Sound the Alarm! Disrupting Resonances of a Third-Grade Classroom

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Windows Into the Life Worlds of Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

Sounds, like the repeated alarm in Mr. Holiday’s urban third grade classroom, are socioculturally situated and ground our understandings and knowledge about ourselves and our world. Educational studies have recently investigated sound as more than oral language, music, or “noise,” but additional scholarship analyzing everyday soundscapes still has room to grow. Thus, in this inquiry, I considered how and in what ways sonic experiences might (re)produce (systemic) identities and positionings for children in an urban third grade classroom. In doing so, sound’s capacity to illuminate “nested layers of ecologies, norms, values, and other iterations of the ordinarily sensible” (Gershon, 2013a, p. 260) in a public, resource-limited elementary classroom in the Midwestern United States became amplified.

Author

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto