viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot of a drawing by Katie Butler for my E314J class

Last year at about this time, Emily Bloom offered a thoughtful post in which she cautioned against privileging visual literacy at the expense of what she called “auditory literacy,” a crucial component of both analyzing and creating new media productions in the classroom. After assigning a narrated slideshow project this semester, with decidedly mixed aural results: I consider myself schooled.

This semester, I asked my “Literature and Biology” students to create a 4-6 minute narrated slideshow that analyzes a text on the syllabus while immersing viewers “in an act of storytelling.” Before proceeding to dissect the project, I should note that I consider it an overall success. I’m proud of—and grateful for—the hard work and creativity reflected in these projects, as well as the opportunity to compose my own sample slideshow. Embedded, with permission from their creators, are samples of my students' work that use images and sound to great effect—from the original drawing above, which renders Elizabeth Frankenstein as a 1950s housewife to emphasize her subordinate status in the novel, to a video with humorous visuals and a deadpan delivery befitting its subject: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos.

Image Credit: A narrated slideshow by Isaac Gifford for my E314J class

Yet, despite our attention to sound at viz. this semester, I still managed to forget about the importance of oral performance when preparing students for the assignment. Many otherwise promising slideshows faltered because of a rushed (or ponderous) pacing, poor recording quality, or the absence of audio entirely. I’ve since realized that successful image productions should begin with an in-class discussion of how image, sound, and text interact to create a cohesive whole, as well as an analysis of how successful podcasts, like those produced by RadioLab, use aural elements rhetorically. More specifically, students need practice narrating their slideshows before pressing “record”: in restructuring this assignment, I might ask them to read their scripts aloud to peers for feedback on their delivery.

Image Credit: A narrated slideshow Bethany McNeely for my E314J class

So, because they bear repeating, here are Emily’s original reflections on sound in the classroom:

Image Credit: The Guardian

Samuel Beckett's Play (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2000) 

This is my last Viz posting for the year, so I thought I’d be introspective, or perhaps, self-referential.  Specifically, I want to talk about podcasting pedagogy I’ve been experimenting with this semester and how it’s raised interesting
questions in our classroom about the relationship between visual and auditory rhetoric.  The final assignment for our class was a podcast in which students delivered an argument on a contemporary controversy.  It was very strange for all of us to rely so heavily on voice without a piece of paper to mediate the exchange. Early twentieth-century theories of oral delivery such as those by T. Sturge Moore advocated that speakers of poetry should stand behind a curtain so that listeners could listen more attentively and W.B. Yeats suggested that his Abbey Theatre actors should be placed in barrels to train them against using distracting motions.  Not wanting quite so drastic an approach, I at least thought that a focus on the auditory would
push my students to consider their words in action and more carefully focus on simplicity, organization and delivery.  

Image Credit: Screen Shot of Garageband

While I originally intended to outlaw any visuals, I
relented and allowed them to use Garageband’s artwork track.  This decision was inspired in part by the interesting results of the collaboration between UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center and Badgerdog, a local Austin creative writing program for K-12 students.  I loved the way that participants in this program incorporated imagery into their podcasts without losing focus on the attention to language that makes podcasting such an interesting medium.  The results were mixed.  Some students seemed really motivated by the challenge of auditory delivery and blended interesting music, noises and audio clips into their presentation to create variety in their performances.  Others presented simple, elegant spoken arguments with clear delivery.  Then there were less successful uses of the medium: students who read papers that should have remained on paper and others who found oral delivery challenging for a variety of reasons. Those students that chose to incorporate visuals were not uniformly successful.  I asked students for feedback on what they think defines a good podcast and very few mentioned visuals.  They seemed to appreciate the medium as primarily auditory and one best approached through auditory innovation. 

Image Credit: Undergraduate Writing Center

In general, my students were much better trained in visual literacy than, pardon the paradox, auditory literacy.  However, they seemed to appreciate the particular auditory rhetoric involved in podcasts (which of course borrows heavily from old media such as radio) that to varying degrees they attempted to capture in their presentations. I wanted to end on this note because I think that many of our blogs on Viz are about the audio-visual or performative text rather than the exclusively visual and that we might want to further consider how teaching auditory literacy might help students better understand contemporary audio-visual rhetoric.