Listening to Audio Pedagogies
Mid-Century Audio Recording Pedagogies
While interest in critically analyzing radio continued strong throughout the 1940s in English Journal, interest in radio production pedagogies largely dropped off after the 1930s. When we consider audio media more broadly, however, we can track a micro-trend of pedagogical uses of audio recording equipment (disc, cylinder, and tape-based) in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In a few cases, English teachers imagined audio recording equipment as a tool students could use to produce their own mock radio programs (Ginsberg 1940; Bernstein 1949)—but these references to radio in the audio recording equipment articles were relatively brief and sparse. In many ways, it appears that English teachers saw audio recording devices as a medium distinct from radio—looking to the audio recording practices of office professionals (rather than radio broadcasters) for inspiration. As we peruse the relatively small corpus of audio recording articles from 1940–1968 (only twelve in total), we can see two primary pedagogical uses emerging: “correcting” student speeches and grading student writing. Although a look back at the audio recorder in mid-century English classrooms uncovers a few innovative practices on which we might build, the stories we tell here function primarily as cautionary tales about how new media can be used in normative and problematic ways.
Audio Recording as Speech “Correction” Tool
In contrast to the radio production articles of the 1930s that often emphasized radio as a tool for promoting collaborative creative writing for audiences beyond the teacher, the audio recorder articles of the 1940s and early 1950s positioned the audio recorder as a tool for assessing and correcting students’ everyday speaking or “social conversation” (Adams 1940). The audio recorder was an attractive tool for this purpose because it could turn extemporaneous speech into a fixed, scrutable object for correction, and it also allowed teachers and administrators to assess students’ progress in oral communication over time (Goldberg 1952) by comparing earlier and later recordings.
In some of the earliest writings on audio recorder pedagogy, the
normative force of speech “correction” was muted somewhat by an emphasis
on how audio recordings help students self-assess their own
vocal delivery. For example, a 1940 article by Walter Ginsberg argued
that the goal of speech recording was, first and foremost, to allow
the pupil to hear his own voice as it sounds to others [. . .] The motivating values of an awakened voice consciousness and the opportunities for self-analysis are made possible by the phonograph record of the voice. For the first time the pupil can judge for himself these aspects of his speech: rate, force, quality, pitch, enunciation, pronunciation, inflection patterns, and the more general personality attributes reflected in the way one speaks. Not only can he judge his voice as it sounds at a certain time; through a series of recordings, systematically made at intervals, he can measure his speech progress throughout the school years. (Ginsberg 1940, 230–231)
In this account, we appreciate how the audio recorder (a phonograph in this case) was positioned not as a tool for correcting supposed “flaws” in spoken grammar, but rather as a tool for calling students’ reflective attention to elements of rhetorical delivery that were unique to the spoken word. It’s also significant that Ginsberg’s students had some agency in determining how and in what ways they wanted to improve their spoken delivery over time. Ginsberg’s discussion of vocal recording as a tool of reflective assessment resonates in some ways with our own experiences teaching and composing with audio. In making audio essays, we have likewise found that recording, listening to, and then re-recording our own voices has been a crucial reflective activity to help us deliver our scripts in ways that will be both clear and (we hope) effective for our audience and purpose.
As Ginsberg’s argument unfolded, however, we noted how his students’ reflective self-assessment of their own vocal delivery often problematically occurred in relation to normative, patriarchal standards. For example, Ginsberg quoted a fellow audio pedagogy expert who recounted the process of reflecting on one’s own recorded speech over time in strikingly gendered terms: “secondary school students, particularly boys, are impressed with the ‘growing up’ processes of their voices: increase in resonance, strength, and maturing of pitch” (Andrews 1940, quoted in Ginsberg 1940, 231). In this way, Ginsberg suggested that the ideal voice against which students must judge themselves was the deep masculine voice prized on the radio and in the office. Readers were left wondering what students with feminine voices were to learn from the process of speech recording except that their voices were “immature” and not valued.
In addition to using the audio recorder to reinforce the patriarchal privileging of deep masculine voices, 1940s English teachers also employed audio recorders to reinforce additional patriarchal standards of gendered behavior. In a 1948 article about students and teachers having “fun with a tape recorder,” Walter Northcott outlined the value of using the tape recorder to have students write and record skits in which they modeled rhetorically appropriate approaches to everyday conversational interactions, “such as giving orders, asking questions, making complaints, and refusing to do something” (371). Northcott then shared an example of a script in which a student demonstrated the right and wrong way for a woman to refuse to go on a date:
My name is Shirley, and I’m going to show you the right way and the wrong to refuse a date.[The wrong way] TOM: Sue, are you going to be busy tonight? If not, would you like to go to a show?
SUE: Look fellow, I wouldn’t be caught dead with you.
[The right way] SUE: I’m very sorry, Tom, but I will be busy tonight. Thanks though for the invitation. (371)
While we would agree that the “wrong way” described here was unnecessarily harsh, it’s disturbing that the only “right way” modeled for a woman to decline a date was to claim to be busy while leaving open the possibility that she might say yes in the future. This skit reinforced a gendered, heteronormative script where any direct expression of a “no” from a woman would be seen as inappropriate; the pedagogy here taught female students to prioritize the feelings of male audience members over a clear statement of their own desires. And, of course, the pedagogy also implied that the only appropriate desires for women were heterosexual ones. (Alas, we never find out what would happen if Shirley were to ask Sue out on a date!)
Reviewing Northcott’s social conversation pedagogy, we must question if women students were ever asked to model the proper way of “giving orders” or if that kind of conversational modeling was left only to the men in the class. In addition to using audio recorders to model social conversation, Northcott also imagined some more progressive uses for audio recording such as engaging students in panel discussions of “current events” and “school affairs” (371). We see great potential in the use of audio recording as a way to engage students in conversation about social and educational issues, but we are left wondering to what extent women felt empowered to disagree with men in these panel discussions, given the gendered pedagogy of conversation the course promoted.
Although both Northcott and Ginsberg’s audio pedagogies reinforced patriarchal norms of vocal tone and conversational behavior, they did both make some space for students to choose how they would use audio recorders to further their own learning. In contrast, a 1948 article by Julius Bernstein positioned the audio recorder even more problematically as a tool for surreptitiously surveilling and correcting the everyday speech of students:
The speech faults that the recorder picks up with merciless accuracy for classroom correction are deficiencies in (a) diction, (b) voice, and (c) speech pattern. An excellent introduction to the correction of flaws in these categories is provided by the candid microphone, a technique to which the magnetic recorder is best adapted. The machine is set up and started without any warning to the class; in this first trial, they will not realize that their words are being set down. The playback of this unprepared material will elicit many exclamations of surprise and amused delight, especially if a few glaring examples are recorded and tactfully pointed out. (Bernstein 1949, 331)
While Bernstein claimed that students all reacted to being covertly recorded with “amused delight,” we find ourselves wondering about the reactions of the students whose “diction” or “incorrect usage” were used to demonstrate a “glaring example” of incorrectness. When we listen closely to this quote, we can begin to hear the expressions of shame and anger lurking within students’ exclamations of surprise. Recognizing that “diction” and “usage” functioned in this period (and, in many ways, still do today) as euphemisms for Standardized English, it’s plausible to surmise that the students whose diction was publicly shamed in Bernstein’s class were more likely to have spoken non-standardized varieties of English. In this way, the audio recorder came to function as a tool for disciplining and silencing students who spoke in ways that deviated from white, middle class, masculine norms.
Interestingly, Bernstein justified his pedagogy of speech correction by appealing to the “radio standard” of speech, which required him to correct speech patterns that were “foreign” or vocal tones that were “shrill” (Bernstein 1949, 331). Echoing Jay Newlin (1933), Bernstein appealed to the norms of corporate radio to provide justification for the xenophobic and sexist silencing of student voices that were not deemed to meet the supposedly neutral radio standard. It’s also notable that while Bernstein very briefly discussed the use of the audio recorder to enable students to make mock radio programs (352), his focus remained on how the process of recording could help students correct speech problems; he never explicitly discussed what kinds of programs students made or what audiences listened to them.
While Bernstein focused on the use of audio recording for assessment and “correction” within an individual classroom, some school administrators also used audio recorders for purposes of programmatic assessment. For example, Irving Goldberg’s 1952 article, “Let the Record Speak,” outlined a school-wide recording program initiated by a principal concerned about “the unfortunate speech patterns and deficiencies of numerous students” (147). In this project, students were recorded giving a short speech once in tenth grade and again in twelfth grade as a way for teachers to assess problems with their speaking and to ensure that they had made progress before graduation. Although Goldberg’s article discussed in great detail the benefits and challenges of organizing such a school wide effort, it’s notable that the rhetorical content of students’ speeches and how they were evaluated was never discussed. Indeed, teachers’ evaluation of students’ audio recordings focused almost entirely on correctness: “When the records were played back, pupils and teacher commented on voice quality, diction, and any errors in grammar. Recommendations for improving the voices and speaking mannerisms were made and corrections of errors were stressed” (Goldberg 1952, 149). Just as current-traditional writing pedagogy positioned student writing primarily as an object for correction rather than for rhetorical interaction (Berlin 1987; Miller 1993), we can see here how the audio recorder turned student speech into an acontextual object to be corrected, assessed, and tracked. And, once again, the default model for speaking remained the white, cisgender male, middle class, able-bodied “standard.” Although we continue to believe that audio recorders have the potential to support pedagogies that value student voices, this history can remind us that audio technologies can also easily become aligned with normative pedagogies of correction that ultimately function to silence rather than welcome student voices in the process of knowledge-making.
Although the 1930s radio production articles we discussed earlier in “English Via the Airwaves” relied occasionally on current-traditional tropes of correctness, we found in them a greater emphasis on students’ collaborative composing of texts for audiences beyond the teacher than we did in later 1940s and 1950s audio recorder articles, where the primary audience overwhelmingly remained the teacher or administrator. In some ways, this shift likely reflected evolving educational philosophies, as the 1930s progressive, Deweyan ideals of democratizing the classroom gave way in the 1940s to emphasis on functional communication education designed to enable students to fit into established structures (Ritter 2015). We also think that the current-traditional shift in audio pedagogies may have been influenced by the media-specific differences between the radio and the audio recorder. As a broadcast medium, radio emphasized live performance for a widely dispersed audience. In cases where teachers had students actually perform live on radio stations, considerations of audience and purpose for student speaking necessarily came to the forefront. And even in cases where teachers had students make “mock” radio programs, the effective “simulation” of radio almost always required as large an audience as possible (e.g., the whole class, a school assembly). In addition, radio-friendly English teachers were acutely conscious that students were spending much time out of class listening to radio programs. Thus, when they asked students to make radio, they often positioned students as having unique expertise in the genres of radio composition they were producing.
While the broadcast medium of radio focused teachers’ attention on considerations of public audiences, the medium of the audio recorder was associated more with office correspondence than with public communication. Indeed, most of the audio recording equipment that teachers described using was marketed first and foremost as office equipment for dictation of letters, memos, and other official documents. In this way, the audio recorder or “voicewriter” was imagined as a more conventional writing tool—enabling the production of documents such as letters that might have an audience of only one person. This cultural positioning of the audio recorder as professional technology for individual correspondence also likely influenced teachers’ increasing interest in audio recording as a way of grading papers—a use to which we now turn.
Teachers Talking on the Record
The first English Journal article on audio grading, “Correcting Compositions without a Pencil,” appeared in 1950 and extolled the pedagogical value of the “Edison electronic voice writer, an instrument which is customarily used in offices” (Cohen 1950, 579). In fact, this article may be seen as a kind of advertisement for the Edison electronic voice writer, as the recorders were loaned by the company to the school for the purpose of promoting them as educational tools. In making the case for audio grading, Cohen asserted that writing comments on papers was too time-consuming and tiring for the teacher, and that the written comments were often ignored or misunderstood by students. Recognizing the limitations of written feedback on writing, Cohen suggested that the writing conference was the most valuable method of giving feedback on writing, but “in today’s large classes, personal conferences can be carried on only with considerable sacrifice to other phases of the program because of the time consumed” (579). As a solution, Cohen advocated that teachers record their “corrections” outside of class and then have students listen to the feedback individually while other classwork was ongoing.
Although Cohen positioned audio recording as a replacement for the writing conference, there was notably very little conversation involved. In describing the typical “conference,” Cohen wrote:
The student listens with his unmarked theme paper in front of him. As he hears a correction, he makes pencil adjustments on his paper, stopping the record whenever desirable. If he can’t understand a correction, by the simple movement of one lever he can hear it repeated. In exceedingly rare cases he can discuss incomprehensible corrections with the teacher. (580)
In some ways, this audio conference entailed more active engagement with teacher feedback than might happen if papers were handed back at the end of the class. In the audio conference, students were required to listen and make the edits themselves, whereas they might only quickly glance at a grade on a more traditional commented paper. And, yet, it’s telling that Cohen reported that students very rarely reached out to him with questions. Ultimately, the student’s role was not to make rhetorical decisions, but rather simply to transcribe the edits that the teacher made.
In many ways, Cohen’s work arose from the serious material exigency of English teachers faced with large class sizes and limited time for conferences. When confronted with time-consuming process of correcting large stacks of papers by hand, it is not surprising that Cohen turned to the technologies of the office for solutions—especially when an audio recorder manufacturer was offering to provide the equipment for free in an attempt to break into the education market. Yet, in turning to the corporate world of the 1950s for solutions, Cohen ended up designing a pedagogical innovation that reinforced hierarchical, current-traditional models of writing instruction.
While Cohen sought to turn the student into a transcriptionist of the teacher’s words, a 1961 article by Robert Lumsden, “Dictation Machines as Teacher Aids,” advocated that schools employ professional stenographers to transcribe teachers’ audio recorded comments. Lumsden’s work also differed from Cohen in that he positioned the audio recorder as more useful for composing summative comments than for recording grammar corrections. In Lumsden’s method, the teacher wrote grammar corrections on the paper as they usually did, but then “drops his red pencil, picks up the microphone of his dictation machine, and speaks his evaluative criticism of the composition into the dictaphone” (Lumsden 1961, 555). Noting that teachers were able to speak much faster than they wrote, Lumsden found that all the English teachers at his school who used this method nearly doubled their grading speed. Although Lumsden did not really discuss what factors the teacher’s spoken “evaluative criticism” considered, we take it as a hopeful sign that the spoken comments were positioned as distinct from grammar correction, and thus likely engaged larger rhetorical concerns to some degree.
Similar to Cohen’s early work with the Edison voicewriter, Lumsden’s experiment was also corporate funded—in this instance by the “McGraw Edison” company, which loaned voicewriter equipment to the school in an attempt to promote its educational use—though it appears that the school paid for the time of transcriptionists. Recognizing the cost involved (especially for schools without such corporate partnerships), Lumsden acknowledged that other schools might not have been able to afford the technology:
Perhaps not every school has the funds to purchase dictation machines and stenographic time for its English teachers. These schools, unfortunately, will have to continue to shortchange their students in training in composition. Many other schools do have the funds but are currently using them to employ lay readers to help their hard pressed English teachers. These latter schools will find that an English teacher benefits much more from 100 hours of stenographic help than he does from a 100 hours of lay reader help. (556).
It’s notable here that Lumsden made the case for the dictaphone as a better replacement for “lay reader” programs, in which underpaid women took over some of the labor of grading papers from classroom teachers (Ritter 2012). Both lay reader grading and dictaphone grading, we should point out, relied on the outsourcing of teacher labor. In both systems, there was an attempt to solve the problem of large class sizes with recourse to gendered, Taylorist rhetorics of efficiency by dividing up labor tasks and undervaluing those that were performed by women. While lay reader programs often relied on gendered rhetorics of care to justify underpaying women employed as lay readers, they did acknowledge to some degree the disciplinary expertise of women with college degrees in English and related fields who were employed in these roles (Ritter 2012). In contrast, Lumsden’s arguments for grading by dictation sought to establish English teaching as a masculine profession in which men dictated words to be taken down verbatim by “secretaries,” rather than sharing the labor of grading with women lay readers who were recognized as having some expertise in their own right. Once again, we can see how the temptation to turn to the corporate workplace to solve labor problems in English teaching resulted in the development of pedagogical practices that reinforced patriarchal, capitalist hierarchies.
In Lumsden’s work, we can see echoes of the dominant patriarchal construction of dictation that positioned the gendered work of the transcriptionist as mechanical and mindless, a sexist construction that ultimately worked to erase the ways in which women transcriptionists actually played a more much more active role in shaping the documents they “recorded” than has traditionally been recognized (Solberg 2014). As we ponder the patriarchal underpinnings of audio recording pedagogy, it’s important to emphasize that all the audio recorder articles we have reviewed so far appear to have been written by men—in sharp contrast to the 1930s radio production articles which appear to have been written predominantly by women. In many ways, male teachers seemed attracted to the audio recorder primarily as a tool of patriarchal professional control—a tool by which they could contain the unruliness of student’s speaking and writing by turning into an object to be corrected. Furthermore, in their attempts to use audio grading as a way to assert their professional expertise, male teachers may have been seeking to claim some of the cultural prestige of the “businessman” for the traditionally feminized profession of English teaching.
Ultimately, the dictation approach to grading did not catch on, likely because of the costs involved. Nonetheless, interest in audio grading continued in the 1960s as teachers became inspired by the growing proliferation of relatively inexpensive audio cassette recorders. Unlike the office-centered “voicewriters” of the 1940s and 1950s, the cassette recorders of the 1960s were increasingly marketed as devices for the home and school (Morton 2000). Perhaps in part because of this turn away from office equipment, the cassette grading articles of the 1960s challenged the commonplace notion that audio grading was a time-saver, focusing instead on highlighting how the recorder could help teachers move away from making sentence-level corrections to addressing rhetorical concerns (Lowe 1963; Fitzpatrick 1968). For example, Lee Frank Lowe wrote a 1963 article about how grading with an audio tape recorder “doesn’t take less time [but] is more effective. It allows me to talk personally with the student and it stimulates his interest in writing” (Lowe 1963, 212). For Lowe, the traditional technology of marking correction symbols by pen felt overly mechanical, and he turned to the tape recorder in an attempt to help students come to see him as a human reader interested in their work: “As I look at a theme I’ve spent some time on and see only a list of correction symbols in the margin, this seems to me to foster the illusion that some mechanism digested the paper, not a fellow human being. This isn’t right. I should be able to talk to the writer” (Lowe 1963, 212). As Lowe found it difficult to find time in his curriculum for conferences in class, he turned to the tape recorder as a way to talk with his students about writing. In making these tapes, Lowe began to move away from his traditional practice of marking every error to instead engage students in conversation about their ideas: “I began to think of each student listening to what I was saying. He had given me his ideas, and at that moment I was communicating personally to him” (Lowe 1963, 214). Rather than seeing the tape recorder as a tool that could help him comment as he always had in a more efficient way, Lowe instead employed the adoption of a tape recorder as an occasion to rethink his goals on commenting on student writing in productive ways that positioned writing as a highly embodied act of communication between reader and writer.
Emphasis on the tape recorder as a tool that could help teachers comment on more global concerns also featured heavily in a 1968 article by Virginia FitzPatrick on tape recorder grading. For FitzPatrick, the tape recorder didn’t necessarily save time overall, but it did enable teachers to make more extensive comments without expanding the amount of time needed:
Teachers often neglect discussing the content of students’ themes, because it is too time-consuming to write long paragraph pointing out flaws in reasoning or inconsistencies, relating ideas to other works or situations, or asking provocative questions. Too often they settle for a curt comment [. . .]. The tape recorder enables the teacher to respond to the students’ thoughts, as well as to the expression of them, without hours of writing. (FitzPatrick 1968, 373)
In contrast to Cohen’s (1950) positioning of students as faithful transcribers of teacher’s “corrections,” FitzPatrick’s more holistic approach to audio commenting sought to provoke substantial revision and had some success in doing so. Fitzpatrick noted that after listening to audio-recorded feedback, “a number of students elected to scrap their original and start fresh, or to completely reorganize their paper—something they had been noticeably reluctant to undertake in previous assignments” (Fitzpatrick 1968, 374). In FitzPatrick’s view, the move to tape recorder offered an occasion not only for teachers to rethink their commenting practices, but also for students to reconsider how they revise in response to teacher feedback. For students who had fallen into a rut of just making surface-level corrections, listening to extended spoken feedback seemed to provoke them to try out more radical revisions of content that moved beyond the sentence level. For FitzPatrick, changing the medium of feedback was not simply a way to make grading more efficient; rather, the move to audio commenting was a way to disrupt a current-traditional emphasis on sentence-level editing by repositioning feedback as a space for holistic conversation about how an essay might be revised in radical, deep ways.
Towards Critical Audio Literacies
In reviewing the mid-century history of audio recorder pedagogies, we have been starkly reminded that new educational technologies are not necessarily liberatory—that new technologies (especially those inspired by the corporate workplace) can be used in ways that further reinforce ineffective pedagogies and structural inequalities of gender, race, class, and disability. We imagine that some readers might be tempted to dismiss the problematic pedagogies of these histories as a thing of the past, but we think it important to remember that new technologies are still used in problematic ways today. In our current moment, large corporate entities continue to promote oppressive new technologies designed to make paper grading more efficient. As one example, let’s look at the popular “GradeMark” software sponsored by the Turnitin corporation. This software makes it convenient and fast for teachers to leave audio comments (a useful feature, we agree), but it also comes pre-packaged with a set of “standard editing marks” that make it more efficient for teachers to “correct” students’ papers quickly. In this way, GradeMark promotes a current-traditional writing pedagogy that positions the English teacher first and foremost as an “editor” of student work, whose primary job is to correct students who deviate from the norms of standardized English. And, of course, GradeMark also includes automated plagiarism detection software that promises to make the process of teaching source use and attribution more efficient, but which ultimately offers a quick technological fix that creates unnecessary distrust between students and teachers, deflects attention away from more effective ways of addressing plagiarism through meaningful instruction and assignment design, and ultimately requires students to turn over their intellectual property to a for-profit corporation without their consent or compensation (Vie 2017).
In other words, GradeMark is not a new innovation at all, but rather a return to error-centered pedagogies of the past that are now far out of step with the current research-supported consensus on effective approaches for teaching writing (Adler-Kassner and Wardle 2015; Ball and Loewe 2017). Teachers who wish to make audio comments, then, should be wary of uncritically adopting corporate tools such as GradeMark to do so—looking closely at how a potentially useful features (such as audio comments) might be packaged alongside other tools that promote problematic pedagogies. Certainly, we see great value in audio feedback on writing, but we point out the flaws with GradeMark’s promotion of audio grading in order to highlight the importance of teachers thinking critically about how commenting tools based on logics of corporate efficiency often highlight their new, useful features as a way of masking their ultimately conservative agendas.
In addition to thinking critically about how new audio commenting tools might surreptitiously promote problematic pedagogies, we also need to carefully consider how digital audio composing pedagogies might inadvertently support sexist, racist, and ableist norms about voice, unless we work actively to teach students to develop “critical sonic literacies” (Comstock and Hocks 2006). For example, in reporting case studies of students’ digital audio composing, numerous feminist composition scholars have critically documented challenging pedagogical situations in which women students considered having men speak their voiceover narration because they thought a deeper masculine voice would be more authoritative (Comstock and Hocks 2006; Adsanatham, Garrett, and Matzke 2013, 323). As Comstock and Hocks demonstrated, patriarchal normative standards of voice continue to hold sway in dominant media culture, so it’s imperative that we work with students to compose texts in ways that challenge patriarchal assumptions of voice rather than merely replicating the “male-dominated [. . .] mainstream soundscapes they are accustomed to hearing.” Adsanatham, Garrett, and Matzke expand on this point by detailing useful heuristics for how teachers can work to challenge the normative “commonplaces” of voice that many students bring with them to classrooms—offering a model of multimodal pedagogy that seeks to empower students to resist dominant media norms rather than reinscribe them (326). As we work to develop critical audio pedagogies, then, it’s essential that we design pedagogies that work with students to interrogate and disrupt how structures of sexism, classism, racism, heterosexism, and ableism influence which voices are heard and which voices are silenced both in our cultures and classrooms—pedagogies that dial down the volume on cisgender, heterosexual white men and dial up the volume on the voices of those who are multiply marginalized along axes of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class (Bessette 2016; Buckner and Daley 2018; Burns et al. 2018; Comstock and Hocks 2006). Although we continue to believe audio composing technologies have an important role to play in pedagogies that seek to empower student voices, our critical review of the history of audio recorders in mid-century classrooms can remind us that integrating audio tools into our classrooms will only be transformative if we consistently work to challenge the ways in which these tools are too often embedded in normative, corporate structures of domination.
