Audio, Archives, and the Affordance of Listening in a Pedagogy of “Difference”

While attention to “affordance” has tended to focus on the forms of production that technologies encourage, this essay shifts emphasis to how different modes and mediums also afford certain kinds of engagement in the process of digital composing. Seeking a fresh pedagogical approach for how writing instructors and students might productively engage difficult issues of “difference” together, I argue that engaging audio archives of non-normative voices in the process of composing digital “audio collage” can afford iterative listening practices. Through a study of students’ listening practices revealed in their audio compositions in a gender-themed composition course, I demonstrate the rewards of this pedagogical approach: an increased potential for “a stance of openness” ( Ratcliffe, 2005, p. 17) to non-neutral texts and gender-critical inquiry, a greater sense of creative freedom and productive uncertainty felt by students, and the occasion to discuss fundamental issues in writing, including the process of coming to invention across a multitude of sources, the responsible appropriation of others’ voices, issues of Fair Use and plagiarism, and the relationship between historical evidence and contemporary claims.