Bringing aural editing into my composition classrooms has become a recent interest of mine by way of thinking backward from my larger dream of establishing a podcast about student writing. I had envisioned students reading from their papers and being interviewed about their habits and hang-ups, interspersed with thoughtful commentary from the teacher’s perspective. In short order, I realized that I would want a pool of material available from which to construct a podcast and, in that case, I might do well to have students privately recording their work in a restricted classroom environment first. Then, with the ability to choose between the best candidates for inclusion, I could pursue IRB approval and student contacts and sound engineering.
Refusing to be deterred by the growing scope of the project, I thought about how I’d need to redesign assignments and set up the recording feature in our online learning management system, Canvas. These recordings would effectively be my auditions for podcast consideration.
At this point, while attending a workshop in preparation for the project, I was introduced to Dr. Megan-Brette Hamilton, then recently hired as assistant professor in Auburn University Department of Communication Disorders. We were specifically introduced to one another by Dr. Diane Boyd, director of Auburn’s Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, who knew we were both investigating the idea of bringing podcasting into the classroom.
Since then, Dr. Hamilton and I have been researching, conferring, and planning this approach as an interdisciplinary project that will eventually culminate in a podcast thematically focused on the connections between language and identity from both the oral and written perspectives. We succeeded last December in getting a grant from the Biggio Center to purchase microphones for the students to use in recording themselves and we hope to have our classes for fall prepared to introduce aural elements to our class design, which reflectively will involve students listening to and commenting on their own recorded voices.
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