Sonic Literacy: Using Sound to Teach High School Reading and Writing

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you teach literacy skills? Then it's time to unleash the power of sound in your English language arts classroom! Authors Hashem and Mooney make the case for why the mode of sound is worth your time and effort.

Discover how to harness the transformative potential of audio by diving into the tools, theories, and materials you need to bring audio into your classroom.

Why Sound Matters

• Engage Students: Sound can powerfully engage students who are auditory learners and help those who are not develop their auditory processing skills.
• Empower Voices: Students can find their unique voices by listening to a diversity of voices across different sound genres.
• Enhance Literacy Skills: In a modern, multimodal world, students must learn to extract meaning not only from written and visual text, but from audio content as well.

What's Inside

• Research-Backed Guidance: Learn the theory and science behind the power of sound in education.
• Practical Advice: Get actionable tips for designing assignments that utilize sound effectively.
• Classroom-Ready Materials: Access ready-to-use materials for a variety of sound text genres such as speeches, podcasts, audio dramas, sound poetry, and audio memoirs, all conveniently included via QR codes.

Providing everything you need to explore this innovative and relevant way to enrich students' learning experience, this book is your ultimate guide to integrating sound into your ELA classroom!

Danah Hashem is a former chemical engineer turned reading and writing teacher-scholar currently teaching composition courses at the University of Massachusetts Boston to both undergrad and Early College students from various high school settings. Hashem also works as the assistant director with the UMass Boston Writing Center. Prior to working at UMass, she taught at the high school level for the better part of a decade, and she has a particular interest in bridging the gap for student readers and writers transitioning out of high school and into successful college experiences. Her areas of scholarship include audio rhetoric, writing pedagogy, and digital and multimodal composition, and she is passionate about flexible, student-centered learning that encourages intellectual play and exploration.

Anne Mooney is a high school English teacher at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts. In her nearly a decade of teaching, she has taught students in grades 9 through 12. Teaching at the most diverse urban public school in Massachusetts, Mooney has worked with multilingual students, students of various socioeconomic backgrounds, and students with a multitude of disabilities; her teaching and pedagogical practices have been both informed and improved through her experiences with each and every one of them. Her areas of scholarship include audio rhetoric, multimodal composition, and trauma theory, which have worked to establish her trauma-informed and student-centered classroom.