Reading Response # 9: Selfe "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning Aurality and Multimodal

In Cynthia Selfe's article on aurality, she argues that throughout recent history, the last two centuries, aurality has been regarded as a less powerful tool for composition. While she does not intend to argue that we should pay attention to aurality over the written text, her work does outline why we should see the form as a powerful tool, especially given its history in communicating prior to written ext. Additionally she shows how prioritizing the written text and alphabetic literacy, has allowed us to create power structure in society, belittling other forms of intelligence. She states "As a factually, we we limit our understanding of composing and our teaching of composition to a single modality, when we focus on print alone as the communicative venue for our assignments and for student responses' to those assignment, we ensure that instruction is less accessible to wide rand of learners, and we constraints students' ability to succeed by offering them an unnecessarily narrow choice of semiotic and rhetorical resources" ( 644).

Selfe's point here speaks to what I witnessed a few years ago when I brought podcasts into my sixth grade class. At that point in the year, my class appeared very divided in work ethic; about half the class did their homework on a regular bases and the other class rarely completed an assignment unless I called home for it. Before asking them to create their own podcasts, I played them a segment of This American Life Story episode on middle school. While I had fallen in love with podcast as an adult, I figured most of my students were not as familiar with this mode of storytelling. Immediately when I started the podcasts, the class was engaged. They were listening laughing, and when our class ended they begged for me to play more. I told them I would post the clip on their homework page, and those who were interested could listen to the rest of the episode at home. I figured few if any would. But to my surprise, the next day it was the group of students who consistently ignored homework assignments who were chatting about the episode. In there conversation, they were even acknowledging some of the abstract themes drawn out towards the end of the program. Additionally, it was these students who were experts when it came time to making on our podcasts, and they were eager to help their peers who were often labeled "the good students" out in his process.This examples speaks to Selfe's argument: "By broadening the choice of composing modalities, we expand the field of play for students with different learning styles and differing ways of reflecting on the world; we provide the opportunity for them to study, think critically about, and work with new communicative modes ( 644).