Rhythmic rituals and emergent listening: Intra-activity, sonic sounds and digital composing with young children

Abstract

(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom’s participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of ‘emergent listening’ in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound studies and more posthuman ways of knowing/being/doing, this article details how the sonic was felt not only as an actor on the scene of young children writing but also as an intra-active agent of what the teacher called ‘making space’ and community. Exploring ‘emergent listening’ through a diffractive entanglement of stories and concepts, this paper focus on two pieces of early writing: a digitally produced audio clip and a ‘body built’ (Ms Lionel’s words) tableau depicting the sensorial process and thinking behind children’s making moments. The findings highlight how particular actions of emergent listening generated new forms of embodied knowledge-in-motion. Encouraging educators to consider the modal affordances of sound and sonic composition, this article expands definitions of young children composing with material realia and explores how, as this article suggests, emergent listening opens up pedagogical spaces where creative energies are generated and mobilized to bring to fruition an ethico-onto-epistemological world view.

Drumming in excess and chaos: Music, literacy and sustainability in early years learning

“…Although playing together, each child experiments as a single entity, seemingly disconnected from the other parts; however, their improvisations are heard to change as other rhythms change, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the different vibrations, rhythms, bodies and parts. Such interdependence is encapsulated by Wargo (2017), who says that 'humans and the more (than) human are both the singular and plural, the oscillation and unfolding of intensities that work through the material <->discursive' (395). In this way, they rely on, and are defined and changed by, every alteration and deviation.…”

Vibrations in Place: Sound and Language in Early Childhood Literacy Practices

“…Recent research in early childhood literacies considers children's playful enactments of sound and movement as examples of embodied literacies (Wohlwend, 2013), or "knowledge-in-motion" (Wargo, 2017, p. 393). Whilst Wohlwend draws attention to multiple communicative modes as texts (albeit action texts, played not written), Wargo (2017) experiments instead with reading "sounds-as-sounds" (p. 406). More recently, Wohlwend et al (2017) discuss play and design as literacies that are both sense-making and sensory, describing 'sense' not only in relation to social meaning-making and cultural histories, but as suggestive of bodily response to histories with the material environment; "the sense our bodies make of experienced materiality" (p. 446).…”

Visualizing lived experience: mapping the soundscape of an after-school Minecraft club

“…However, here it is not the final product of analysis or an output of a 'sonic ethnography' (Gershon's (2013b). Whilst others (Dean, 2016;Wargo, 2017) have used similar recordings as the basis for a written commentary, next I will explain how this combined sonic / visual approach involves an additional, intermediate stage of analysis, involving drawing.…”