Sonic Civics, Heard Histories: Examining Walking as a "Sound" Method in Early Childhood Geography

• In Event: Histories, Hopes, Myths, and Monsters: Critical Humanities in Early Childhood

Abstract

From the progressive era of the early 1900’s (see, for example, Mitchell, 1934) to the contemporary context of today (Vascellaro, 2011), field trips have come to be a central landmark in early social studies education. Underscoring everyday experience, the resurgence of “human geography” pedagogy has led young children to examine and address complex social and environmental issues at their local grocery store (Adams, 2015), community cemetery (Groce, Wilson, & Polling, 2013), and school boiler room (Jorgenson, Howard, & Welch, 2018). Despite these advances in early geography, few examine sound as a modal resource and more-than-human interlocutor to young children’s experiences with place. Re-entering data from a video-recorded community walk with first graders, I take up this extant literature to amplify the sonorous sensibilities of invoking walking methodologies in early childhood social studies. In particular, I interrogate the following: What local histories are heard, felt, and voiced by young children walking the city? How might taking a sonic sensibility to human geography amplify more critical notions of place for early learners?

Theory
Theoretically, this paper lies at the axes of affect theory (Clough, 2007; Gallagher 2016; Manning, 2013), social geography (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989), and sound studies (Bull & Back, 2003; Voeglin, 2010). Refracted through these perspectives, it understands soundwalks – embodied practices of listening that present tactile and auditory perceptions of place – as ripe sensory and spatial experiences for young children to know, hear, and be moved by place. Sound, thus, becomes not only a modal and semiotic resource to interrogate human geography (e.g., why is it noisy here?) but a vibrational ontology and affective domain by which we come to know and experience the world. This form of sonic affect, as Gallagher (2016) posits, not only registers feelings (as it pertains to place) but dictates how bodies are moved, changed and affected through social space.

Methods
Zeroing in on a 43-minute GoPro recording of the children’s “walking field trip,” I used a “research-creation methodology” (Springgay & Truman, 2015) to explore how sound amplified affective histories of human and more-than-human movement and social change. Whereas traditional arts-based methods seek to represent, research-creation engages art practice as propositional thought. In other words, and as Springgay and Truman (2017) contend, the goal was to engage “speculative middles and (in)tensions” in data. My goal, thus, was not to detail how sound functioned in the moment for young children, but rather how it may tune teachers and researchers in to facets of human geography that were previously unheard or silenced.

Findings & Significance
Detailed through sharing the digital research-creation, my findings speak to how place, sound, and walking engaged embodied geographic inquiry for young children and their teachers. In particular, I detail the heard relationship between young children’s personal histories of place, land displacement, and public art. In doing so, I call for more critical approaches to examining the sonic dimensions of early social studies.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College