Restorying Fahrenheit 451 Through/With Sound

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Remaking the Word to Rewrite the World: A Convergence of Diverse Practitioners and Literacy Practices

Abstract

Objectives
This paper focuses on how students and teachers interacted with Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 through sound. The paper describes how the research team, along with teacher candidates and a class of grade eight students, explored the relationship between hearing, sensory perception in general, and text. How does looking for, creating with, and remixing the sounds uncovered in a canonical text change how we interact with it? How can sound studies research (Dylan, 2016, Ceraso, 2018) and listening pedagogies (Oliveros, 2005; Schafer, 1967, 1992; Schultz, 2003) help us know our students better? How can these practices allow us to learn what our students already know and the ways they critically navigate their lives, as they read, re-read, and remix the multiple texts of their world?

Theoretical framework
Sound vibrations can, via physically moved air waves, connect us to each other and might connect us to texts and/or texts to us. Robinson warns us about “conflating the collapse of distance with the collapse of difference” (2014, p. 282); with this in mind, Diamond states that these divergences “might also be potentially productive moments where dialogue might begin” (2016, p. 245). Literacy research by Brownell and Wargo (2017) explores these moments. Ceraso argues that listening itself is multi-sensory and multi-modal (2018). Using sound to interact with text encourages us to access and include all of our senses. We take inspiration from Ghíso’s (2016) descriptions of multi-modal literacy events in her observations of children’s collective and individual empathy and care.

Methods and data sources
After listening exercises (Oliveros, 2005; Schafer, 1992) and discussions around what centring hearing feels like in addition to what it might offer us, grade eight students and teacher candidates looked for and imagined sound in Fahrenheit 451. Selected sound plays, video and audio recordings, and students’ and teacher candidates’ written reflections will be reviewed and collaboratively described (Carini, 2011).

Results
Inspired by Fahrenheit 451 and alert to current local and global crises, students and teacher candidates made sound plays where they composed and remixed sound to accompany excerpts from the text. The students and teacher candidates used sound-making as a means of disrupting the literary canon and resisting colonial logics. Participants made Fahrenheit 451 their own, literally and figuratively. They re-made and re-storied (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) the novel through multisensory arts practices that represent individual and collective critical interpretations in relation to current social and political injustices.

Scholarly significance
This paper provides a critical and practical (re)framing for the use of sound and hearing, and multi-sensory pedagogies, to change how we might interact with text and illuminate possibilities of how students and teachers can remix canonical works.

Authors

• Doug Friesen, University of Toronto

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto