We're Just Jamming: Tuning Into the Literacies of Song and Sound

• In Event: Roundtable Session 38
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 5. Songs, Poetry, and Comics: Embodied Text Construction

Abstract

There is little debate that writing is an integral part of the high school learning experience. In the last decade, secondary schools have seen an increase in attention to the quality of high school writing and expectations for high school writers. Although there is a growing body of scholarship that emphasizes the importance of new literacies and multimodal composing, writing instruction in most English classrooms continues to revolve around written texts. This paper focuses on the ways in which songwriting could be used as a legitimate and valuable type of writing in-school. This inquiry considers the experiences of a group of adolescent students who took up an invitation to engage songwriting as a rigorous literacy practice.

Author

• Molly Buckley-Marudas, Cleveland State University