Sonic Literacies for Social Action: Composing Sounds of “Struggle”

In today’s digital era, there has been an expansion of literacies and texts that are part of adolescents’ lives. Sound is playing an increasingly significant role in adolescents’ lives. Although sound proliferates their lives, little attention has been given to understanding the possibilities of sonic education or the potential of sound as a space for language and literacy activism in secondary schools. How are adolescents thinking about the ways in which sounds—those they create and those they experience—are shaped by and shape certain contexts? What social change might sonic expressions initiate? This inquiry aims to deepen understandings of what happens when adolescents compose with sound and the capacity for sound to create social change. This inquiry examines 11th graders as they composed and produced a music album as part of their work in school, focusing on the ways in which pedagogies that embrace sound might promote social action.