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This study explores how educators ( n = 23) in a graduate-level “teaching with technology” course used the affordances of digital composing, and sonic composition in particular, to “sound out” reflection. Using the twin-lenses of sociocultural theory and social semiotics, findings suggest that sound operated as a: rhetorical tool for illustrating affect/argument; complementary mode to syncretic meaning; and a diegetic structural feature/locating mechanism. Examining how multimodality became a technology and communicative resource for teachers to remix reflection, this study highlights the frictions and freedoms of using sound to synthesize learning in the online teacher education classroom. As such, this article proposes novel ways to think with sound in e-learning and (re)educates the senses to hear practitioner-inquiry in new ways.

Working to combat, speak back to, and shift discourses concerning issues of genders, sexuality/ies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and 2-spirit (LGBTQ2) identities in schoo...

Amplified by a global political climate of fear, oppression, and increased nationalism, this article examines how U.S. secondary students in a digital media elective course used multimodal composit...

This chapter discusses sound and its modal intensities by refuting ocular-centric notions of seeing phenomena in educational research. It shows that earwitnessing (in)equity, a process where the so-called hearer becomes an ethical listener/witness, is a process that is always already emergent. Its goal is to add to the sonorous sensibilities and sonic possibilities of orienting researchers within their environments, connecting them with affective stimuli, and opening their bodies up to sonic foundations of schooling. Whether earwitnessing the sounds of inequity in a digital media classroom or participating in the production of an auditory performance piece investigating improvisation, sound is always already an action of “becoming-in-resonance with”. Stories, juxtaposed and told from an array of perspectives, modes, and locales, are stacked to evoke possibilities of earwitnessing (in)equity in educational research. Earwitnessing (in)equity and becoming-in-resonance-with promotes an ethics of listening, one that acknowledges who gets heard and what gets silenced. Earwitnessing (in)equity is never finite but always already in process.

Purpose Plugging into the multimodal aesthetics of youth lifestreaming, this article examines how three lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) youths use digital media production as an activist practice toward cultural justice work. Focusing on the queer rhetorical dimensions of multimodal (counter)storytelling, the communicative practice used to (re)name, remix and challenge epistemic notions of objective reality, this paper aims to highlight how youth worked to (de)compose and (re)author multiple identities and social relationships across online/offline contexts. Design/methodology/approach Through sustained participant observation across online/offline contexts, active interviewing techniques and visual discourse analysis, this paper illuminates how composing with digital media was leveraged by three LGBTQ youths to navigate larger systems of inequality across a multi-year connective ethnographic study. Findings By highlighting how queer rhetorical arts were used as tools to surpass and navigate social fault lines created by difference, findings highlight how Jack, Andi and Gabe, three LGBTQ youths, used multimodal (counter)storytelling to comment, correct and compose being different. Speaking across the rhetorical dimensions of logos, pathos and ethos, the author contends that a queer rhetorics lens helped highlight how youth used the affordances of multimodal (counter)storytelling to lifestream versions of activist selves. Originality/value Reading LGBTQ youths’ lifestreaming as multimodal (counter)storytelling, this paper highlights how three youths use multimodal composition as entry points into remixing the radical present and participate in cultural justice work.

(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom’s participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of ‘emergent listening’ in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound studies and more posthuman ways of knowing/being/doing, this article details how the sonic was felt not only as an actor on the scene of young children writing but also as an intra-active agent of what the teacher called ‘making space’ and community. Exploring ‘emergent listening’ through a diffractive entanglement of stories and concepts, this paper focus on two pieces of early writing: a digitally produced audio clip and a ‘body built’ (Ms Lionel’s words) tableau depicting the sensorial process and thinking behind children’s making moments. The findings highlight how particular actions of emergent listening generated new forms of embodied knowledge-in-motion. Encouraging educators to consider the modal affordances of sound and sonic composition, this article expands definitions of young children composing with material realia and explores how, as this article suggests, emergent listening opens up pedagogical spaces where creative energies are generated and mobilized to bring to fruition an ethico-onto-epistemological world view.

Attuning to the acoustic ecologies of multicultural education, this critical qualitative project interrogated how elementary prospective teachers (PST) used digital media to write community through and with sound. Examining PST produced soundscapes and the practice of sonic cartography, this study inquired how hearing difference and listening to community re-educated the senses towards issues of difference, belonging, and multiculturalism. Findings illuminate three ways in which PSTs maintained a ‘proper distance’ – a proximal, reflexive, and reciprocal stance – through digitally composing their cartographic creations and reflections. Developing materials that hear and sustain community, this study has implications for how English educators can attune to the frequencies and rhythms of culture while designing towards more equitable landscapes for learning.

Locating itself broadly within the 'sociolinguistics of mobility' (Blommaert, 2014) and taking heed of Stornaiuolo and Hall's (2014) call to 'trace resonance' in writing and literacies research, this article works to trace academic literacies across the emerging 'literacy sponsorscapes' (Wargo, 2016a) of contemporary culture. Despite its variance and recent resurgence (Lillis and Scott, 2007), academic literacies continues to be reduced to: (1) an instrumentalist and pragmatic pedagogy, and (2) the ability to navigate academic conventions and practices of higher education (Lea and Street, 1998), in particular the writing classroom (Castelló and Donahue, 2012). This centred focus, however, is limiting, and silences the more innocuous and less tangible sponsors of academic literacies: mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies. Set against the backdrop of globalization, and grounded in two case studies, this article considers how academic literacies are not an 'and' but an 'elsewhere', thereby emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic space in academic literacy development. In it, we chart new directions for scholarship and underscore how ideologies shift with mobilities (Pennycook, 2008; Pennycook, 2012), are indexed by identities (De Costa and Norton, 2016; Hawkins, 2005), and extend through technologies (Lam, 2009; Rymes, 2012). By outlining a literacy sponsorscapes framework for studying academic literacies, this article highlights the purchasing power of seeing academic literacies not solely as a field or set of practices, but rather as a locating mechanism for studying a range of hybridized repertoires that are shaped and constituted by the physical and social spaces that contemporary youth inhabit.