After selecting a relevant social issue based on readings from the course textbook (homelessness, gang violence, animal cruelty, etc.), students are asked to write a proposal for an audio Public Service Announcement (PSA) on that issue. After consulting with the instructor on the proposal, students then produce their own PSAs using the free open source program Audacity, supplementing their own scripted voice-overs with background music and other ambient sounds. These PSAs are then submitted to the entire class for studio critique. Afterwards, they are re-edited and shared with the other students via the class blog, where classmates have the option of downloading them as podcasts.
This audio production prompt, designed for a basic writing course, is meant to foreground the notion of genre as a kind of cultural memory and evaluates students' abilities to produce texts that adhere to the conventions of a given genre. Cynthia Selfe has required a similar audio PSA-composing assignment in one of her recent graduate-level composition seminars. Selfe's assignment expresses both pragmatic and conceptual goals: not only are students meant to gain experience working with the digital audio recording and editing technology, they are also supposed to gain "hands-on practice composing an audio PSA, using various modalities of expression: sounds, music, voice." The first and foremost goal of the assignment, as Selfe writes, is to get students "to think about composing and composition in different ways, to expand the bandwidth of how you understand words like text and composing." Such goals resonate not only at the graduate level, but indeed across the spectrum of college composition classes. The fact that these two variations of the PSA assignment address very different audiences (basic writing students and graduate-level composition students) illustrates how potentially adaptable it is to different course themes, content, and skill levels.
The public service announcement, with its often pathos-laden background music, earnestly delivered voice-overs, and additive ambient sounds, serves as an easily identifiable genre that students can easily decode, as well as a form that is manageable enough to reproduce, especially for students who may not have much experience with sound-editing software. One of the assignment's main purposes, to have students recognize genre as a type of collective cultural memory defined by a set of structural, stylistic, and related commonplaces, is reinforced by the collaborative nature of the workload, which functions on at least two levels. Students will produce the proposal and final PSA with a partner, thus creating an immediate feedback loop that aids in the inventional, organizational, and initial production stages of the assignment. Students also experience collaboration in the ensuing studio critique sessions and informal file sharing subsequent to revision. Such collaborations serve as a wider feedback network, a broader audience that evaluates the PSAs based not only upon how well they adhere to generic conventions, but also how successfully those conventions are utilized in order to create a genuinely persuasive final product. Of course, in order to also gauge students' meta-cognitive understanding of their own rhetorical process (as well as their ability to clearly express said understanding), the assignment includes an initial written proposal that details the concept, rhetorical goal, and overall outline for the PSA project.
While this assignment currently incoroporates many of the best pedagogical practices we associate with successful educational podcasting applications, we feel it can be revised for future courses in order to take more complete advantage of podcasting technology. The PSA assignment gives students the opportunity to produce and edit audio compositions themselves, and they do so collaboratively, with the added benefit of peer and instructor feedback. Such goals are in sync with what we believe is a sound approach for incorporating any technology into a composition pedagogy, but we acknowledge that the assignment's design could go further to address the unique status of the podcast. With more emphasis placed upon the creation of these audio PSAs specifically as podcasts, we can open up questions for our students concerning how podcasts define and situate audience, how podcasts are dissemenated differntly than "legacy" web content, and the impact of earlier genres or media on how listeners approach this relatively new media form and place it within the vast landscape of communication technologies. To those ends, we might consider an assignment such as The Weekly Wrap-up Podcast Assignment proposed for a first-year writing course. |
