Critical Listening for Social Change: The Possibility of Playback in the English Language

In the last two decades, there has been an expansion of the literacies and texts, including sound, that are part of our lives. Although sound proliferates the lives of young people, little attention has been given to understanding the possibilities of sonic education and the capacity of listening as a space for literacy activism as part of students’ intellectual work in language arts education. With the recognition that more teachers are embracing critical literacy frameworks and incorporating sound, this article pays attention to the affordances of sound for teaching and learning, particularly for generating social change and supporting civic imagination. Drawing on data from young people’s sound-based compositional processes in two different public schools, this article offers listening as critical practice. Within our analysis, we found two elements that characterized listening as a critical practice: (1) listening to participate and (2) becoming audience to one’s own voices and own knowledge. Both elements foreground listening in an effort to understand what listening might mean when composing with sound. Within the context of a sonic pedagogy, this inquiry illustrates the power of listening to our own voices and the potential of becoming audience/listener/spectator to our own individual and collective knowledge.