“Oh boy, I ain’t playin’ no games!”: making sense with youth in the aural imaginary

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to explore how sounds and attunements to particular organizations of sound collide across an English language community learning space. The activities in the paper come from a six-week summer initiative that connected middle school youth with community artists for writing songs and rap lyrics, making beats and hip-hop DJing. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws from the interdisciplinary field of sound studies and, specifically, the concept of aural imaginary to explore the collisions alive and in-motion across the learning space. The paper uses qualitative and ethnographic approaches to explore the research questions. Findings The findings focus on how youth hear certain sounds and organizations of sound in music as “old” and “new,” and how these shifting listening entangle talk, claims and interactions in the learning space. The findings also trace the ways that youth use sound as an active, aural resource to make competing distinctions between rapping, singing and talking. Originality/value This paper reasserts the role of sound in multiliteracies, hip-hop and English education work, keying into the ways it collides with other aspect of the learning space. The paper raises questions about what educators might attune themselves to by considering English education as already taking place in a youth aural imaginary.

Sonic play: on the B-side of literacy and songwriting

“…In these approaches, scholars often take up sonic and aural phenomena like resonance, vibration and reverberation as heuristics for making sense of entangled literacy phenomena in place-based settings (Petchauer, 2021; Brownell et al , 2018; Gershon, 2018; Gallagher et al , 2017). Furthermore, embodiment, emergence and multimodality are often prioritized in these accounts, particularly for the ways they work throughout affective and more-than-human processes of writing, composing and sense-making (Petchauer, 2020; Dernikos et al , 2023; Brownell and Wargo, 2017; Doerr-Stevens and Buckley-Marudas, 2019; Ceraso, 2018; Gallagher et al , 2017; Hackett and Somerville, 2017; Wargo, 2017; Wargo and Clayton, 2018).…”

“…It is a backdrop, or backbeat, upon which the "main work" of writing and performance happens. Through the text-centrism that often accompanies multiliteracies (see Leander and Boldt, 2013), these approaches privilege the spoken and written wordand their semantic meaningsover the sounds that circulate around them, which are subject to just as sophisticated composings, interpretations, ecologies and entanglements (Petchauer, 2020;Ceraso, 2018;Gershon, 2018;Stoever, 2016).…”

Bus riding leitmotifs: making multimodal meaning with elementary youth on a public school bus

“…The role of sound provides powerful insights into qualitative inquiry in educational context (Ceraso, 2014;Gershon, 2017). Several contemporary studies of how students compose and learn with and through sound have broadened the sonic spectrum for multimodal meaning-making (Doerr-Stevens and Buckley-Marudas, 2019;Gershon, 2017;Petchauer, 2020;Wargo, 2018). By expanding the existing literature exploring sound and literacy practices, this study focuses less on how students compose and record sound in learning environments.…”

“…Rather, we explore how sonic sensemaking shapes student perspectives and identitites, buidling on Kheshti's (2011) description of an "aural imaginary" that constructs an imagined identity of a group or an individual as "elicited in sound (p. 724). Exploring hip-hop and classroom learning practices, Petchauer (2020) demonstrates how this aural imaginary can reconfigure learning environments and the act of listening, illustrating in his study that "sounds and youth attunements to sounds entangle the interactions in motion across this English education learning space" (n.p.). It is this entanglement of sound, youth and motion within a particular environment that is at the heart of how we consider youth adherence and resistance to an adult "aural imaginary" on the school bus.…”