, English 490 is probably the most interesting. The class is a capstone, so it is predominantly English majors who are about to graduate and English education majors who are about to pivot from English studies to education courses. While that sounds pretty standard, what it means to be an English major at Northern can vary; some students are into literature, others  are into rhetoric, others professional writing, creative writing, journalism, media studies, or education—it’s a mix.

And because there are so many types of students in the class, I had designed this capstone to be fairly “choose your own adventure.” We would all be reading the same four books, doing weekly sonic reflections, and writing end of unit audio essays, but all of the prompts were really open-ended and there were several options for final projects including a seminar paper, a sonic essay, a podcast, and a sonic memoir. I even allowed students to pitch me their own idea for a final project if they wanted, and several students took me up on that.

I also tried to facilitate a lot of sharing, discussion, and critique in the class. Students submitted all their assignments to Slack so that everyone else in the class could listen to and/or read everyone else’s work. We actually devoted a week at the end of each unit to listening to and discussing each other’s end of unit essays. When we moved online, we did something similar via Slack, students posted their work and other students responded to it. This ended up working out well—there were some genuine conversations on there.

The biggest hurtle with moving the class online was helping students with the readings. Students didn’t come to the course with a lot of experience reading scholarly work, especially in composition and rhetoric, which meant I spent a lot of time reverse outlining arguments, giving background, and helping students understand what they were reading. When we went online this explanatory work became even more important because several students had to return their books to either the bookstore or the library before they left campus. 

Now, this all meant that I had to spend a lot of time in my weekly audio lectures explaining the reading: Adam Banks’s book Digital Griots. And the book is great, but my readings of it became fairly longwinded—keep in mind that I usually try to keep an audio lecture to about five minutes, which just isn’t possible with such a rich text.

So, to compensate for the length, I ended up breaking each weekly lecture into sections with musical interludes between them. This worked out well. Banks references a lot of music in Digital Griots, so I was able to share that with my students, who told me later that they really appreciated the audio essays—especially the media I imported into them.

Strangely, I also started to really enjoy the lectures. I got excited about the writing, the performance, and the production. I became ridiculous enough that I was actually sending lectures to friends of mine just so they could check them out.

The problem was, however, that writing, recording, and producing audio lectures is a lot of time-consuming work. First, I would read the week’s selections and take notes. Then, I would type out the entire script, record the audio, edit the audio, download the incidental music, insert the music, checked the levels, export the file as an mp3, rewrite the script to match what I actually said, and then post the audio and the transcript to our learning management system. I ended up with a great product, and my students seemed to benefit from it, but damn if it wasn’t a lot of work. And I’m not sure I can actually advise anyone to do this.

Regardless, if you are interested in what these lectures ended up sounding like, I am linking to them at the bottom of the transcript. I am also including a link to the full class syllabus with the COVID-19 edits. So, please feel free to use any of this material if you wish, and if you want to talk about any of it with me, you can email me at benjamin.harley@northern.edu.

Alright, thanks for listening!

[StarMob “Mooncaves”]

Link to Syllabus

Link to Lecture 1 Audio
Link to Lecture 1 Transcript

Link to Lecture 2 Audio
Link to Lecture 2 Transcript

Link to Lecture 3 Audio
Link to Lecture 3 Transcript