Teaching with Music in the College Writing Classroom

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2019

Striking a Chord: Teaching with Music in tDahvied B C. Boedslollee ge Writing Classroom

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

STRIKING A CHORD:

TEACHING WITH MUSIC IN THE COLLEGE WRITING CLASSROOM

DAVID BEDSOLE

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2019 David Bedsole defended this dissertation on November 1, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Michael Neal Professor Directing Dissertation

Alysia Roehrig University Representative

Kristie Fleckenstein Committee Member

Kathleen Blake Yancey Committee Member

The Graduate School has veriﬁed and approved the above-named committee members, and certiﬁes that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii To Katharine. This is our doctorate, my love.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project, and in fact, this degree in general, would not have been possible without all of the people who repeatedly and selflessly came alongside, encouraging, helping, listening, and even occasionally kicking my tail. For instance: Katharine F. Bedsole, who managed to start a successful speech-language pathology practice while all of this was going on, while remaining a cherished partner to me and a fantastic parent to Nora Claire. You are my hero; Dr. Michael Neal, who went above and beyond university expectations in helping me finish this dissertation, and who remains a good friend as well as a respected colleague; Others in the committee, including Drs. Kathleen Blake Yancey, Kristie Fleckenstein, and Alysia Roehrig, for their generous outlay of time and advice; Dr. George Boggs, for nudging me in this direction of studying music and writing pedagogy; The men’s group in Tallahassee, especially Andy McClenahan, who sent me encouraging and threatening texts to keep me going; you’re one in a million, brother, and I wish I could give honorary doctorates; Our church family at Riverwood Presbyterian; The men’s group in Tuscaloosa, especially Chris Gill, who encouraged and kept me accountable in Tuscaloosa: you’re next!; Drs. Martha McKay Canter and Janelle Jennings-Alexander, who participated in our virtual “leaky rowboat” writing group—the third leaky rowboat is almost ashore!; Colleagues at the University of Alabama who had my back, especially Drs. Margaret Purcell, Amber Buck, and Cindy Tekkobe; My parents, Glenn and Linda, and Katharine’s parents, Butch and Gayle, who kept our daughter and cheered me on; My sisters and brother, who always believed I could and should do this; Friends, especially those who selflessly watched Nora Claire during the summer so I could write; Musician buddies who jammed with me at Band of Brothers and elsewhere and kept me sane; My students, for being the reason I do this; And for Nora Claire, my daughter, and Chris, my son, who both love words and music.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ...... viii List of Figures ...... ix Abstract ...... x

1 Introduction and Literature Review 1 1.1 Finding an Exigence ...... 2 1.2 Placing Music Within a Multimodal Framework ...... 5 1.3 Deﬁning an Area of Interest ...... 7 1.4 Following a Trodden Path ...... 9 1.5 Research Questions ...... 10 1.6 How Do Writing Instructors Use Music Pedagogically in Their Writing Classes? . . . 11 1.6.1 Music as Subject of Rhetorical Analysis ...... 11 1.6.2 Music as Methodological Model for Writing Practice ...... 13 1.6.3 Music as Material for Multimodal Production ...... 13 1.7 What Purposes or Values Do Instructors Have for Using Music Pedagogically in Their Writing Classes? ...... 15 1.7.1 What Purposes or Values Do Instructors Have...? ...... 15 1.7.2 ...For Using Music Pedagogically in Their Writing Classes? ...... 17 1.8 How Do the Purposes of Music-Based Writing Pedagogy as Deﬁned by the Instructors Relate to Principles Outlined in the Third Iteration of the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement? ...... 21 1.9 The Structure of This Dissertation ...... 23

2 Methods 25 2.1 How and Why Should Research Be Conducted? ...... 25 2.2 Survey ...... 27 2.3 Survey Distribution ...... 29 2.4 Coding ...... 29 2.4.1 Units of Analysis and Issues ...... 29 2.4.2 Second Coder ...... 31 2.4.3 Coding Process ...... 31 2.4.4 Final Coding Scheme ...... 33 2.5 Targeted, Semi-Structured Interviews ...... 36 2.5.1 Transcribe Software ...... 38 2.5.2 Interviewees ...... 38 2.5.3 Institutional Environments ...... 39 2.5.4 Supporting Documents ...... 40 2.6 IRB Considerations ...... 40

v 3 Survey Results 48 3.1 Survey Demographics ...... 48 3.1.1 A Typical Respondent by the Numbers ...... 48 3.1.2 Gender ...... 49 3.1.3 Age ...... 49 3.1.4 Racial and Ethnic Identiﬁcation ...... 49 3.1.5 Highest Level of Education Completed ...... 49 3.1.6 Graduate Degrees Held ...... 49 3.1.7 Current Professional Identity ...... 50 3.1.8 Years Teaching College Writing ...... 50 3.1.9 Job Responsibilities ...... 51 3.2 A Typical Institution by the Numbers ...... 51 3.2.1 Institutional Description ...... 51 3.2.2 Highest Degree Granted by Current Institution ...... 52 3.2.3 Institutional Size by Student Enrollment ...... 52 3.2.4 Geographic Region ...... 52 3.3 Closed-Ended Questions ...... 53 3.3.1 Degree Music Used in Writing Pedagogy in the Past ...... 53 3.3.2 Writing Courses in Which Music Was Used ...... 53 3.3.3 How Music Is Used as Part of Pedagogy in Writing Courses ...... 53 3.4 Open-Ended Question Coding Results ...... 55

4 Interview Results 67 4.1 How Do the Interviewees Use Music in the Writing Classroom? ...... 68 4.2 Why Do the Interviewees Use Music in the Writing Classroom? ...... 73 4.3 What Have Their Students Been Able to Do With Music? ...... 76 4.4 What Challenges Have They Faced in Their Use of Music? ...... 77 4.5 How Do They Plan to Use Music in the Future? ...... 79 4.6 What Else Did They Want to Talk About? ...... 80

5 Discussion 85 5.1 Fulkerson and Approaches to Teaching Writing with Music ...... 86 5.1.1 Current-traditional Rhetoric ...... 86 5.1.2 Expressivism ...... 86 5.1.3 Cultural/Critical Studies ...... 87 5.1.4 Procedural Rhetoric ...... 87 5.2 Glam: Critical/Cultural Studies and Analysis ...... 88 5.3 Folk: Musical Preferences and Expressivism ...... 91 5.4 Rap: Music and Current-Traditionalism ...... 94 5.5 Pop and Opera: Rhetorical Approaches ...... 96

6 Conclusion 104 6.1 Reframing Background Noise: Music as Academic Hospitality ...... 105 6.2 Playing (with) Music: Musical Play as Resistance in the Writing Classroom . . . . . 108 6.3 Limitations of This Study ...... 112

vi 6.4 Pedagogical Possibilities ...... 114 6.5 Conclusion ...... 115

Appendices A Complete Qualtrics Survey 118 A.1 Informed Consent ...... 118 A.2 Demographic Information ...... 118 A.3 Institutional Information ...... 121 A.4 Use of Music in the Writing Classroom ...... 123

B Sample Survey Open-Ended Question Responses 125

C Sample Interview Transcript 134

D Sample Survey Codes 146

E IRB Consent Form and IRB Approval Memos 150 E.1 Interview Consent Form ...... 150 E.2 Initial IRB Approval Memorandum ...... 151 E.3 Re-Approval Memorandum ...... 152 E.4 Second Re-Approval Memorandum ...... 153 E.5 Protocol Closure ...... 154

Bibliography ...... 155 Biographical Sketch ...... 163

vii LIST OF TABLES

2.1 Correlating research and survey questions...... 42

2.2 Emerging coding categories...... 43

2.3 Supporting materials collected...... 44

3.1 A typical respondent by the numbers...... 62

3.2 A typical institution by the numbers...... 63

3.3 Code occurrences within open-ended questions...... 66

5.1 Fulkerson’s approaches to composition...... 101

viii LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Mapping theorists and their perceptions of sound...... 24

2.1 Example demographic survey questions...... 41

2.2 Questions removed from survey after pilot testing...... 45

2.3 Example section of coding notes...... 46

2.4 Example of coding in Microsoft Word using Comment function...... 47

2.5 Transcribe software interface...... 47

3.1 Job responsibilities...... 63

3.2 Degree to which music was used as part of pedagogy for writing classes...... 64

3.3 Writing courses in which music was used...... 64

3.4 How music was used as part of pedagogy...... 65

4.1 An excerpt from Folk’s assignment sheet...... 81

4.2 A slide from Rap’s lecture...... 82

4.3 A slide from Opera’s lecture...... 82

4.4 Another slide from Opera’s lecture...... 83

4.5 Final slide from Opera’s lecture...... 83

4.6 iTunes music visualizer...... 84

5.1 Traktion 4 interface...... 102

5.2 SongU instructors critique one of my songs...... 102

5.3 Jacob Collier discusses harmony with Herbie Hancock...... 103

ix ABSTRACT

As studies in sound continue to emerge in the field (Ceraso, 2018; Danforth, Stedman, & Faris, 2018; Hawk, 2018), this dissertation seeks to describe how and why writing instructors are using music in their college writing classrooms, and to assess the match between these practices and an agreed-upon outcomes statement for effective teaching in college composition, the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. In order to outline the relevant scholarship about the use of music in the teaching of college writing, I first show that music belongs in the category of aurality as described by Selfe (2009). Then, I use Erin Anderson’s (2014) framework to organize the relevant scholarship about music: writing instructors tend to use sound/music: “. . . as a subject of rhetorical analysis, a material for multimodal text production, and a methodological model for alphabetic writing practice” [emphasis mine]. Next, I use Fulkerson’s (2005) framework for understanding instructor theories of composition, which includes: the axiological question (what makes writing “good?”); the process question (how do texts come into existence?); the pedagogical question (how is composition effectively taught?); and the epistemological question (how do you know all this?). Finally, I employ Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s (2012) four-part heuristic for interrogating new rhetorical options to the possible reasons for using music in the writing classroom: semiotic potentials; cultural position; infrastructural accessibility; and de/specialization. To conduct the study, I designed a Qualtrics survey and distributed it on two national listservs, and considered case studies in the form of targeted interviews/collection of teaching materials from five different instructors. The survey includes demographic, close-ended, and open-ended questions. I outlined and applied a coding scheme to the open-ended questions. I conducted interviews via phone with the five interviewees, transcribed the interviews, and shared the results with the participants for correction or confirmation. Then, I described the results of the Qualtrics survey, and reported the results of the targeted interviews and collection of teaching materials. I find that instructors use music in myriad ways, but most commonly use it to analyze lyrics or as background noise in the classroom. I find that their purposes for using music often correspond, in some ways, with their understanding of the purposes of composition itself (Fulkerson, 2005). Finally, I wrestle with the main findings, and reframe them using the lenses of academic hospitality and play. Results imply that the use of music is defensible according to the WPA Outcomes

x Statement, depending on how it is used. Further research is called for, especially in understanding the eﬀectiveness of music-based pedagogy in the writing class. Such research might involve student responses, as well as collection of student materials at various stages in a music-based writing course.

xi CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Imagine you enter a jam session. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated jam, a jam too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the jam had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the songs that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the set; then you put in your oar. Someone answers with a verse; you answer with a verse of your own; another riffs off of your chorus; another takes a solo off the bridge, to either the delight or dismay of the room, depending upon the quality of the player’s chops. However, the jam is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the jam still vigorously in progress.

So Marvin Diogenes paraphrases the famous “parlor analogy” or “unending conversation” from Kenneth Burke’s (1973) Philosophy of Literary Form. As writing instructors invite students into an academic conversation, they can just as easily think of it in musical terms: not just an argument or answer, but a verse, a riff, a chorus; a solo off the bridge; not the quality of an ally’s assistance, but the quality of their chops. Indeed, in his highly-praised 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) chair’s address, Adam Banks drew on his love of funk and soul music to urge participants to rethink the field along those lines: “I’m talking about Funk as a guiding idea for who we are in our thinking, teaching, making, and doing. . . ” (p. 270). To embrace funk as a metaphor, for Banks, is to embrace “dropping pretense and embracing boldness, wildness, and irreverence” (p. 270). Funk means “. . . we are willing to sweat. Funk means we are willing to deal with messiness and complexity.”1 I write as a participant in two worlds: a world of music and musicians, and a world of college writing instructor/scholars. During the day, I teach and do research; at night, I can often be found

1A Spotify playlist that includes many of the songs and artists referenced in this dissertation is available at https://tinyurl.com/strikeachord. Although the speciﬁc song Banks references, George Clinton’s “Martial Law,” is unavailable on Spotify, you can hear one of George Clinton/Parliament’s other pivotal tracks, “Mothership Connection (Star Child),” on the playlist.

1 playing gigs in local venues. When I am not studying, writing, or teaching, I am likely playing jazz piano or clawhammer banjo. My interest in the relationship between writing and music goes back to my days in college, when an English professor casually observed that writing and music have a lot to do with each other. And they do. Scholars have known for some time that language is fundamentally metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003; Richards, 1965), and Kathleen Blake Yancey’s (2004) germinal College Communication and Composition (CCC) piece “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” used a musical metaphor as a central organizing figure: composition in a new key implies a new key signature, a transposition into a different range of notes. Other resonances also exist: Both musical and linguistic composition began as ways to arrange symbols on a page to memorialize sound. Both have a grammar and a logic, and both demand interpretation on the part of a reader. Both are linear and time-based. Musicians play a piece of music from left to right, start to finish, just as a piece of writing is read. Both have a distinct syntax and grammar; both have written and aural elements; both involve arrangements of symbols; both require technique and practice.

1.1 Finding an Exigence

In his pivotal essay “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd Bitzer (1968) defined an exigence as an “imperfection marked by urgency” (p. 6). It is a flaw, in other words, that demands rhetorical remedies. For Bitzer, rhetorical situations are more found than created, and for evidence, he pointed to situations such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However, Richard E. Vatz (1973) challenged Bitzer’s theory five years later, claiming that rhetorical situations are created by rhetoric rather than found and responded to. Finally, Scott Consigny (1974) argued that both Bitzer and Vatz were partially right, and both were partially wrong. For Consigny, rhetorical situations can exist and be found, but are not as determinative as Bitzer seems to think. Consigny also allows that rhetorical situations can be created, as Vatz claims, but argues that Vatz does not attend enough to the rhetor’s limitations. Here, following Vatz, I identify an exigence for this dissertation, which responds to situations outside of myself, but also to my own need to create an understanding of music in the writing classroom. Sometimes I sing to my students. The other day, in teaching about purpose in writing—specifically, the socio-cultural purpose of the music review—I showed them a picture of Aretha Franklin, asking

2 them if they knew who she was. When no one answered, I broke into Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”: “Hey nineteen, that’s ‘retha Franklin/She don’t remember the Queen of Soul.”2 Later that same class, when I mentioned Franklin’s Alabama-based backing band the Swampers, I sang the verse from “Sweet Home Alabama”: “In Muscle Shoals they got the Swampers.” It sounds like a small thing, but the student reactions are fascinating. I’m not the only teacher who sings or plays the guitar, but in some ways, it defies expectations. Academic writing is supposed to be boring and full of rules, but the teacher is singing, and teasing them about not knowing enough about classic Motown. So as a participant in academic and musical environments, I am an active agent in creating my own exigence: I want to know what others are doing with music in their teaching, and I want to allow that knowledge to shape my practices. I am perhaps searching, as my partner suggested, for “kindred spirits,” and trying to carve out a niche for us in the field. In fact, I began a kind of informal research into this question before this dissertation became a possibility: a casual query about music in the writing classroom that I posted on the WPA listserv in 2016 received a rich, enthusiastic, and varied response. Anecdotally, I became aware that instructors are doing everything from using jazz music to teach writing style, to using song revisions to teach audience and situation. But that is not to say that exigences do not exist outside myself. Most instructors are familiar with the daily sight of students walking into class, headphones on or earbuds in, existing in their own musical worlds. This is why Brock Dethier (2003), even before the popularization of the smartphone and services like Apple Music, urged attention to music in the writing classroom: it’s a common subject; a “universal language”; a motivator; a source of identity; a “neutral territory” in which students and instructors can meet (pp. x-xi). As early as ten years ago, the internet and smartphones were making more and different kinds of music available. Concluded Mary Madden in a (2009) Pew Research study, “The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster”:

As more and more internet users acquire smart phones and high-speed wireless connectivity improves, music consumers get ever closer to the “celestial jukebox” dream of any song at any time. . . Ultimately. . . it all becomes the same: instant access to the music you want.

2See Steely Dan, “Hey Nineteen” on the Spotify playlist.

3 In a 2019 study, Edison Research found that of Americans between the ages of 12 and 24, a whopping 91% report listening to online audio in the last month, which is deﬁned as “listening to AM/FM radio stations online and/or listening to streamed audio content available only on the internet.” Indeed, if the media surveys are to be believed, the audio share of the multimedia landscape is only increasing: this number is up from 87% in 2017, and 88% in 2018. Although Edison Research speculated that much of the increase is due to the burgeoning popularity of podcasts, they also observed a rise in YouTube music listening, with an estimated 50% of the American population visiting YouTube for that purpose in the last week. Of this population, the largest percentage (70%) is made up of listeners between the ages of 12 and 24. A (2016) OnCampus national advertising survey claimed that:

Students reported that their favorite media formats are social media and internet music. Approximately 77% and 58% of students spent more than 2 hours a week with these two formats, respectively. Approximately 17% of students spend more than 10 hours a week on social media and 20% spent more than 10 hours a week on Internet radio. No other media format approached this level of engagement.

Additionally, out of 120 respondents, the survey observed that 73% subscribed to Internet radio (Pandora, Spotify, iHeart Radio). This rising consumption of audio in digital spaces suggests that it is even more necessary to provide tools for students to both critique and produce texts involving music, and to understand connections between music and other forms of writing. Since around the mid-1990s, scholars in a vast array of ﬁelds have converged in their interest in sound, giving birth to a phenomenon known as, among other things, sound studies, which Jonathan Sterne deﬁned as an “interdisciplinary ferment in human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (2012, p. 2). UT Austin Digital Writing and Research Center Coordinator Will Burdett has pointed out that the word “phonograph” translates literally from the Greek to “sound writing” (Danforth, Stedman, & Faris, 2018), and accordingly, called for attention to sound. However, widespread attention to music in rhetoric and composition classrooms began in the 1960s with the emergence, alongside the nascent counter-culture, of pedagogies that incorporated popular music in the writing classroom (Brittanham, 2001). Attention to sound in rhetoric and composition underwent a renewal in 1999 with a special issue of Enculturation,“Writing/Music/Culture,” and emerged again in the 2006 special issue of Computers and Composition edited by Cheryl Ball and Byron Hawk, “Sound in/as Compositional

4 Space.” Situating sound within a multiliteracies framework (New London Group, 1996), the editors noted that the field has moved from “linguistic to visual meaning-making, all in digital environments” and that sound has been under-theorized in the field. The time is ripe, then, to advance a “multiliteracies approach that incorporates attention to audio. . . within composition studies” (p. 263). More recently, scholarship continues to emerge in the field about sound and music in the writing classroom. The (Danforth, Stedman, & Faris, 2018) edited collection Sound Writing Pedagogies, for instance, has emerged, along with Steph Ceraso’s (2018) Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening, and Byron Hawk’s (2018) Re-Sounding the Rhetorical: Com- position as a Quasi-Object. Perhaps most surprisingly, in 2017, Clemson University graduated the first doctoral student to compose a musical dissertation: A.D. Carson’s 34-song rap album.3

1.2 Placing Music Within a Multimodal Framework

Before I go any further, it is important to understand the relationships between several distinct yet interrelated terms: music, sound, audio, aural, oral, noise, speech, and silence. I do not propose, in this dissertation, to settle all of the relationships between these, but I will attempt, here, to survey some possible frameworks, then distill them into a working framework for the purposes of this project. Since the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition has become interested in multiliteracies (The New London Group, 1996) sound has been conceived as a mode: a “socially shaped and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning” (Kress, 2010, p. 79). Multiple modes may interact in communicative situations: a web page, for instance, may include image, writing, and moving images. Multimodality emphasizes the social nature of sign-making, and points to the motivated interest of the sign-maker as counterbalanced by the interest and attention of the recipient. In other words, signs are not created through adherence to social rules, but by the situated interests of the communicator—by drawing on the resources available in the community surrounding the mode, or by choosing signs that “strongly suggest the meaning [they] want to communicate” (Kress, 2010, p. 64).

3See A.D. Carson “The Defense” on the Spotify playlist.

5 The New London Group argued that there are six major modes: linguistic, visual, gestural, spatial, multimodal design, and audio, which they associated with music and sound effects (1996). But Cynthia Selfe (2009), a tireless proponent of multimodal pedagogies, brought wider attention in the field to aurality: “a complexly related web of communicative practices that are received or perceived by the ear, including speech, sound, and music” (p. 646). She proposed this aurality term to replace the more typical orality, because the former avoids what she sees as the error of oversimplifying the “oral/literate” divide, as well as classifying cultures or groups as one or the other. Instead, Selfe argued, writing has always been multimodal,4 and she hoped to redefine aurality as existing in perpetual relationship with the linguistic, rather than standing in direct opposition to it. Though Selfe did not attempt to exhaustively delineate the terms, her emphasis on the ear as a receiver/perceiver of information draws attention to the various ways sound is produced: by the human voice, by instruments, by other means, natural and artificial. Theo Van Leeuwen, continuing the social semiotic project of the New London Group, broke sound down into three main categories: music, speech, and sound. Yet his efforts in Speech, Music, Sound (1999) were integrative: he sought to find commonalities between the three categories in terms of timbre, perspective, time, and melody, among others, complaining that too often, sound has been divided up between various disciplines—speech to speech departments; music to music; and so on. Finally, Heidi McKee (2006) suggested that sound could be combined into four major elements: vocal delivery, music, special effects, and silence. Though in my estimation, the first two terms do not significantly differ from Selfe and Van Leeuwen’s speech and music, the inclusion of silence as a category is important. McKee argues:

Silence should not be considered separate from sound but rather an integral and important element of sound, one whose relationship to the other elements of voice, music, and sound eﬀects needs to be analyzed, as do each of the elements’ relationships to the other modes in a multimodal text. (p. 351)

For this reason, McKee used noise to differentiate “silence from not-silence.” In other words, for McKee, there is either silence or there is noise (p. 350). Accordingly, she used sound effects rather than noise to differentiate sounds that are neither music, nor speech, nor silence. Figure 1.1

4Jason Palmeri (2012), reached a similar conclusion in Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy.

6 illustrates the relationships between these three theorists and the categories that they include in the larger category of sound. While the relative novelty of the term can be problematic in terms of popular understanding, I am yet persuaded that Selfe’s umbrella term of aurality best describes sound as a distinct mode among others, while resisting the artiﬁcial oral/literate distinction. In a multimodal framework, sound and music and silence and noise can function as subcategories of aurality. And while I will resist making judgments about what does or does not count as music—a fraught enterprise to say the least—I can allow that all music exists within the aural mode, but not all that is aural is music. Still, there is no consensus in the ﬁeld about terminology, and this can complicate research agendas at times. For instance, frequently a piece of scholarship will center on sound but not mention music, leaving the reader to wonder whether music is meant to be included.

1.3 Deﬁning an Area of Interest

I have already referenced Adam Banks’ use of the funk metaphor in his 2015 CCCC address. A large part of the agenda, for Banks, is rethinking the field’s sacred cows, and in his speech, he de/pro/moted the essay to “dominant genre emeritus” (pp. 272-273). Although Banks stopped short of calling for a stop to teaching the essay, he claimed that the field needs to re-evaluate old comfort zones in light of new technologies, and seemed to suggest that the future resides in other modes besides the linguistic (p. 275). Banks was not the first CCCC chair to bring music into the conversation during their chair’s address. Doug Hesse did so ten years earlier (2005) when he began his address by singing “My Lord, What a Morning” and used his past nervousness, as a white male, in performing Negro spirituals as a way to frame a conversation about who “owns” writing (p. 336). Indeed, Hesse’s (2017) response to Joseph Teller’s (2016) incendiary Chronicle of Higher Education article “Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?”, employed a musical metaphor: learning writing is like learning the piano. Additionally, in his (2012-2013) JAEPL article “Writing and Time, Time and the Essay,” he reflected on his struggles with the trombone and his love of choral singing. Yet Hesse is not convinced that the essay, and indeed, the linguistic literacies most often associated with the composition classroom, are (or should be) on their way out. As he showed in his (2010) response to Selfe’s (2009) article, addressing the use of sound and music in the writing

7 classroom activates several controversies within the field of rhetoric and composition. For instance, attention to aurality forces the question of what, exactly, the nature of the first-year writing course is. Is it a course on “rhetoric/composing,” where rhetorical options may be freely chosen, and no mode, including alphanumeric writing, is pre-eminent? Or at the other extreme, is it a course on “writing/composing,” where all other modes, except for some reluctant attention to the visual, should be largely ignored? (Hesse, 2010, p. 603). Or, is it some hybrid, where the mode of writing is prioritized, but other modes are cautiously addressed? Hesse, who described himself as “persuadable but pragmatic” (p. 603), also questioned whose interests composition should serve. As students are expected to chart a path through a life fraught with rhetorical situations that range from personal expression to the expectation of corporate and civic advocacy, what is the ethical way to teach composition? Do instructors bend to student preferences in terms of modalities, especially when many of the students would prefer almost anything to the linguistic, the mode in which composition instructors are most thoroughly trained? Hesse conceded that he is “inclined to make a place for aurality” in his practice, even as he continues to critically interrogate the practical and ethical implications of expanding attention to modalities in the composition classroom (p. 605). Accordingly, Selfe, in her (2010) response conceded that “Because writing continues to occupy a privileged position in the world (and because I am particularly tied to writing as a mode of expression), I involve students in lots of reading and writing tasks” [emphasis original], but maintained that writing situations are changing, and claimed that the best curricular space for composition is rhetoric/composing (pp. 606-607) . Like Hesse and Selfe, I am pragmatic. I take for granted that the vast majority of first-year writing, like it or not, is still alphanumeric (Anderson, Atkins, Ball, Millar, Selfe, & Selfe, 2006), and that much of what is seen as writing at least begins with the linguistic mode. And despite calls for rethinking the rhetorical endeavor based on sound (Hawk, 2018), I am unconvinced that writing instructors need to move that far away from alphanumeric writing. Indeed, given institutional and disciplinary restraints, I question whether it is possible to do so. Additionally, while I believe that teachers should draw on their own talents, life experiences, and outside expertise to teach writing in the best way possible, I am deeply uncomfortable with efforts to (re)make the subject(s) of rhetoric and composition in the instructor’s own image(s). The interdisciplinary nature of the field has hatched scores of debates over the years about the proper

8 limits of the discipline, and efforts have been made to unify and codify what these actually are (Olson, 2002). These are healthy and necessary discussions. But while I would certainly defend a musician/writing instructor, or visual artist/writing instructor, or dancer/writing instructor’s right to teach writing using that lens and subject area, and even to point out potentialities in that mode (aural, visual, gestural), I do not think the aim should be to replace the subject of composition—writing, by my lights—with whatever is most familiar or comfortable to instructors. Furthermore, since the conversation is so large and diverse, it is necessary to set limits on what I can reasonably study in a single dissertation. In this dissertation, while I recognize a great deal of overlap between sound, aurality, music, and other related areas, I am not interested in exploring the uses of sound outside of music in the writing classroom, nor am I interested in the more theoretical uses of sound in the field. My intention, rather, is to treat music as a pedagogical tool in the writing classroom, with the assumption that the main object of first-year composition is greater facility in alphanumeric, linguistic writing.5 That is, though I do not eclipse or discount the value of attention to other modes as well, I do not assign them the same level of importance as linguistic writing in the composition classroom. And this move is as much practical as anything: Given the current disciplinary and curricular constraints of composition, a movement toward greater attention to other modalities should proceed slowly and cautiously. Much of sound studies pedagogies seek to teach sound production (Ceraso, 2018, p. 25), but that is not my main interest here. In sum, though I value the production and appreciation of sound for its own sake, for the purposes of this dissertation, I am interested in the pedagogical use of music to support and teach alphanumeric composing/writing.

1.4 Following a Trodden Path

With new interest in, and emerging scholarship on musical pedagogies in the writing class, one might expect to ﬁnd these same practices in the college writing classroom. But of course, as Steven M. North (1987) has argued, the scholarly journal often does not ﬁnd its way into the classroom, and pedagogical practices are driven as much by “lore” as by scholarship. Therefore, scholars do not really know to what degree pedagogical realities match pedagogical theories. What to do?

5This also dissertation addresses writing courses other than ﬁrst-year composition. However, the majority of the discussion in the surveys and the interviews, as I will presently show, centers around FYC. See Figure 3.3 in Chapter 3.

9 In a similar situation, Daniel Anderson et al. (2006) noted that while multimodal pedagogy had been richly theorized, no “snapshot” existed of who was doing what in the classroom, and where (p. 60). Anderson and his colleagues observed that in order to get a real picture of how multimodality was being used in the college writing classroom, they needed to get beyond scholarship and speak with instructors as well as scholars, so they designed a national survey instrument to discover how instructors saw and used multimodality in the writing classroom. This dissertation begins with the same kind of exigence, and undertakes the same kind of project: to begin to describe how and why writing instructors are actually using music in the college writing classroom, and to consider to what degree these practices match up with an accepted pedagogical instrument in the ﬁeld, the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. There may be anecdotal accounts in places like the WPA listserv, and scholarship from scholars who speciﬁcally focus on music and aurality, but little is known about the use of music in the college writing classroom from any empirical study. This dissertation aims to occupy that niche.

1.5 Research Questions

There are three research questions this dissertation poses:

1. How do writing instructors use music pedagogically in their writing classes?

2. What purposes or values do instructors have for using music pedagogically in their writing classes?

3. How do the purposes of music-based writing pedagogy as deﬁned by the instructors relate to principles outlined in the third iteration of the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition?

In the remainder of this chapter, I will explain the three research questions this dissertation aims to answer, and then frame these questions in more depth, sequentially, by: (Research question 1): outlining existing scholarship in music as a tool for teaching writing using Erin Anderson’s (2014) three-domain framework; (Research question 2): employing Fulkerson’s (2005) framework for understanding philosophical commitments in writing pedagogy and considering music as a rhetorical option in the writing classroom using Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s (2012) four-part heuristic for interrogating new rhetorical options, and ﬁnally; (Research question 3): describing the (2014) WPA Outcomes statement and its value as a guide for writing pedagogy.

10 1.6 How Do Writing Instructors Use Music Pedagogically in Their Writing Classes?

In 2014, Erin Anderson claimed that, “. . . scholars of sonic rhetoric have worked to carve out a space for sound as a subject of rhetorical analysis, a material for multimodal text production, and a methodological model for alphabetic writing practice” [emphasis mine]. I find Anderson’s observation useful for understanding extant scholarship on musical pedagogies in the college writing classroom, so I adapt it here to frame the discussion. However, I tackle the categories in a slightly different order, since both make use of music as a metaphor, reversing the final two: I first discuss music and alphanumeric writing with its frequent use of metaphor, then discuss metaphor in multimodal writing pedagogy.

1.6.1 Music as Subject of Rhetorical Analysis

Lyrical Analysis, and Others. When music ﬁnds its way into the composition classroom, it is often categorized as pop culture, and conceived of an object of critique, as a text to be dissected, interrogated, digested, understood (Selfe, 2009). Early instances of this can be found in CCC articles about assigning freshman papers based on popular song lyrics (Kroeger, 1968)6 and critically interrogating Beatles songs (Carter, 1969). More recently, Brock Dethier and Cynthia Selfe have both complained that the use of music in the writing classroom is often reduced to lyrical analysis. Dethier put it this way:

The reasons for concentrating on lyrics are obvious: you can write them down and treat them the way you’d treat any other text; you can ask the same questions and point to the same issues as you would when discussing literature, so they’re comfortable for English teachers to work with; they’re user-friendly for students and teachers. . . (2004, p. 64).

Obviously, this approach only works when the music being analyzed contains lyrics. While these reasons are no doubt attractive to instructors whose primary training is in the linguistic mode, they tend to ignore the aﬀordances of music that distinguish it from purely linguistic texts. To adopt this approach is to treat music as an interesting cultural text, but the (aural) music itself as merely a delivery system for the (linguistic) lyrical content.

6Kroeger referenced studying tracks that he saw as “patent propaganda”: Barry McGuire’s scolding “Eve of Destruction” and the Spokesmen’s defensive “Dawn of Correction”. Both can be found on the Spotify playlist.

11 In From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music, Brock Dethier (2003) outlined a writing pedagogy that is uniquely intertwined with music. He claimed, for instance, that music can also offer effective ways to interrogate identity in the writing classroom. Additionally, although Dethier did not shy away from a more traditional lyrical analysis, his goal is to move beyond simple critique. While Dethier saw limited value in lyrical analysis, he also claimed that: One alternative to the lyrical fixation is focusing on the arrangement and production of the song, the instrumentation and the studio innovations and insider information about the making of the record. . . Talking about nonverbal qualities of music is difficult, but sometimes it can reveal essential lessons about songs and other forms of writing. (p. 64)

Students, for instance, can listen to the contrast between “rough” and “smooth” vocals against diﬀering instrumental sounds, and notice the way delivery aﬀects lyrics, either reinforcing them or subtly undermining them. To sing an angry protest song like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” for example, as a lounge tune, is to casually dismantle much of what gives the song its power, and suggest that, in fact, we’re prepared to take it quite cheerfully. Even so, as I will show, this project of describing non-linguistic phenomena in the writing classroom arrives with its own set of challenges.

Sound Description and the Problem of Vocabulary. Writing instructors have a rich vocabulary of disciplinary terms from which to draw—genre, composing, materiality, reflection, and so on—but in considering music as a pedagogical resource in the writing classroom, they face the problem of how to describe what they are hearing. Do they borrow terms from other disciplines, like music, or do they repurpose existing ones? Do they invent new ones? Katherine Ahern (2013) polled her English 101 classes over four semesters to discover what sound concepts were most salient, and found that terms that overlapped with “compositional” terms (melody, texture, harmony, arrangement) were less important to students than those unique to the affordances of sound (sound, timing, and loudness). At the same time, perhaps unsurprisingly, students seemed to remember whatever terms were emphasized in class the most that semester. This led Ahern to propose the metaphor of “tuning,” whereby students and instructor first harmonize their assumptions, then engage in thick description of the music, then recognize and negotiate difference: a kind of collaborative listening that, as Ahern notes, involved “very little discussion at first of the lyrics of a piece” (p. 84).

12 1.6.2 Music as Methodological Model for Writing Practice

Music as Metaphor for Alphanumeric Writing. When music is not being analyzed in the writing classroom, it is often positioned as analogical to some aspect of writing or the writing process. It is, in other words, metaphorical. As early as 1968, Marcia L. McElvain considered the relationship between “musical” and “literary” composition. She wondered how the composing processes of certain classical composers could translate into lessons for “literary” writing. She conceived, in other words, a metaphorical association between music and literary “composing,” and wondered to what degree the one mirrors the other. This search for ripe metaphors in music to apply to traditional, alphanumeric writing continues to this day. Bump Halbritter (2006), though he had doubts about the ability of academics immersed in the “silent, text-only ethos” to conceive them, saw the need for new metaphors for “hearing aural rhetoric in academic work” (pp. 330-331). Peter Elbow (1994) notably explored the metaphor of “voice” in “About Voice and Writing,” where he attempted—and achieved—a strong and nuanced defense of the voice metaphor in writing and writing pedagogy. Elbow also compared the form of writing to music in his (2006) discussion of music as a tool for arrangement. Other scholars (Hess, 2006; Wakeﬁeld, 2006) have compared hip-hop sampling to academic citation and research, troubling the easy relationship between intellectual borrowing and plagiarism. And Brock Dethier (2003) connected the idea of process with yet another metaphor: rehearsal. Taking issue with the romantic student tendency to see good writing as “spontaneous,” Dethier instead reminded readers that writers and musicians—even jazz musicians—have creative processes, using the examples of “false starts” in “Leap Frog” by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (p. 108).7 To be sure, the use of music as a metaphorical analogue to alphanumeric writing still assumes that alphanumeric writing is, and probably should be the primary object of study in the college writing classroom. Music becomes a useful way to understand writing, and possibly lowers barriers between music-loving students and writing, but the production of music, or indeed sound itself is rarely the ultimate goal. The linguistic mode remains primary.

1.6.3 Music as Material for Multimodal Production

Multimodal Metaphors. But there is a way, some scholars seem to suggest, to use musical metaphors in the study and teaching of writing without mainly or solely privileging the linguistic 7See ”Leap Frog” in the Spotify playlist.

13 mode. Jeﬀ Rice, troubling the traditional idea of literacy being rooted in topos, used the metaphor of hip-hop DJing to suggest “sounding out” (which seems to be a kind of assemblage) as the new focal point of literacy. He referenced the initial (1962) work of Marshall McLuhan, who claimed that “the new physics is an auditory domain and long-literate society is not at home in the new physics, nor will it ever be” (p. 267). He connected this to hip-hop by activating the idea of “dropping science,” and drew on DJ Spooky to claim that “writing is dj-ing” (p. 272). Ong’s (1982) use of the Greek word “rhapsodizing” (stitching a song together) is replaced by “the mix.” All of these ideas work together to comprise “ka-knowledge,” “the digital rhetorical practice of assemblage” (p. 277). And assemblage is far from limited to the linguistic mode. Instead, it comprises, as Rice argued, “all media” (p. 278).

Metaphor vs. Material. Even so, to treat music as a metaphorical analogue to writing, whether it be traditional alphanumeric writing or multimodal, is to sideline the materiality of sound. Jonathan Alexander (2015) recalled the work of Canadian pianist and sound artist Glenn Gould, whose groundbreaking work anticipated the “DIY aesthetic” of contemporary sound production as early as the 1950s. Sound, Alexander reminds us, is material: it is the movement of air, vibrating an eardrum; it is the embodied voice. Indeed, as feminist scholars have attended to rhetorical listening (Ratcliﬀe, 2006; Royster, 1996), Steph Ceraso (2014) applied an ecological lens to the act of listening, suggesting the term “multimodal listening” to encompass the idea of embodied, multisensory experiences of sound. Ceraso used the case study of deaf percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie to illustrate how sound can be seen and felt as well as heard, and proposed the term “earing” to describe an ear-based, traditional act of listening, seeing sound as a text. She suggested ways to “retrain” the ears of students to unlearn bad habits, and argued that the inclusion of multimodal listening in the composition classroom will not only help students become better consumers of sound, but also better producers.

New Multimodal Assignments. Courtney S. Dansworth and Kyle Stedman, in Soundwrit- ing Pedagogies (2018), suggested a series of etudes, which traditionally means musical instrumental skill-building exercises, for instructors and students to undertake in order to better understand the aﬀordances of sound. Although not all of them were focused on music—they ranged from robot voices to white noise—they did suggest experimenting with background music, and having students

14 write an original song based on a text as an exercise in paraphrasing and summarizing. They also discussed having students create technology-enabled “auto-songs,” as well as remixing music into “patchwork songs.” Katherine Ahern (2013) proposed two assignments: the “sonic object” whereby students are asked to design an object that uses sound to enhance a user’s experience; and an “embodied soundscape design,” where students create a “landscape made of sound.” In a similar vein, Mary E. Hocks and Michelle Comstock (2017) proposed the combination of an agenda of embodied listening, including analysis of music, with a semester-long sound compositional project.

1.7 What Purposes or Values Do Instructors Have for Using Music Pedagogically in Their Writing Classes? 1.7.1 What Purposes or Values Do Instructors Have...?

Scholars (Berlin, 1988; Fulkerson, 1990) have observed that while composition remains a core part of college curricula, there has historically been little consensus on how and why composition is to be taught. Richard Fulkerson (2005) proposed four central questions for understanding a theory or philosophy of composition in the 21st century: the axiological question (what makes writing “good?”); the process question (how do texts come into existence?); the pedagogical question (how is composition eﬀectively taught?); and the epistemological question (how do you know all this?). Interestingly, he declines to mention multimodality at all, apart from a footnote where he acknowledges he “omits several topics” including “computers and composition,” which is about as close as he gets, since he does not see these as constituting “approaches” to composition (p. 682). The responses to the article in the June, 2006 issue of CCC did not mention multimodality either, apart from a brief reference on the part of Alan Chidsey Dickson, euphemistically referring to multimodality as “technology,” but using visuals in composition textbooks to support his point (p. 749). Otherwise, apart from a vitriolic defense of his “current-traditional” pedagogy by Jeﬀrey Zorn, the responses can be boiled down to this: “thanks for the framework, but you are oversimplifying.” This is a fair point, of course: any framework will oversimplify. But if frameworks tend to minimize nuance in the service of clarity, instead of abandoning the framework for its shortcomings, I propose to retain it, and seek to shore it up. The goal is not to damn instructors to a pedagogical box for

15 all time, but simply to see if there are resonances between Fulkerson’s framework and ways that music is being used in the college writing classroom. Fulkerson identiﬁed three main perspectives on composition in the early 21st century: critical/cultural studies; contemporary expressivist; and rhetorical.8 Since I intend to use Fulkerson as a framework for understanding responses later in this dissertation, I will brieﬂy unpack these perspectives in this section.

Critical/Cultural Studies. The CCS approach, for Fulkerson, overemphasizes critical reading and interpretation, and reflects what he calls content envy on the part of the field. The danger is that this departicularizes composition courses–these kinds of critical/cultural courses could occur in any department–and encourages a standard of evaluation that is essentially mimetic in that it expects the student to reflect certain orthodoxies, usually held by the instructor. Additionally, all of the analysis might crowd out actual writing, and the likelihood of indoctrination into a particular ideological agenda is high. Though Fulkerson acknowledged that any pedagogy is ideological, he finds the idea that all education is indoctrination unconvincing.

Contemporary Expressivist. Fulkerson sees the rise of “consciousness-raising” feminist approaches to composition as enacting a renewed expressivism. Much attention is given to voice, self-discovery, and so on, and little to audience. In fact, as Fulkerson put it, “writing is a means of fostering personal development. . . ” (p. 667).

Rhetorical. Fulkerson sees the rhetorical approach to composition being enacted in three forms: composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as academic discourse, though he is baffled that there is little scholarship about any of these approaches. He sees a widespread use of the concept of argumentation in the field; he accused genre theorists of adopting a “quasi-scientific approach”; and he wondered whether there is actually a such thing as “academic discourse,” or whether instructors should be teaching it. Fulkerson is befuddled by the term post-process, finding it to be an oxymoron. He acknowledged some possible views (instructors are no longer constrained by a particular kind of process; instructors no longer research process), but claimed that all compositionists teach some kind of process.

8He assumed that the “current-traditional” category remains, even if it is somewhat less common than before.

16 Since each view of composition includes a pedagogical component, I assume that the use of music in the classroom will correspond, at least to some degree, to the instructor’s perspective on composition. For instance, if an instructor views music mainly as a text to be mined for insights about various cultural phenomena, I suspect that instructor holds to a critical/cultural studies view of composition, and if an instructor focuses upon student experiences with music, and even the composing of musical texts to reﬂect personal experiences, I suspect that instructor holds to an expressivist view of composition.

1.7.2 ...For Using Music Pedagogically in Their Writing Classes?

The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric (2012) by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel oﬀered, in the chapter on access, a four-part heuristic for interrogating new rhetorical options (this includes modes, media, technologies, and genres): semiotic potentials; cultural position; infrastructural accessibility; and de/specialization. Here, I apply that heuristic to music as a rhetorical option within the writing classroom, while bringing in relevant scholarship to develop responses. The goal, here, is to understand why instructors might use music pedagogically in their writing classrooms. In other words, what justiﬁcations exist?

Semiotic Potentials. Semiotic potentials are “the particular processes of semiosis that a given rhetorical option makes available”. The authors further unpacked this theme with these questions:

What semiotic work can this mode, medium, or technology perform? What communicative or persuasive power does it possess compared to other modes, media, and technologies? What are its limitations? How are the potentials of this new option revealed or masked by cultural practices? What cultural practices endow this mode, medium, or technology with potentials or impose on it limitations? Who has a stake in using this rhetorical form? Who beneﬁts and who loses when aﬀordances and constraints are assessed?

Yip Harburg, composer of tunes such as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “Over the Rain- bow,” famously quipped that ”Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought” (Teachout, 1993). Though a time-bound artifact like writing, an important rhetorical consideration of music is its apparent ability to bypass rational processes,

17 and do rhetorical work at a gut level. Scholars have found that music oﬀers several aﬀordances, including 1) creating atmosphere and setting in a space; 2) activating emotion; 3) generating mood; 4) Establishing tone, atmosphere, and setting; 5) activating personal associations; 6) freezing and keeping memories; 7) transitioning between things; 8) freezing something in history; and 9) activating “cultural and generational memories” (Rodrigue, Artz, Bennett, Carver, Grandmont, Harris, Hashem, Mooney, Rand, & Zimmerman, 2016).

Cultural Position. Cultural position is “the value assigned to a particular rhetorical option by various and overlapping cultural logics.” The authors went on to oﬀer these questions:

What images and metaphors do we associate with this mode, medium, or technology? What is our initial response to it? Where does this response come from? How is this mode, medium, or technology depicted within the myriad representational practices of the culture? What roles and status has it been assigned? Why? How prevalent is it? What practices are associated with it? How have these come to be? What systems of cultural values privilege or deprivilege this particular mode, medium, or technology? Why and how did this valuing come about? To what extent should this valuing be embraced? Critiqued? Reconﬁgured? How could things be otherwise? Are there potentials for this rhetorical form that are invisible to us, that are untapped? At our most imaginative, what uses can we envision for this rhetorical option?

Music, according to my students, is a “universal language.” They have used this descriptor so often, in fact, that I am tempted to ban it to keep it from becoming meaningless by overuse. But the phrase, attributed to Longfellow, is apt in a way: music has the ability to transcend time and space, and even communicate across language barriers. Still, the use of music—especially the production of music in the writing class—can be seen as less serious than “real” writing. Sheridan et al. (2012) complained that:

The institution of first-year writing as a narrowly word-focused endeavor functions to produce individuals who see writing as a mainstream, inevitable, and privileged form of rhetorical action and who see alternative forms, such as music, video, and animation, as somehow “other”: marginalized, nonserious, unimportant, ineffective. As it is typically configured, first-year writing produces writers, as distinct from multimodal public rhetors.

So it seems that music, while beloved, can still be regarded as fundamentally less serious than writing. And even if music is taken seriously as an object of study, critique, and production, the

18 affordances of using music in the writing classroom can be a double-edged sword. Some have noted the potential of music, when used in the writing class, to subvert the very academic ideas that are being taught (Sirc, 1997). Indeed, Bruce Horner (1995) observed that to teach writing through music is to invite certain conflicts. He quoted Lawrence Grossberg: students “jealously guard their music,” often feeling that instructors misrepresent and misunderstand it. Additionally, the nature of music can become a source of debate, where students enthrone the ineffable character of music, or the nature of experience can be called into question, which can functionally silence debate and critique with radical relativism: students can feel that their experience of music is theirs and theirs alone, and it is not up for debate or critique. In response to these problems, Horner repurposed Gerald Graff’s recommendation to “teach the conflict”—to embrace the differences between academic and popular conceptions of music, and to use them as a productive site of learning.

Infrastructural Accessibility. Infrastructural accessibility is “the material and intellectual resources necessary for a given rhetorical option to be deployed by a rhetor.” That is:

What technologies are— and are becoming— available? How much of an investment would need to be made in order to use these technologies effectively? How much time, money, space, effort would this rhetorical option involve? What raw materials (paper, ink, envelopes, etc.) are necessary? What people (e.g., IT support staff) and spaces (e.g., computer labs) would need to be accessed to accomplish rhetorical goals?

The availability of composing technologies, especially digital ones, bears on infrastructural accessibility. Courtney S. Dansforth and Kyle Stedman discussed this issue in their introduction to Soundwriting Pedagogies (2018), and argued that “our digital tools really simplify this stuﬀ and make it easier to bring it into the classroom.” They compared this to decades past, when “jerry- rigging” composing technologies might include “plugging the tape player into the back of the TV, and then into the back of the record player.” The availability of open-source composing software (discussed further in Chapter 5) bodes well for musical composition in the 21st-century classroom. However, the availability of the technologies does not guarantee ability to use them well or teach them well. Though the term “functional literacy” originally referred to a baseline amount of reading and writing ability, and the capacity to make meaning from texts, it has shifted, in the face of digital technology, to the ability to perform actions with technology. Stuart Selber

19 (2004) located functional literacies within the broad rubric of multiliteracies, along with critical and rhetorical literacies. For Selber, each literacy is associated with a metaphor, a subject position, and an objective. Functional literacy sees “computers as tools,” students as “users of technology,” and “effective employment” as the ultimate goal (p. 25). While Selber acknowledged that too much attention to functional literacy can occlude systematic injustices perpetuated by uncritical use of technology, and potentially revealed by critical literacies, he is equally insistent that functional literacies supply a necessary foundation for the other two. Selber proposed five parameters in the pedagogy of functional literacies, which correspond with five qualities of a functionally literate student:

1. A functionally literate student uses computers eﬀectively in achieving educational goals;

2. A functionally literate student understands the social conventions that help determine computer use;

3. A functionally literate student makes use of the specialized discourses associated with computers;

4. A functionally literate student eﬀectively manages his or her online world;

5. A functionally literate student resolves technological impasses conﬁdently and strategically. (p. 45)

De/Specialization. Finally, de/specialization is “the range of perceptions concerning the use of a given rhetorical form by nonspecialists.” Additional heuristic questions are:

What forms of specialized knowledge and skills are associated with the eﬀective use of this mode, medium, or technology? What institutional and professional structures govern access to this specialized knowledge and these skills? On what is this system based? What material and cultural realities does it reﬂect and reproduce? Who stands to gain from it? Is this system desirable? Should it be embraced or resisted?

It is unclear what the role of the instructor should be in teaching functional literacies. In 2019, it is fair to say that most humanists see computers as an inevitable part of modern life, though some are more resigned than excited about this reality. And even if computers are inevitable, digital multimodal composition is still a diﬃcult thing to sell to some faculty. Debra Journet (2007) considered the challenges of turning to multimodal instruction as a “senior faculty member,” identifying two

20 sources of tension: learning the technologies, and ﬁnding the ways that multimodality connects to course outcomes (p. 110). So one obstacle to overcome is whether multimodality (and she has digital multimodality in mind here) is an appropriate subject for composition courses, but alongside that is the question of how she should teach it. Though Journet insisted that the learning of the technologies is actually not as diﬃcult as she initially believed, she provided a snapshot of faculty resistance to learning these technologies. One problem is fear of the unknown. For instance, she noted that despite her wide range of continually-developing expertise,

. . . very little since that ﬁrst decade (with the exception of becoming a department chair) has seemed as abrupt and new, as frightening and exciting, as this most recent reinvention—into someone who tries to know and use multimodal technologies, to read and think critically about their value in the English curriculum, and to incorporate them into her teaching and scholarship. (p. 110)

She is very likely not alone here. Instructors struggle to connect digital multimodal composing to traditional writing curricula, and to compose digitally themselves.

1.8 How Do the Purposes of Music-Based Writing Pedagogy as Deﬁned by the Instructors Relate to Principles Outlined in the Third Iteration of the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement?

The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (2014) is designed to identify “outcomes for first-year composition programs in U.S. postsecondary education.” First approved in 2000, then amended in 2008, the statement has become a useful tool for first-year composition programs throughout the U.S. and beyond, suggesting pedagogical outcomes that can then be adapted to local, institutional standards and benchmarks. It was revised for the third time by a special task force in 2014 to reflect “changes in the field and current practices in first-year writing” (Dryer, Bowden, Brunk-Chavez, Harrington, Halbritter, & Yancey, p. 129). The statement consists of four outcomes: rhetorical knowledge; critical thinking, writing, and composing; processes; and knowledge of conventions. The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011) is largely based on the WPA Outcomes Statement, and adds “habits of mind” as well as “abilities to compose in multiple environments” as essential competencies for success in postsecondary writing.

21 In this dissertation, I use the WPA Outcomes Statement as a way to compare current practices in music-based writing pedagogy to accepted best practices in the field. This is because despite alternative methods of framing pedagogy in the field such as threshold concepts (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015) and Writing about Writing (Downs & Wardle, 2007), the WPA Outcomes Statement remains, for now, the sturdiest and most trustworthy instrument of its kind, because 1) it has been the subject of significant scholarship ;9 2) it has been constructed through consensus and dialogue10 ; 3) it has been continually in use for almost 20 years; 4) it has undergone three revisions; and 5) it has undergirded other instruments such as the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. The statement consists of these outcomes:

• Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze and eﬀectively address the rhetorical situation, including attention to audience, purpose, conventions, and context, and to understand and apply concepts like tone, design, and genre, and to attend to technological options, all within a rhetorical mindset.

• Critical thinking, writing, and composing involves the ability to analyze and evaluate texts of all kinds, and to tease out ideas, contexts, arguments, and evidence, as well as reading for patterns and responding eﬀectively. This outcome addresses the selection and gathering of sources as well, as well as the employment of strategies such as interpretation and synthesis.

• Processes are the ways that writers compose, which are “seldom linear” and are and should be ﬂexible. This outcome attends to robust knowledge of process, including drafting, feedback, revision, collaboration, and reﬂection.

• (Knowledge of) conventions are expected features of genres, conditioned by audience expectations, and consist of things like structure and format as well as grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

While it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to rule on what practices are in or out of bounds, or even what practices are pedagogically eﬀective, I hope to use these comparisons to begin a conversation about the pedagogical appropriateness of music-based writing instruction, especially for those instructors and writing programs that are interested in best practices and outcomes in the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition.

9Including two full-length manuscripts: Behm, Glau, Holdstein, Roen, and White (2013); Harrington, Rhodes, Fischer, and Malenczyk (2005). 10The most recent iteration involved informal surveys of 27 WPAs and a 40 member workshop session aimed at developing ideas about digital literacies. Then, a formal survey was deployed and collected 223 responses. Finally, the outcomes were drafted and revised based on feedback from over 200 stakeholders (Dryer et al., 2014, pp. 131-134).

22 1.9 The Structure of This Dissertation

In this chapter, I have introduced the exigence for this dissertation, outlined the history of interest in music within the field of rhetoric and composition, and argued that music should be understood as an example of the aural mode within a multiliteracies framework. I then presented the research questions that guide this dissertation, and considered the relevant literature that addresses each research question. I now turn to the remainder of this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I introduce my epistemological assumptions about research, then outline the research methods within this dissertation. I consider the value of survey research, describe the Qualtrics survey I created and deployed, and then introduce the coding scheme and methodology for the survey results. Then, I explain the interviewee selection process, provide the semi-structured interview questions, and describe the interviewees and research environments. Finally, I note Institutional Review Board (IRB) considerations. In Chapter 3, I provide the results of the Qualtrics survey. Beginning with demographic data, I both show demographic data results by question and construct snapshots of representative survey respondents and their institutional environments. Then, I provide responses to the close-ended questions. Finally, I include the results of the open-ended (narrative) questions, along with relevant codes and frequency of code occurrence. In Chapter 4, I discuss the semi-structured interview results. Proceeding by question and responses, I conduct close readings of the interview transcripts to compare interviewee responses, mine them for themes, and begin to generalize about their similarities and differences. In Chapter 5, I consider the implications of the survey and interview results. Using Fulker- son’s (2005) framework, I identify examples of four different pedagogical approaches to the writing classroom involving music. In the process, I also consider how the rhetorical options framework (Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, 2012) intersects with the results, as well as the outcomes in the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement. Finally, I note how my own pedagogical practices address other practices identified in the results. In Chapter 6, I reflect on the results, and then reframe them using the lenses of academic hospitality and play. Academic hospitality, as defined by Haswell, Haswell, and Blalock (2009), is in “essence. . . host and guest, strangers to one another who yet accept in good faith their equality in dignity, privilege, and value. . . ” (p. 709). In this chapter, I argue that music has traditionally

23 been a feature of hospitality, and that music in the writing classroom can help create an egalitarian space where writing can be taught and negotiated. I also combine this with the idea of play (Batt, 2010), where reality is brieﬂy suspended in order to create a space where learning make take place through (apparently) useless activities. Finally, I propose pedagogical implications for the dissertation, acknowledge weaknesses, and pose future directions for research.

Figure 1.1: Mapping theorists and their perceptions of sound.

24 CHAPTER 2

METHODS

In the previous chapter, I introduced the exigence for this dissertation and posed the three research questions that guide this study. To set up the disciplinary context for the use of music in the teaching of college writing, I ﬁrst claimed that music belongs in the category of aurality as described by Selfe (2009). Then, using Erin Anderson’s (2014) framework to organize the relevant scholarship about music, where writing instructors tend to use sound/music: “. . . as a subject of rhetorical analysis, a material for multimodal text production, and a methodological model for alphabetic writing practice [emphasis mine]”, I outlined the current disciplinary conversation about music in the writing classroom. Then, I described Richard Fulkerson’s (2005) framework for understanding approaches to composition pedagogy in order to address the reasons instructors might have for using music in their particular pedagogical practices. Finally, I used Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s (2012) four-part heuristic for interrogating new rhetorical options to the possible reasons for using music in the writing classroom: semiotic potentials; cultural position; infrastructural accessibility; and de/specialization. In this chapter, I introduce the research philosophy of this dissertation, and describe the Qualtrics survey construction and coding scheme, as well as the interview methodology and inclusion criteria. I also show how the survey and interview questions address the three central research questions of the dissertation: 1) How do music instructors use music pedagogically in their writing classes? 2) What purposes or values do instructors have for using music pedagogically in their writing classes? and 3) How do the purposes of music-based writing pedagogy as deﬁned by the instructors relate to principles outlined in the third iteration of the (2014) WPA Outcomes Statement?

2.1 How and Why Should Research Be Conducted?

Although this is not an experimental study, it is an empirical one, which “is grounded in the belief that direct observation of phenomena is an appropriate way to measure reality and generate

25 truth about the world” (Given, 2008). Empirical study seeks a measure of reproducibility, meaning that if the data set is provided to other researchers, they have the opportunity to test ﬁndings for themselves. However, since empirical study is linked to logical positivism, which is the belief that when correct practices are followed and valid observations are captured, objective truth is accessible, it has undergone criticism. Given (2008) wrote:

Critical theory, feminist stances, and some social constructionist stances would state largely that issues of epistemological criteria must be considered within a larger political framework where power relations, in particular, are addressed. In postmodern qualitative work, for example, rhetorical and aesthetic persuasion and coherence may play a key role in shaping the work, leading to a shift in dissemination toward literature and performance as representational forms.

Accordingly, rhetoric and composition researchers have grappled with ways of researching in the ﬁeld, especially given the messy and contextual nature of writing. As critiques of logical positivism in research have given way to general cynicism about the project of knowledge construction, researchers may wonder how and why they should research at all. Donna Haraway (1988) has shown that empirical inquiry and feminist critiques of logical positivism are not necessarily irreconcilable. Instead of succumbing to the ”god trick” of either objec- tivity or hard relativism, Haraway suggested what she calls ”situated knowledges,” where sources of knowledge are multiple and able to be changed. It is accepted today that research is situated and conditioned by the interests and positionality of the researcher. Instead of seeking objective knowledge, in this dissertation I seek validity in two ways. First, I undertake description by means of survey data, both demographic and narrative; semi-structured interviews; and analysis of course materials. Second, I employ triangulation, which is the use of multiple methods—in this case, survey research and targeted interviews—to achieve greater understanding of the phenomena in question (Given, 2008). The why for this dissertation has to do with a lack of knowledge about ﬁeld-wide pedagogical practices using music. Such knowledge is useful for three reasons. First, it allows me to test my impressions of a phenomenon like the use of music in the writing classroom against a larger range of responses. Second, it can enrich understanding of the pedagogical practices of using music, and how they might line up with accepted outcomes statements like the WPA Outcomes. Third, it can

26 make way for policy additions or changes, as well as additional research into music in the writing classroom.

2.2 Survey

The use of surveys in the service of exploration and description is well-established in the field (Anderson et al., 2006; Thaiss & Porter, 2010). I have already discussed Anderson et al.’s use of a national survey to describe how multimodality was being used in the writing classroom. More recently, though, Chris Thaiss and Tara Porter (2010) designed and deployed a survey to discover how “alive and well” Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is within the field of rhetoric and composition. When little is known about a given set of practices, such as if and how and for what purposes writing instructors use music to teach college writing, surveys are a good means of describing existing phenomena (MacNealy, 1999). Survey research first defines a population (N ), which is the pool of all possible participants in a given study, and then selects a sample (n), which is the actual pool of participants (Lauer & Asher, 1988). The population here is all instructors who teach college writing and use music in some way in their teaching. However, since no publicly-recognized list of such a population is available, this survey used snowball sampling, a nonprobability sampling technique that allows a population to identify other possible survey respondents based on a given characteristic: the use of music in the writing classroom (MacNealy, 1999). Though snowball sampling is often used with populations that are potentially vulnerable to public exposure such as drug dealers (Atkinson & Flint, 2001), it is also a useful technique for populations that are not necessarily vulnerable, but otherwise “hidden”. The main drawback, of course, is generalizability—snowball sampling necessarily identifies a small, particular subset of a larger population—but since this is an exploratory study that does not intend to generalize, this drawback can be seen as an acceptable risk. For this dissertation, I designed a survey, built it in the Qualtrics software platform, pilot tested it with several colleagues, revised it, and distributed to rhetoric and writing instructors through the WPA and Writing Center listservs. The FSU IRB-approved Qualtrics survey (Appendix A) was left open until August, 2017, and consists of a section of eight demographic questions, a section of four institutional information questions, and a section of eight closed and open-ended questions

27 aimed at discovering if, to what degree, how, and for what purposes writing and rhetoric instructors use music in teaching rhetoric and writing. Because little is known about the population using music in the writing classroom, the survey begins with demographic questions such as racial and ethnic identification (choose more than one if desired); highest level of education completed; graduate degrees currently held; current professional identity; years teaching at the college level; and job responsibilities that apply. The intention here is to learn as much as is ethical and possible about the makeup of the population that responded to the survey call. Next, the survey provides a section on institutional information, which includes questions about: type of current institution; highest degree granted by current institution; institutional size; and geographic region. This information provides a baseline for identifying trends in music-related teaching in the field. See Figure 2.1. The final section of the survey is “Use of Music in the Writing Classroom,” and it contains three close-ended questions, four open-ended questions, and a request for an email if willing to be contacted for an additional interview. I illustrate how these questions correlate to the research questions in Table 2.1. The survey was pilot tested with several colleagues in the English (rhetoric and composition) doctoral program at FSU. The feedback was mostly positive, although two respondents complained that the survey seemed inapplicable to them. For instance, there were originally questions about whether the respondent was, themselves, a musician, and whether they, themselves, composed music. In conversations with the pilot testers and my major professor, I realized I was overlaying an unspoken expectation of mine: that instructors who use music in the writing classroom are, themselves, musicians, and in doing so, I ran the risk of alienating a good part of the survey population. I decided to remove those sections, and allow respondents to discuss their own musicianship in the open-ended questions if they so chose. See Figure 2.2 for an example of questions which were removed. A recruiting email was sent to both listservs on May 2, 2017, containing the survey URL and a request to forward the email to any colleagues who are interested in teaching writing with music.

28 2.3 Survey Distribution

To distribute surveys for this dissertation, I drew on two professional listservs: The WPA listserv, and the WCenter listserv. The WPA listserv is a logical choice for this for two reasons: First, it is an “international e-mail discussion list intended primarily for individuals who are involved in writing program administration at universities, colleges, or community colleges” that has been in operation since 1993 (Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2017). Second, as discussed previously, my informal inquiry leads me to believe that there is a good deal of innovative pedagogy related to music being undertaken in writing classes. The WCenter listserv is also a useful research environment because it is “a mailing list for Writing Centers around the world” (2017). I used these listservs to deploy the Qualtrics survey to writing instructors, and to collect interested parties for follow-up interviews. For the sake of this dissertation’s scope, I limited my interactions to instructors themselves, based on responses to a Qualtrics survey deployed on a national listserv, targeted follow-up interviews, and examination of teaching and planning documents.

2.4 Coding 2.4.1 Units of Analysis and Issues

For the purposes of analysis, the unit of analysis for this dissertation was a complete thought. This diﬀers from a T-unit in that it might involve more than one “move” in making meaning (Geisler, 2004), but if such a move occurs, it must amplify or qualify the previous sentence. For example, here is a typical response to an open-ended survey question:

When I teach students about genre, I start with a genre they’re familiar with–music. I play a YouTube video that goes through the alphabet and visually and verbally goes through corresponding music genres. After watching the video, the students and I discuss the various features they saw and what was used to convey each genre.

I could take the ﬁrst T-unit (“When I teach students about genre, I start with a genre they’re familiar with—music)” as a unit of analysis, but to do so would be to miss the additional context supplied by the remainder of the response: an explanation of the actual assignment used to teach genre. So units of analysis, for the purposes of this dissertation, can be as small as a clause, or as large as an entire response to an interview or survey question.

29 Sometimes it was clear when a survey respondent intended several thoughts in response to a question, such as when they used a “planning” phrase (“I use music in my class in three ways. . . ”), indicating a subordinating style sentence:

I’ve used it in at least three ways: * to teach genre; * to discuss rhetoric, discourse; * to talk about students’ writing processes; (and a fourth: just because/for fun/for mood/for enjoyment/to make the classroom less sterile)

Other times, when a looser, more additive style is employed, we had to guess a fair amount:

In the past, I often used music to teach album reviews as a way to think through analysis of a text. More recently I have moved to a multi-modal approach that features music as an option for end of term projects (I have had students compose songs for end of term projects), and I also have extensive conversations about research, citation, copyright, and intellectual property engaging use of music in various projects (ﬁlms, presentations, etc.).

In this example, the respondent seems to be saying that they teach album reviews as a way of teaching analysis. However, then they switch to multimodal production (composing songs), and mention research, citation, and copyright/intellectual property. If we are looking for one main theme, we are probably not going to get it; at the very least, we have codes for analysis and multimodality. However, we then have to decide whether to double-code and include research, citation, and copyright/intellectual property. Other times, respondents used terms in a way that was unfamiliar to us. For example, they might use a rhetorical term with which were familiar in a way that hinted that they intended a diﬀerent meaning:

Using media arts, including music, for the compare/contrast essay not only helps the students learn the rhetorical mode, but introduces media analysis and considering multiple perspectives.

The respondent seems to be thinking of rhetoric not as a mode in the Kressian sense, but as a mode of composition, like comparison/contrast. What is unclear is whether the respondent thinks of all of the possible modes as falling under the umbrella of rhetoric (for instance, rhetorical modes might include description; comparison/contrast; cause/eﬀect; etc), or whether s/he sees rhetorical modes as standing alongside other modes. They also use terms that are not usually employed in rhetoric and composition, such as media arts and media analysis.

30 2.4.2 Second Coder

I employed a second coder to increase reliability: My major professor and I independently coded the entire corpus, and we compared results. Where results diﬀered, we attempted to reach agreement via dialogue. I further explain this process in the following section.

2.4.3 Coding Process

I used an inductive coding scheme in order to address my research questions of what musical pedagogical practices instructors are using and why. I employed this data for additional context and to further illuminate issues that the closed-ended questions did not allow for. During the course of coding the survey responses, the initial coding scheme underwent several changes. Initially, the categories were as follows:

• Music as analogous to writing

• Music and technological problems

• Music as academic hospitality

• Music as background

• Music as instructor expertise

• Music as less academically rigorous

• Music as public vs. private experience

• Music causes student resistance

• Music connecting academy to public life

• Music for student engagement

• Music making good pedagogical sense

• Music to activate prior knowledge and experience

• Music to teach audience and situation

• Music to teach copyright/left

• Music to teach critical analysis

• Music to teach genre

31 • Music to teach multimodality

• Music to teach process

• Music to teach revision

• Music to teach style

However, in continuing to apply codes and in discussion with my second coder, I realized that the list contained too many categories, and was still growing. I revised the coding categories by larger theme, and arrived at the following: Music as analogous to writing

• Music to teach audience and situation;

• Music to teach process;

• Music to teach revision;

• Music to teach style;

• Music to teach copyright/left;

• Music to teach critical analysis;

• Music to teach genre;

• Music to teach multimodality

Music as academic hospitality

• Music as background;

• Music for student engagement;

• Music connecting academy to public life;

• Music to activate prior knowledge and experience

Music as problem

• Music and technological problems

• Music as instructor expertise

• Music as less academically rigorous

32 • Music as public vs. private experience

• Music causes student resistance

Note that even at that point I was thinking of music in the writing classroom as an instantiation of academic hospitality. My second coder and I began independently coding responses using this coding scheme, but our results differed significantly. Additionally, I was still unsatisfied with the categories, as they were insufficient to capture all of the question responses. Categories tended to work only on one question, so I added several categories. An example of my notes during this process is in Figure 2.3, and my emerging categories in Table 2.2. My second coder and I began coding with this scheme, and in the process, we reached 90% agreement when coding the fourth question. At this point, we finalized the scheme and re-coded all of the data. Coding was undertaken this way: after dividing responses by question, each individual question/response set was coded separately by myself and my second coder. We initially attempted to do this with the NVivo software package, but I decided that the drawbacks—especially the steep learning curve—outweighed the benefits for this project. I instead turned to Microsoft Word, and employed the Comment function to highlight units of thought and apply codes. Initially, both coders decided on units of thought independently, but after several conversations it became clear that the two researchers were seeing units of different lengths. Therefore, I began identifying units of thought in advance of coding (see Figure 2.4). For an example of survey open-ended question codes, see Appendix D.

2.4.4 Final Coding Scheme

Code as Student interest, access, cultural relevance, taste, and preference any unit of thought that refers to environments in which instructors refer to students being interested in, motivated by, and/or knowledgeable about music. This includes referring to:

• music connecting to students culturally in some way;

• music giving students an entry point into writing. Or:

• suggesting a way to welcome students into the writing classroom (academic hospitality; note that this overlaps with Background noise);

33 • alternately, students or instructor may not be adequately prepared to write with and about music;

• students and instructors have diﬀerent tastes in music, and prefer diﬀerent styles and songs;

• this can extend into issues of appropriateness too, including what counts as “oﬀensive,” what’s too loud, etc. This code can overlap with Aﬀect and distraction.

Code as Aﬀect and distraction any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors see music as keyed to emotion. This includes referring to:

• music being used to activate, express, or acknowledge emotions or mood. Or:

• Music being used as an emotional bridge to writing (academic hospitality); Or

• negatively, aﬀect may cause student resistance to music-based pedagogy;

• students are connected with music in ways that may work against academic progress;

• personal feelings about music may occlude more objective analysis;

• students may show resistance to analyzing music.

Code as Background noise any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors use music as part of the classroom landscape. This includes referring to:

• students being motivated, calmed, encouraged, and welcomed (academic hospitality; note that this overlaps with Student interest, access. . . ) through it;

• using music as a device to inﬂuence ambiance,

• using music to block group-to-group noise,

• using background music to encourage creativity,

• using music to build a sense of community;

• using it to encourage concentration.

Code as Rhetoric, argument, audience, and style any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors explicitly associated music with rhetoric. This can include:

• mention of rhetorical terms like ethos, pathos, and logos;

• or audience;

34 • or discussion of style (rhetorical devices, etc).

Code as Intellectual property any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors use music as a way to teach copyright and/or intellectual property, or issues centering around these topics, including:

• plagiarism;

• fair use;

• citation.

Code as Cultural and critical analysis any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors have students analyze music critically, but not necessarily with a rhetorical lens. This can include:

• analyzing for cultural and critical themes;

• analyzing for literary themes and concepts.

Code as Genre any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors use music speciﬁcally to teach genre. Code as Modes and media any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors mention (multi)modality or (multi)media in terms of multiliteracies. Additionally, students may be taught to compose musically as part of the aural mode. Code as Parallel, structure, processes, revision, and editing any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors discuss process, especially in terms of equating the composition processes of musical and linguistic composers. This also includes:

• music is used to teach writing structure (transitions, introductions, conclusions, hooks, etc),

• music is used to teach revision;

• music is used to teach editing.

Code as Remix and remediation any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors use music within units, courses, or assignments that teach remix and/or remediation. For example, other assignments may be remediated as musical compositions, or vice versa.

35 Code as Content, topic, or theme any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors use music as a content area for assignments, units, or even entire courses. Usually this is because either students, instructor, or both are very familiar with music. Code as Memory, transfer, and overlap any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which instructors use music as an aid to memory. This includes referring to:

• instructors having diﬃculty ﬁnding ways to teach concepts through music;

• students struggling to apply other concepts to music, or to apply concepts learned through music to other situations;

• instructors and students having success transferring knowledge from music into another domain, or from another domain into music.

Code as Technology, time, and resources any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which technology stalls or fails when using music in teaching, or technology is useful in teaching music. This also includes referring to time and/or resources as factors when teaching with or through music. Code as Rigor any unit of thought that refers to the environments in which students or other stakeholders may feel that music is a less rigorous way to approach writing instruction. This also includes:

• the idea that insuﬃcient “scholarly” sources exist for research;

• the idea that insuﬃcient theory exists in teaching writing with and through music.

2.5 Targeted, Semi-Structured Interviews

One source of validity in this empirical dissertation is triangulation, or the use of more than one research method. Having discussed surveys, I now turn to case studies, which are particular instances of some observed phenomena. In this case, the phenomena in question is the use of music in the college writing classroom, and the case studies comprise collection of materials and semi-structured interviews with self-selected interviewees. Robert S. Weiss (1994) wrote that interviews provide several things: the ability to develop “de- tailed descriptions”; the capacity to integrate “multiple perspectives”; a way to “describe process”; a means to “develop holistic description”; a tool from “learning how events are interpreted”; the

36 capacity to “bridge subjectivities” or empathize with the respondent as an actor; and a framework for “identifying variables and framing hypotheses for quantitative research” (pp. 9-11). Semi- structured interviews begin with a set of pre-determined yet open-ended questions, and the interview is allowed to develop naturally, following conversational directions opened up by both inter- viewer and interviewee. These interviews set up the inquiry as a kind of “collaboration” between the two parties (Given, 2008). The goal of these interviews was to gain a greater understanding of how these interviewees use music in their writing courses, and why. In order to find participants for the interviews, I used the following selection criteria: 1) respondents who rated their use of music at “3” or higher on question 14 of the survey; 2) respondents who provided an email address on question 21 of the survey, which indicated their willingness to be interviewed; and 3) respondents who wrote responses to the open-ended questions on the survey. Based on these criteria, I identified a pool of 17 of the survey respondents to contact for potential interviews. From this pool, I narrowed the list to 14 because three of the willing participants are well-known to me, and I do not want my existing relationship with them to influence my research. I sent an email to the 14 subjects of my list requesting a follow-up interview. To this email I attached both the IRB Consent Form (see Appendix E) and the list of interview questions (below). I also requested that interviewees consider responding with any course materials that they have used: rubrics, assignment sheets, and syllabi that relate to the teaching of writing through music.11 After initial contacts and follow up attempts, five participants responded affirmatively, and I set up interviews. These subjects were given a choice of being interviewed via phone (and audio recording) or being interviewed via video chat, using Skype or Google Hangout, and screencast recording. In keeping with the protocol of semi-structured interviews, I prepared a list of questions (Given, 2008), but l pursued conversational threads that went outside of the prepared list. The questions asked were as follows: (Before beginning interview)

• Do you understand the purpose and your involvement in this study?

• Do you have any questions and/or concerns about this study and your involvement in it?

(Assuming satisfactory responses)

11Although most of the participants provided some materials, no one provided syllabi.

37 1. Can you tell me about the context of your department? Can you give me a brief description of the course(s) in which you use music-based teaching in the writing classroom? Students?

2. How do you use music in your teaching?

3. Why music? Do you see music-based pedagogy attaching to speciﬁc programmatic or course goals, or do you have other reasons for using it?

4. Tell me about some students who have really connected with the music-based teaching? What have they been able to do with it?

5. Tell me about some students who have really struggled with the music-based teaching? Where do they seem to run into the most trouble?

6. What challenges have you encountered? Can you tell me a time or example?

7. How would you like to see yourself using music in more or diﬀerent ways in the classroom in the future?

8. Anything else you’d like to share?

2.5.1 Transcribe Software

After recording interview responses, audio and video files were uploaded into the Transcribe software platform for transcription. Transcribe is a browser-based transcription tool that embeds an audio player in a text editor interface. Because it is local to the computer on which it is used (it is not, for instance, a cloud-based service), it is secure. Most notably, Transcribe offers a robust diction engine. Therefore, I was able to listen to the interview recordings on headphones, pausing periodically to speak the content aloud for the dictation engine (see Figure 2.5). During transcription, I made choices about recurring and filler phrases and verbal tics. For instance, I chose not to note when either I or the interviewee began a sentence and then stopped and went a different direction, unless this seemed important for understanding the sentence. I also chose not to include verbal tics like “uh,” “um,” and “hmm,” unless they seemed important for understanding a given sentence. In order to ensure that I did not miss nuances, I sent transcriptions to the interviewees and asked for additions, subtractions, or clarifications before coding.

2.5.2 Interviewees

The ﬁve qualifying instructors who responded to the interview invitation were as follows:

38 Instructor 1— Ms. Rap. Ms. Rap was interviewed via phone at 11:00 AM on July 14, 2017. She is an assistant director of a writing center, and has experience teaching ﬁrst-year composition in both four-year and two-year institutions. Rap holds a master’s in rhetoric, composition, and professional communication, and rates her use of music in the classroom as a “3.”

Instructor 2— Mr. Folk. Mr. Folk was interviewed via phone at 8:00 AM on August 8, 2017. He is a full-time senior lecturer. In addition to being a writer, he describes himself as a “storyteller and songwriter,” and he rates his use of music in the classroom as a “5”.

Instructor 3— Ms. Pop. Ms. Pop was interviewed via phone at 9:30 AM on August 8, 2017. She is a Ph.D student in rhetoric and writing at a large Southeastern university, and teaches professional and technical writing in an engineering department as well as teaching ﬁrst- year composition. She rates her use of music in the classroom as a “5”.

Instructor 4— Ms. Glam. Ms. Glam was interviewed via phone at 9:30 AM on August 9, 2017. She is a Ph.D candidate in literacy, rhetoric, and social practice. Glam has a rich set of experiences teaching writing through music, and rates her use of music in the classroom as a “5”.

Instructor 5— Ms. Opera. Ms. Opera was interviewed via phone at 10:45 AM on October 5, 2017. Opera is a Ph.D student in composition, rhetoric, and English studies. She has won teaching awards in the department, and rates her use of music in the classroom as a “3”.

2.5.3 Institutional Environments

The instructors also represented a range of institutional environments:

Community College. Pop described her institutional contexts as “traditional English departments at two diﬀerent community colleges in Maryland.” Rap also worked in a community college, describing it as “very small,” with open admissions. She taught a required class, English 105, which was a FYC course centered on expository writing and introduction to rhetoric.

Large Public University. Glam and Opera both work in large public universities, and Rap worked at a large public university until she took her current position as a writing center director. Glam explained that her department has “set learning outcomes,” but “a lot of freedom” in the ways that instructors can meet those outcomes, and what kinds of modules, units, and assignments they design and deploy. She also noted that there is a mix of students in the institution, from a

39 range of ages, socioeconomic brackets, and ethnicities. Finally, she explained that English courses are capped at 19 students in her institution. Opera teaches at a large public university also, and has taught FYC as well as advanced composition and technical writing. She notes that the department teaches upwards of 6000 students per year, everything from ﬁrst-year students to juniors and seniors. Opera has taught in the department for ﬁve years. Rap has taught in a speech communication department of a large university in the Midwest, where she taught an introductory public speaking class that covered oral and written rhetoric. The course, she explained, was a required course that served around 1200 students a semester. However, Rap currently serves as an assistant director of a writing center of large public university.

Private Religious-aﬃliated University. Folk described his institution as “exclusive and expensive,” Catholic (Jesuit), with an emphasis on social justice. Many of the students, Folk explains, come from “rich families,” though there are quite a few scholarships available. He teaches six of the seven required “critical thinking and writing” courses, which are ten-week courses, taught back-to-back. As Folk notes, they are “basically freshman comp.”

2.5.4 Supporting Documents

I requested syllabi, assignment sheets, rubrics, and any other music-related pedagogy documents from interviewees, and several documents were provided. Interviews, since they ampliﬁed previous survey responses, were not coded, but were closely read for themes. See Table 2.2, below, for list and explanations.

2.6 IRB Considerations

Permission was obtained by both listservs to conduct research therein. No vulnerable populations were speciﬁcally targeted for this dissertation. My assumption is that all instructors are at least 18 years of age, and all respondents were required to digitally sign an informed consent form (Appendix E) in order to proceed. Anonymity was guaranteed by not requiring an email address in order to complete the survey, making it possible for instructors to complete the survey without any personal follow-up from me. All responses were stored in a password-protected Qualtrics ac-

40 count, accessible only to me. Dissertation-related documents were housed in a password-protected Dropbox folder. All will be destroyed by January, 2020. Participants in the unstructured interviews were approached via email, and any additional music-related materials (syllabi, assignment sheets, rubrics, lesson plans, etc) were requested before the interview. These materials were housed in a password-protected Dropbox folder, and will be destroyed by January, 2020. Interview participants were given a choice between conversing via phone or via Skype/Google Hangout. All of the interviewees chose phone interviews.

Figure 2.1: Example demographic survey questions.

41 Table 2.1: Correlating research and survey questions.

42 Table 2.2: Emerging coding categories.

43 Table 2.3: Supporting materials collected.

44 Figure 2.2: Questions removed from survey after pilot testing.

45 Figure 2.3: Example section of coding notes.

46 Figure 2.4: Example of coding in Microsoft Word using Comment function.

Figure 2.5: Transcribe software interface.

47 CHAPTER 3

SURVEY RESULTS

In the ﬁrst chapter of this dissertation, I introduced the exigence and guiding questions of this project, and in the previous chapter, I outlined the methodology of this dissertation, including a Qualtrics survey deployed to two national listservs. The purpose of this survey was to understand who is using music in the writing classroom; where and when it occurs; why it is employed; and how. As discussed in Chapter 2, this survey consists of a section of eight demographic questions, a section of four institutional information questions, and a section of eight closed and open-ended questions aimed at discovering if, to what degree, how, and for what purposes writing and rhetoric instructors use music in teaching rhetoric and writing. In this chapter, I consider the responses to that survey in three sections: survey demographics, closed-ended questions, and open-ended questions. The Qualtrics survey received 93 responses. In this section, I break down the demographic and textual responses to the survey.

3.1 Survey Demographics 3.1.1 A Typical Respondent by the Numbers

The ﬁrst goal was to capture some key information about respondents in the form of demographic data, which should provide a baseline for interpreting the reach of the survey. By using the descriptor(s) with the highest number of responses in each question, I can construct a snapshot of the typical respondent to this survey: Female; from 20-49 years of age; Caucasian; holding a Ph.D, Ed. D, J.D. or equivalent, or a master’s degree; a graduate student, full-time instructor or lecturer, non-tenured professor or adjunct; having taught writing for 1-10 years; teaches one or more writing courses per semester, may make decisions about writing curricula, publish scholarship, and/or oversee other writing teachers (see Table 3.1).

48 3.1.2 Gender

The largest population of respondents identified as female. Of the 91 survey respondents, 88 responded to this query: 54 (61.36%) identified as female, while 31 (35.23%) identified as male. No respondents identified as non-gender binary, though 3 (3.41%) preferred not to answer.

3.1.3 Age

Of the 88 responses, the most common age range of respondents was from 30-39 years: 32 (35.56%) reported being in the 30-39 years range; followed by 40-49 years: 19 (21.11%) reported being in this range, and then 20-29 years: 18 (20%). The age group least likely to respond was that of the 60+ years range: 6 (6.67%) reported being in this range, and one possible reason for this is that professionals in this age range may be retiring or nearing retirement. In the 50-59 years range: 12 (13.33%) reported being in this range. Three respondents (3.33%) preferred not to answer.

3.1.4 Racial and Ethnic Identiﬁcation

Of the 88 responses, the most prevalent racial and ethnic identification was that of Caucasian (non-Hispanic): 77 (87.5%), while the least prevalent, at 1 (1.14%) each were Mixed Race or self- identified. One respondent (1.14%) self-identified as “Arab,” while another respondent (1.14%) self- identified as “White (not Caucasian).” Of the responses, 5 (5.68%) identified as African-American (non Hispanic); 3 (3.41%) identified as Latino or Hispanic; and 1 (1.14%) identified as Mixed Race. No respondents identified as Asian/Pacific Islander or Native American, Aleut or Aboriginal.

3.1.5 Highest Level of Education Completed

Most respondents had completed a Ph.D, Ed.D, J.D. or equivalent; of the 88 responses, 42 (47.73%) reported their highest level of education as such. This is followed closely by holders of master’s degrees: 33 (37.5%) reported their highest level of education as such. On the other hand, 12 (13.64%) reported their highest level of education as ABD, and only 1 (1.14%) reported their highest level of education as bachelor’s degree. No respondents declined to answer.

3.1.6 Graduate Degrees Held

The most prevalent graduate degrees of the respondents were English, with the concentrations of literature and rhetoric and composition within 2 percentage points of each other. Out of 116

49 responses (note that these categories are not mutually exclusive, and respondents were asked to choose all that apply): 36 (31.03%) reported holding graduate degrees in English (literature); while 38 (32.76%) reported holding graduate degrees in English (rhetoric and composition). A full 13 (11.21%) reported holding graduate degrees in other ﬁelds: English language and literature; journalism; MBA MPA; history; digital media studies; leadership studies; English pedagogy; adult learning; J.D.; English studies; rhetoric and scientiﬁc and technical communication; chemical physics; and translation studies. Finally, 7 (6.03%) reported holding graduate degrees in education; 5 (4.31%) reported holding graduate degrees in linguistics; and 1 (.86%) reported holding a graduate degree in communications. Somewhat surprisingly, only 2 (1.72%) reported holding graduate degrees in music, but this probably has to with the specialized nature of the listservs on which the survey invitation was posted.

3.1.7 Current Professional Identity

Of the 101 responses (note that these categories are not mutually exclusive, and respondents were asked to choose all that apply), the majority of respondents were either graduate students or full-time instructors or lecturers, with 26 (25.74%) and 14 (13.86%) reported respectively, followed by non-tenure-track professors, with 13 (12.87%) reported. Then, in diminishing order, 11 (10.89%) identified as adjunct; 9 (8.91%) identified as part-time instructor or lecturer; 9 (8.91%) identified as professor (tenured); 8 (7.92%) identified as professor (tenure track); 7 (6.93%) identified as staff or administration; and 4 (3.96%) identified as other. These four respondents identified, respectively, as “consultant”; “writer, songwriter, storyteller”; “professor at community college (no tenure-track positions)”; and “writing center administrator”.

3.1.8 Years Teaching College Writing

Years of teaching experience varied among respondents, with the largest number having taught for 5-10 years, followed by 1-5 years: of the 88 responses, 27 (30.68%) reported teaching writing at the college level for 1-5 years; 32 (36.36%) reported teaching for 5-10 years; 14 (15.91%) reported teaching for 10-15 years; 8 (9.09%) reported teaching for 15-20 years; and 7 (7.95%) reported teaching for 20+ years.

50 3.1.9 Job Responsibilities

Of the 201 responses (note that these categories are not mutually exclusive, and respondents were asked to choose all that apply), the largest number, 53 (26.37%) reported teaching multiple writing courses per semester; while 46 (22.89%) reported teaching at least one writing course per semester; 39 (19.40%) reported making decisions about writing curricula as part of their job; 30 (14.93%) reported publishing scholarship about writing instruction as part of their job; 22 (10.95%) reported overseeing other writing teachers as part of their job; and 11 (5.47%) chose to identify other responsibilities. Five identiﬁed as writing center directors. Included in this category were the following responses: “writing center director”; “I am widely published author”; “run a writing center”; “I run a writing center”; “I teach writing skills in literature and humanities classes, as well (though it’s not standard curriculum)”; “I work in the writing center”; “I present at and attend Professional conferences”; “One freshman writing course per year average”; “I teach 1 writing course occasionally”; “writing center director, but taught FYW until recently”; and “not currently teaching; responses are based on my experience”.

3.2 A Typical Institution by the Numbers

By using the descriptor(s) with the highest number of responses in each institutional question, I can construct a snapshot of the typical institution in this survey: a Public research university granting Ph.D, Ed.D, or other professional degree as its highest degree; from 20,000 to over 40,000 students, in the Southeast or South Central US (see Table 3.2).

3.2.1 Institutional Description

Of the 87 responses, the largest number, 54 (62.07%) described their institution as a public research university; while 10 (11.49%) described their institution as a liberal arts college; 7 (8.05%) described their institution as a private research university; 7 (8.05%) described their institution as a public community college; 2 (2.3%) described their institution as a comprehensive university; 2 (2.30%) described their institution as a minority-serving institution (including HBCU); 1 (1.15%) described their institution as a proprietary (for-proﬁt) institution; and no respondents described their institution as a private community college. Finally, 4 (4.6%) respondents described their

51 institution as “other,” specifying respectively: “private religious”; “technical college”; “law school”; and “both public and private universities”.

3.2.2 Highest Degree Granted by Current Institution

Of the 86 responses, the highest number of respondents, 58 (67.44%) reported a Ph.D, Ed.D, or other professional degree (J.D., M.D., D.D.S., etc) as the highest degree awarded at their institution. The second most common highest degree was a master’s, at a response number of 15 (17.44%). In the middle, 6 (6.98%) reported an associate’s degree as the highest degree awarded at their institution; and 5 (5.81%) reported a bachelor’s degree as the highest degree awarded. No respondents reported technical (vocational) certiﬁcates or specialist degrees as the highest degree awarded. Finally, 2 respondents (2.33%) chose other degrees, which they speciﬁed as “credits only” and “no degrees (yet) from current institution; BA & MA at another public institution”.

3.2.3 Institutional Size by Student Enrollment

The largest number of institution sizes by student enrollment was over 40,000 students. Of the 86 responses: 19 (22.09%) reported enrollment as being more than 40,000; 12 (13.95%) reported enrollment as being between 30,000 and 39,999; 12 (13.95%) reported enrollment as being between 20,000 and 29,999; 10 (11.63%) reported enrollment as being between 10,000 and 19,999; and 12 (13.95%) reported enrollment as being between 5000 and 9999. On the lower end, 10 (11.63%) reported enrollment as being between 2500 and 4999, and 11 (12.79%) reported student enrollment at their institutions as being less than 2500.

3.2.4 Geographic Region

Of the 87 responses, the largest geographic region reported was Southeast at 28 (32.18%), followed by South Central at 17 (19.54%). Continuing from there, 10 (11.49%) reported Mid- South; 8 (9.20%) reported the geographical region of their institution as Northeast region; 7 (8.05%) reported Great Lakes; 5 (5.75%) reported Mid-Atlantic region; 4 (4.60%) reported Northwest; 3 (3.45%) reported Rocky Mountain; 2 (2.30%) reported Paciﬁc; and 2 (2.30%) reported North Central. Only 1 (1.15%) reported International (other than Canada).

52 3.3 Closed-Ended Questions 3.3.1 Degree Music Used in Writing Pedagogy in the Past

Although it relies on self-reporting, this question allowed me to narrow the possible interview candidates according to their responses, because it suggested the amount of importance they placed on music-related pedagogy. This Likert-Scale (1-5; almost never-very frequently) query resulted in 42 responses: 9 (21.43%) responded 1; 8 (19.05%) responded 2; 6 (14.29%) responded 3; 11 (26.19%) responded 4; and 8 (19.05%) responded 5. See Figure 3.2.

3.3.2 Writing Courses in Which Music Was Used

The goal of this question was to attempt to capture the range of writing courses in which music was used by respondents. Although I assumed, correctly, that FYC would be the most common site of music-based pedagogy, I wanted to know if music was also being used in upper-level writing courses. Of the 147 responses (note that these categories are not mutually exclusive, and respondents were asked to choose all that apply): 67 (45.58%) reported that music was used in first-year composition (first semester); 50 (34.01%) reported music was used in first-year composition (second semester); 20 (13.61%) reported music was used in upper-level undergraduate writing; 3 (2.04%) reported music was used in graduate writing courses; and 7 (4.76%) listed other situations. They were: “never”; “public speaking”; “basic writing”; “none yet but hoping to integrate music and writing in my freshman seminar of Fall 2018”; “English Literature”; and “Professional Development I (in Materials Science Engineering)”. See Figure 3.3.

3.3.3 How Music Is Used as Part of Pedagogy in Writing Courses

In this question, I attempted to tease out possible, distinct uses of music in the writing classroom in order to observe their frequency of use. To do so, I brainstormed as many uses of music as possible, and arranged them in a question that allowed multiple responses. Of the 343 responses to this question, the most common responses were:

• I have students read about and listen to music for class (50/14.58%);

• I teach audience with music (37/10.79%);

• I teach analysis and critique with music (36/10.50%);

• I teach genre with music (34/9.91%);

53 • I have students write about music using mixed and/or multimodal genres (32/9.33%).

It is interesting that the “mixed and/or multimodal genres” option got the responses that it did, and it causes me to wonder if I should have asked for additional clariﬁcation. What modes, for instance, are instructors actually emphasizing in these assignments, or are they modally agnostic, simply allowing students to use whichever modes make the most sense? A subsequent question, below (“I have students compose about music using diﬀerent modes besides aural or linguistic”) sheds some light on the question: it is a smaller number (11/3.21%). The other responses broke down as follows (see Figure 3.4):

• I give students the option to compose music for class (24/7%);

• I teach voice and style with music (23/6.71%);

• I design writing courses using music as a theme (21/6.12%);

• I teach revision with music (21/6.12%);

• I teach process writing with music (19/5.54%);

• I have students write about music in traditional genres like album reviews (17/4.96%);

• I have students compose about music using diﬀerent modes besides aural or linguistic (11/3.21%).

• Other (please specify) (18/5.25%).

The 18 “Other” (self-generated) responses were as follows:

• Use music/ music lyrics to identify larger issues for argument papers

• I teach research using music

• I teach remix with music.

• I have students listen to music while free writing/working in class

• I use music as background during in-class writing activities or group activities.

• Students can listen to music while working (continued on p. 65)

• I teach students about rhythms in music and scholarly writing.

• I use music as a classroom accompaniment

• I play music during individual and group writing activities

54 • I teach stylistic devices with music

• I teach plagiarism, source use, and source acknowledgement with music

• I teach invention with music

• I play music during peer review and other work sessions in class.

• I often play music at the beginning of class and while students write and while they do peer review.

• I teach intellectual property and copyright using music.

• I often play music in the background during class sessions when students are working on their own or interacting with others (e.g., in peer review groups).

• I play music in my class while students are composing.

• I play music at the start of the class.

3.4 Open-Ended Question Coding Results

Open-ended questions in the survey were as follows: Q17: Please describe a unit, module, or lesson in which you used music to teach writing: Q18: What is your rationale for using music as part of your teaching of writing? Q19: What challenges have you encountered in using music in your writing pedagogy? Q20: Is there anything else you’d like to add about using music in the writing classroom? Responses comprised almost 10,000 words of text. After coding was completed, I counted the instances of each code within each open-ended question. If a phrase was double-coded, I counted it as an instance of each code rather than choosing between the two codes. When occurrences of each code were counted within each question, the results were as follows (see also Figure 3.3). It seems that instructors overwhelmingly see the use of music in the writing classroom as a way to connect with students and move them into academic writing through a common theme or body of knowledge. Of the codes that emerged, by far the most prevalent was Student interest, access, cultural relevance, taste, and preference, which occurred 74 times, and was the only code that appeared in responses to all four questions. Representative responses included:

• It is a way to make analysis relative to something most of them feel passionately about (their chosen music) as a gateway into analyzing something perhaps more diﬃcult for many - a short story or poetry.

55 • Music keeps students engaged and alert. It also helps students connect the lesson to their personal interests.

As discussed in the previous section, this was honestly a category I had not considered a great deal, possibly because, as a musician, it seemed fairly self-evident to me. Of course music connects us, and of course music can welcome people into a space and give them a way into a writing environment. But it turned out to be a major consideration for respondents, which caused me to give it greater consideration. I return to this theme in Chapter 5. While music is a good touchstone, however, there are still issues of taste and preference that come into play in the classroom:

Students bring a lot of biases with them regarding music. Some of these biases are just taste preferences, but a surprising amount of students have moral judgments. To them, ”rap” is promiscuous/violent or ”country” promotes misogyny or ”rock” is all about drugs. They do not have biases to this extent with other modes of composition.

As I explained in Chapter 2, I placed these often-seemingly-contradictory concepts (Student interest, access, cultural relevance, taste, and preference) in the same code because it tries to capture “ environments in which instructors refer to students being interested in, motivated by, and/or knowledgeable about music,” and this can extend to negative situations as well—ones where student knowledge (or presumed knowledge) causes them to have biases against certain kinds of music. Laura Pochodylo (2016) has argued that dislike of rap and country music most likely stems from unacknowledged racism and/or classism: country is the sound of lower-class whiteness, and rap is the sound of lower-class blackness. But, she continues, “Not being able to appreciate a song because you refuse to listen to it means you miss the subtleties, the humor, the craft and tradition of an entire genre.” Instructors also see music as a set of resources for teaching Rhetoric, argument, audience, and style, a code which appeared 34 times in responses to questions 17, 18, and 20. Respondents have used music to teach rhetorical principles and rhetorical devices, as well as audience:

• Metal Music is most useful for me when I teach rhetoric and rhetorical devices.

• My students compose a rhetorical analysis paper using two different artists from two different genres of music. The into [sic] revolves around applying ethos, pathos, logos to music and how to effectively analyze an artist’s portrayal of a message.

56 • Music helped us to address a lesson on considering audience.

My second coder and I debated including style in this category, since it often deals with local rather than global concerns, but ultimately chose to put them together since style so often appeared in conjunction with rhetorical concepts. For instance, Ms. Rap, discussed in the following chapter, often spoke of her teaching of “rhetorical devices” such as simile, metaphor, antithesis, parallelism, and so on, and these are devices that fall within the canon of style (although some, like metaphor, can appear in larger order concerns as well. In other words, metaphor can go beyond the sentence level). The next most prevalent code was Cultural and critical analysis, which appeared 36 times in responses to three questions (17, 18, and 20). This is diﬀerent from rhetorical analysis because it does not explicitly mention terms common in rhetorical analysis such as ethos, pathos, logos, audience, and so on, but uses literary or cultural frameworks:

• I have students analyze the text of songs. They are asked to interpret the message of the song and select evidence from the text (song) that supports their interpretation. Every interpretation is valid as long as they can use evidence from the text to support their argument.

• . . . Examining popular music helps them practice cultural analysis. . .

Sometimes, however, the terms overlapped, and I had to make a judgment call. For instance, a respondent might use rhetorical terms, but in such a way that it seemed clear that they had literary, critical, or cultural analysis in mind, or vice versa. For instance, one respondent wrote:

I teach a music module in my ﬁrst semester FYC classes on song lyric interpretation and appreciation. We read/talk about the education we receive from understanding others’ views through their lyric and melody choices; we analyze and critique the lyrics and compare/contrast with poetry; we interpret the authors’ meanings; we look at songs that have been historically/traditionally misunderstood; we consider voice, style, and audience through lyric analysis.

Although style and audience are just as much rhetorical terms as they are literary/critical/cultural analysis terms, from the context of the comment it seems clear that they are not referring to a speciﬁcally rhetorical analysis. For one thing, they mention comparison/contrast with poetry, and although it is neither inappropriate nor unheard-of to rhetorically analyze poetry, it is fair to

57 say that it is not a typical practice. For another, they mention songs that have been “historically/traditionally misunderstood,” which suggests a cultural emphasis. From here, the codes substantially drop oﬀ in frequency and diversify. Many instructors see music as a parallel to writing—mostly a metaphorical parallel—and way to teach writing processes that are not necessarily driven by rhetorical terms. The code, Parallel, structure, processes, revision, and editing occurred 22 times over responses to two questions (17-18):

• Sometimes music can provide a clearer picture of the process of composition better than a lecture or reading could. It is easier for students to hear changes or improvements in a song than it is sometimes for them to see those revisions on paper.

• . . . Students’ engagement with music lends itself to the learning outcomes of critically analyzing reading and writing, 3. Students then engage in the process of drafting, writing, editing, and proofreading their work and their peers’. 4. Articulation and development of a coherent thesis.

I chose the words “parallel, structure, and processes” in this code because they often appeared together: music paralleled writing; the structures were similar; the composing processes overlapped. For the same reason, I included revision and editing in this code; observe the ways that these terms appeared together in the previous two examples. Other instructors use music as Background noise to help inﬂuence ambiance, help students relax and focus; block group-to-group noise; encourage creativity; and build a sense of community; 19 occurrences in responses to three questions (17, 18, and 20):

• Often during peer review, i’ll [sic] put music on in the background. I started doing this a few years ago when i [sic] received feedback form peer review groups that it was hard to focus if one group was trying to read through drafts while another nearby had already started talking about their drafts.

• I wouldn’t call it using music to teach writing, per se, but I sometimes play music when students have a longer individual or group task, to relax the atmosphere and invite more discussion.

In the code Modes and media, which occurred 18 times in questions 17, 18, and 20, music becomes an instantiation of the aural mode, and is usually taught in conjunction with other modes

58 in order to analyze and construct multimodal texts. Instructors seem to use terms like multimodal and multimedia more or less interchangeably :12

• . . . Upper-division: similar to FYW but through multimodal composing

• . . . The purpose of the lesson was to help students understand how visual devices can translate written arguments into multimodal arguments (which they were required to do with their own written arguments).

The code Memory, transfer, and overlap, which occurred 16 times in questions 18, 19, and 20, refers to instances when instructors used music as a way to encourage memory of concepts, or discussed the concept of transfer (or lack of transfer) from music to other domains, and vice versa:

• . . . They can learn about rhythm, the composition/creative process, etc. in diﬀerent modes and then transfer that knowledge to written composition. . .

• Music aids memory.

Several respondents noted the value of music in teaching Genre (14 occurrences; Q17-18), including, by analogy, written genres. Although it would be tempting to collapse this code into rhetoric, audience, argument, and style, it appears by itself enough that it warrants its own category:

• . . . I use diﬀerent subgenres of metal music to discuss the conventions of genres and how they should be understood and used.

• I use music as a tool to help students understand the concepts of genre and conventions, as well as the importance of understanding the basic elements of writing and language in order to use them effectively. For example, Nirvana and Beethoven were using the same basic tools of music writing, but doing so in different ways. Only once each of them had full control over concepts like chords could they use those concepts to their various ends to create vastly different but extremely influential and important music.

Music activates, acknowledges, and directs emotion, and can also be a source of distraction when negative emotions are triggered. Aﬀect and distraction occurred 11 times in questions 18, 19, and 20: 12Claire Lauer (2009) has shown that the use of these terms tends to correspond with context and audience. For instance, multimodal is prized by writing instructors because of its emphasis on process, but multimedia tends to be favored by those in the public sphere because of its emphasis on production. This seems to have little to do with nuances in deﬁnition.

59 I am still experimenting with this form. One possible issue I am running into is students having a narrow interpretation of the lyrics, and needing them to be able to see the lyrics from diﬀerent angles and perspectives, which might be upsetting when they ﬁnd out other interpretations to something they simply liked.

Some students are not sure how to go beyond their own feelings about the songs and write an analysis that encompasses why the similarities and diﬀerences are important to society or how they show various perspectives of others. The code Rigor, where the academic merit of using music to teach writing is questioned or doubted by students, fellow faculty, administrators, and other stakeholders occurred 11 times in question 19. This code also includes the worry that insuﬃcient theory exists to really apply music to writing pedagogy:

• Some students may feel like they’re not in a ”real” composition class because they have the option to compose nontraditionally.

• Keeping the level of discourse suﬃciently academic in nature, convincing colleagues that it’s a ”rigorous” enough pursuit

Technology, time, and resources, a code which occurred 9 times on questions 18 and 19, refers to environments in which technology stalls or fails when using music in teaching, or technology is useful in teaching music. This also includes referring to time and/or resources as factors when teaching with or through music:

• There’s often not enough time for students to listen to and reﬂect on music for in-class assignments, especially if we are listening to a complete album

• . . . Nasty projectors.

• Bad internet connection is the only problem I think I’ve encountered.

The code Remix and remediation, which appears 8 times in question 17, refers to music within units, courses, or assignments that teach remix and/or remediation. For example, other assignments may be remediated as musical compositions, or vice versa. This code, unsurprisingly, often appears in conjunction with modes and media.

60 In SYC, students watch Everything is A Remix, which has segments that focus speciﬁcally on the way that artists remix music in composing new songs. Students write journals in response to the video, and we discuss in class. Similarly, in upper level writing courses, students read Arola & Arola’s ”An Ethics of Assemblage: Creative Repetition and the ’Electric Pow Wow’” to understand processes of assemblage.

The code Content, topic, or theme, which appears 8 times in questions 17 and 18, refers to music as a content area for assignments, units, or even entire courses. Usually this is because either students, instructor, or both are very familiar with music:

• My freshman comp course, ”Rock Pop Hip-Hop” features music as its continual theme, so all writing has something to do with popular music (which I deﬁne very broadly). . .

• Using music as a theme, my FYC students compose narratives about their personal theme songs, analysis essays in which they look for patterns among a friend’s personal soundtrack, interview essays in which they interview someone from a generation other than their own about an aspect of music, and a multimodal project in which they re-vision one of their previous essays into a new mode.

The code Intellectual property, which appears 7 times in questions 17, 19, and 20 refers to the environments in which instructors use music as a way to teach copyright and/or intellectual property, or issues centering around these topics, including plagiarism, fair use, and/or citation:

• . . . I use Vanilla Ice’s improper borrowing of ”Under Pressure”13 as an example for teaching plagiarism/source citation (did this before I knew about DeVoss’s CC article). . .

• As an introduction to plagiarism, source use, and summary / paraphrasing / quotation, I play a number of diﬀerent musical clips. We listen for sampled clips in old-school rap; we listen to various originals and their covers; and we listen to songs involved in copyright claims (eg, George Harrison’s ”My Sweet Lord” and The Chiﬀons’ ”He’s So Fine”14 ).

• I use music as a way to introduce and explore concepts of originality, citation/quotation, imitation, copying, and intellectual property.

Overall, the survey revealed a great deal of diversity in approaches to using music in the writing classroom. However, there was little consistency in the diversity. Though respondents noted using music in every single way suggested in Q1615, and more, for the most part, respondents

13Compare Queen’s “Under Pressure” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” on the Spotify playlist. 14Compare both on Spotify playlist. 15See Figure 3.4.

61 were and are using music in fairly predictable ways: to set up a particular classroom atmosphere; to analyze especially with regards to lyrics; and to teach fairly obvious concepts such as genre and intellectual property, where musical genre becomes a way to understand written genres, or intellectual property issues are demonstrated by means of considering improper sampling. These are well-known pedagogical moves in rhetoric and composition, and do not, in my opinion, represent a signiﬁcantly new way to approach pedagogy through music. In the following chapter, I consider the individual interview results to discover what the interviewees can contribute to my understanding of the use of music in the college writing classroom.

Table 3.1: A typical respondent by the numbers.

62 Figure 3.1: Job responsibilities.

Table 3.2: A typical institution by the numbers.

63 Figure 3.2: Degree to which music was used as part of pedagogy for writing classes.

Figure 3.3: Writing courses in which music was used.

64 Figure 3.4: How music was used as part of pedagogy.

65 Table 3.3: Code occurrences within open-ended questions.

66 CHAPTER 4

INTERVIEW RESULTS

In the ﬁrst chapter of this dissertation, I outlined the exigence, framed the guiding questions, and surveyed the relevant research that undergirds this project. Then, in Chapter 2, I described the methodology, which consists of a Qualtrics survey that was distributed to two national listservs, as well as targeted interviews. In the previous chapter, I provided survey results. After survey results were collected, respondents who indicated willingness to be interviewed in survey question (Q21) were compiled in a list. Of that list, all 17 respondents who rated their use of music in the classroom as a “3” or higher (Q14) were contacted and invited to be interviewed, with the exception of three respondents I already knew personally. This left 14 respondents, ﬁve of whom responded positively to the interview invitation. These interviews took place via phone, and were recorded, transcribed, and sent to the interviewees for corrections and approval. The interviewees were as follows:

1. Ms. Rap, an assistant director of a writing center who has experience teaching ﬁrst-year composition in both four-year and two-year institutions, and holds a master’s in rhetoric, composition, and professional communication.

2. Mr. Folk, a full-time senior lecturer who describes himself as a writer as well as a “storyteller and songwriter,” and teaches in a small Catholic university.

3. Ms. Pop, a Ph.D student in rhetoric and writing at a large Southeastern university who teaches professional and technical writing in an engineering department as well as teaching ﬁrst-year composition.

4. Ms. Glam, a Ph.D candidate in literacy, rhetoric, and social practice who has a rich set of experiences teaching writing through music. She often designs courses around musical themes.

5. Ms. Opera, a Ph.D student in composition, rhetoric, and English studies who has won teaching awards in the department, is a musician herself, and often teaches with music.

67 4.1 How Do the Interviewees Use Music in the Writing Classroom?

Some interviewees treated music as an object to be critiqued. Glam, for instance, recounted how, after discovering relationships between Foucault and glam rock in her master’s thesis, she designed a first-year composition course around glam rock and pop culture, and the course seemed mainly geared around self-discovery and cultural critique with music as a textual foundation. She provided a link to her personal website, which describes the glam rock course as one whose goal is to produce “stronger writers, thinkers, and researchers.” Glam goes on to explain in the text that these goals will proceed through “close textual analysis, research, and composition” within and around that particular musical genre. She does not defend this choice in relation to writing, but instead explains the background of glam, and argues that the use of such a lens will help students “gain a better understanding of societal and cultural differences within decades passed” [sic]. Notably, her course description says little about the rhetorical process of writing itself, except for the first sentence which advances the course goal of students becoming “stronger writers, thinkers, and researchers.” The remainder of the course description focuses on glam rock and the sociological importance of the genre. Though production is mentioned (“this will be accomplished through. . . research and composition. . . ”), the emphasis, in this course description anyway, seems to be on analysis. In fact, though three out of the four courses on Glam’s portfolio site explicitly use music as a theme, the assignments mostly read like more traditional, print-based assignments: rhetorical analysis; annotated bibliography; literacy narrative. Folk also assigns a longer, more traditional research essay based on a music-based topic, and he helpfully provides students a list of over 100 possible topics (see Figure 4.1). Opera has students analyze a music video for one of her major assignments. This is similar to the practices of Folk, who assigns a “Song I Love” presentation, which asks students to select a song for a seven-minute presentation. The emphasis is on analysis, but the lens is fairly wide; he urges students to “look at the music of the song, its lyrics, arrangement, overall tone, ‘feel’; or evocation, the quality of the performance, any social or political importance of the song, the quality of the songwriting, or other artistic or cultural features.” He goes on to explain that students can focus on the entire song, or certain individual parts. Folk encourages students to think about topics such as the reason they chose the song, including its impact on students’ lives; the song’s meaning or

68 theme; and broadly, what the song adds to “human culture.” Notably, Folk allows students to use songs that lack lyrics, though he adds the caution “if you have anything to say about it.” Finally, he encourages students to feel free to say negative things about the song, as well as positive. The idea seems to be to encourage students to think critically about their musical choices and how these choices aﬀect their identities and understanding of the world. However, there is little mention of the rhetorical qualities of the music and how they might transfer, other than “the song’s meanings, message, or themes, why it’s powerful in eﬀect, and what it adds, in however large or small a way, to human life and/or culture.” Opera uses music to teach rhetorical situation, but complicates it by bringing in an international element: the rapper G Dragon from South Korea.16 She uses G Dragon to explore the rhetorical situation, including author origin and background, and the situation and context in which he raps. She then encourages students to attend to the ways in which G Dragon “constructs identity” through lyrics, and “how that changes the audience.” She also brings in the concepts of intended vs. actual audience/listener:

Then I’ll throw in a curve ball where I’ll use a foreign rap artist. I frequently will use someone like G Dragon from South Korea because he comes from a very different rhetorical situation and his understanding of what rap is is very different. And so we look at, kind of, what is the background of the author? In what situation are they working and what context was the piece born in? And kind of looking at the lyrics and how they’re constructing that identity through their word choice and how that changes the audience that it’s intended for. And talking about intended listener vs. actual listener, I’m just kind of playing those things around. They seem to find the difference between Drake and G Dragon the most interesting because they are both really popular artists that haven’t been through the same kind of difficulties that Tupac had, so they are more able to readily compare them, even though they come from very different countries.

Her comparison of Drake17 (with whom students are familiar), and G Dragon and Tupac18 (with whom students are often unfamiliar, alas), allows her to defamiliarize the familiar—Drake—and look at his music from another perspective. Though the emphasis is on analysis of the rhetorical situation, including context and background of the “author,” she does seem to bring it back to

16See G-Dragon, “One of a Kind” on the Spotify playlist. 17See Drake, “Hotline Bling” on the Spotify playlist. 18See Tupac, “Dear Mama” on the Spotify playlist.

69 production: it not only draws attention to “international discourse,” but it is a way to make students aware of “diﬀerent styles of essays that they work in, diﬀerent citation practices, etc.” Pop, Rap, and Opera had this in common: even if they began with critique, they were using music as a metaphor for writing, based on assumed parallels between songs and college writing situations. In other words, the interviewees were not only looking for ways to illustrate, for instance, ecocriticism, but were searching for ways to use music and songs to teach writing concepts. As Pop put it, “I mostly used it for. . . a heuristic to help my students understand the writing process.” Along the same lines, Opera recounted this anecdote:

So the ﬁrst time I actually used music in teaching was before I ever got in the classroom, it was actually in the writing center: I had an opera student come into the writing center, and he’s like, ”well, writing and music are nothing alike. I don’t understand it. If I could understand it, I would be a better writer.” And I was like, ”well, as it so happens, I actually am classically trained as a vocalist, and I play piano, and I can tell you how it’s like music.” So at that point, I started thinking of composition in terms of music.

It is interesting that Opera’s epiphany about the relationships between music and writing grew out of a response to student resistance to writing. The student understood music, and Opera understood music, so she used that common understanding as a bridge to help the student better understand writing. Again and again, this theme of music as a connecting point between students, instructors, and writing emerges. In Chapter 6, I consider this phenomenon through the lens of academic hospitality. I have already considered Glam’s extensive of use music as a theme in three of her writing courses. The exception is the fourth course, Writing in the Public Sphere, which Glam describes as an “upper level service learning course” that allows students to “create a tangible product for an actual nonprofit in the area.” However, music still played a central role. As Glam explained, her “background in music and youth subculture” paved the way for the directors of the nonprofit to ask her to direct her students in creating “a multimodal project that depicted the impact of protest music on the events of May 4, 1970” which is the date of the infamous Kent State protest and subsequent shootings. Glam designed the class around “injustice and multimodality,” beginning with students noticing “injustices in their own lives” and mapping those onto the students “affected”

70 by the events of May 4, 1970. Then, the students self-selected into groups based on “modality (sound, writing, visual, and production),” and the groups collaborated to create a ﬁnal video:

Writing in the Public Sphere is an upper level service learning course. The purpose of this course is for students to create a tangible product for an actual non-proﬁt in the area. As the instructor, I organized the partnership with the [redacted for privacy] center. Due to my background in music and youth subculture, the directors of the center asked that the students create a multimodal project that depicted the impact of protest music on the events of May 4th, 1970. I created the class from the ground up around the concepts of injustice and multimodality. The students explored injustices within their own lives and connecting those to the students who were aﬀected on May 4th, 1970. The students were broken into self- picked groups based on modality (sound, writing, visual, and production). Each group worked together and as a collective whole to create the video you see before you.

Although music is not the main focus of the course, Glam does have students attend explicitly to multimodality. For instance, in her Multimodal Snapshot assignment, she has students remediate an earlier, print-based assignment—Injustice Snapshot—using “multiple modes.” The assignment expects attendance to fair use. She then has student groups propose ways to use their assigned mode (sound, visual, writing, etc) to best deliver the content. Rap uses music to teach rhetorical devices by metaphorically representing the processes of traditional, print-based composing. She would begin a lecture and provide examples of rhetorical devices, and then, she explains, she would “play snippets of songs, and sometimes entire songs” to reinforce the concepts. Rap provided a PowerPoint, which, interestingly, largely uses examples from speeches, movie dialogue, and various other pieces of writing. The only place in the PowerPoint presentation that directly references music is this slide on rhythm, her metaphorical entry into music (see Figure 4.2). Rap also discusses, in the lesson, metaphors and similes, as well as personiﬁcation, denotative and connotative language, imagery, and rhythm. As before, music is used as an example of a concept, and students are asked to analyze the music to tease out the concept. This time, though, the emphasis is not an abstract sociological principle, but on a set of applicable writing tools. Rap breaks vivid language down into the dual parts of imagery and rhythm, and within the rhythm category she places parallelism, alliteration, antithesis, and repetition. She is able to illustrate

71 several of these concepts with rap songs, such as those from the rapper Dessa.19 Notably, she seems to mainly draw on the textual features of the songs. For instance, it might be possible to show repetition musically—a musical phrase—but she focuses instead on lyrical repetition. Indeed, interviewees were divided about the relative value of the music itself versus the lyrics in songs used for teaching. One ( Rap) described her attempt to teach a writing course based on (wordless) classical music as a “failure,” going on to note that:

It didn’t seem particularly engaging to the class. I don’t know if it was just the wrong audience, or the wrong types of music, or maybe I wasn’t explaining it as clearly as I needed to, but, for whatever reason, when I tried the music without the lyrics, it just didn’t quite go.

One problem, possibly, is the lack of technical understanding of music on the part of the students, and in some cases, the instructors, or reluctance to focus on the technical (non-verbal) aspects of music. Folk has “no requirement whatsoever” that students acquire technical knowledge about music, nor does he address it in class in any way for which students are responsible. He remarks that there are even “music critics out there who maybe don’t know—they can speak about music aesthetically very accurately, even if they don’t know the technical terms.” He notes that some students who come from musical backgrounds “know the terms, and they tend to use them,” but the only thing he insists upon is that “when you’re doing your presentation to the class, remember not everybody knows what a ﬂatted 5th is.” This poses an interesting diﬃculty: in order to get into the musical and not just lyrical aspects of music, some understanding of music and possibly musical terms is needed. But this knowledge is specialized and can be intimidating—it can, in fact, even work against the inclusive nature of music as a teaching tool, as Folk seems to imply. Opera, however, does get into some of the musical and not just lyrical content of the songs she employs: she uses music to metaphorically represent the processes of traditional, print-based composing in her “Dirges and Rock Anthems” lesson. In the lesson, she compares “long, meandering sentences” to dirges, which she illustrates with an embedded video of a funeral march by Frederick Chopin (see Figure 4.3).20 By contrast, she compares short sentences to “rock anthems”—exciting in small doses, but a long string of short, choppy sentences is like “listening to four hours of heavy metal rock

19For whatever reason, Dessa is unavailable on Spotify. 20See “Funeral March in C Minor” on the Spotify playlist.

72 music”—headache-inducing (see Figure 4.4). She uses an embedded video of heavy metal band Dragonforce’s “Through Fire and Flames” as an example. 21Finally, she suggests a mix of “dirge” and “rock anthem” sentences to achieve an agreeable balance. She uses the YouTube performers The Piano Guys as an example, embedding their video cover of Coldplay’s “Paradise,” and explains that, “by using a variety of notes and rhythms, the Piano Guys achieve a dynamic song that you could easily listen to over and over again. In the same way, a paper with great sentence variety is easy to read and leaves the reader in your camp” (see Figure.5).22 Opera seems to mean that the Piano Guys song achieves a pleasing balance between the two extremes: although it is a cover of a song by a well-known rock band (Coldplay), it is played on a piano and a cello, which are usually associated with classical music. It also includes African hand percussion, which gives it a more world-music kind of feel.

4.2 Why Do the Interviewees Use Music in the Writing Classroom?

Though all of the instructors interviewed showed sensitivity to learning outcomes and programmatic goals when discussing the use of music, Opera and Glam discussed them speciﬁcally when asked about justifying their use of music in the classroom. Opera attended, especially, to multimodality, referencing The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric, by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel (2012). Though Sheridan et al. advocated multimodal practice, they also advocated agnosticism about mode and media. Students should be given the freedom to choose between modes, but instructors should not thrust modes, media, or technology upon them simply for the sake of novelty (p. 109). As she explains, her use of music is:

“. . . fulfilling the composition and rhetoric commitment to multimodality, and through engaging different types of learning styles and literacies in the classroom,” which I think is really important. I’ve actually been reading about multimodality in the classroom recently, and, I want to say it’s Sheridan, Ridolfo, and someone whose name I’m forget- ting, but they specifically talk about how just including music in the classroom, or just including a multimodal text in the classroom isn’t enough—that you have to engage with it on multiple levels, and make it a collaborative experience where your students

21See Spotify playlist. 22See “Peponi (Paradise)” on the Spotify playlist.

73 are really engaged in the process of not only just understanding the text, but understanding its place in your course. That we can’t just use it because it’s new and shiny and interesting.

Glam, on the other hand, justifies the use of music theoretically and programmatically. She claims that she can point to current and emerging scholarship, as well as “success rate” of students, according to meeting learning objectives. In other words, she explains, she would use “logic and reason” to defend it, rather than “this is a really cool thing!” Notably, both Opera and Glam expressed sensitivity to the implied critique of music in the writing classroom as simply “new and shiny and interesting,” or a “. . . really cool thing.” Instead, in pointing to current scholarship and student success metrics, they attempted to show that music in the writing classroom represents a valid set of pedagogical interventions. All of the interviewees, to one degree or another, used music to engage and welcome students. Opera suggests that “since these kids don’t love English,” music can be an effective welcoming tool, because “I don’t think I’ve taught a student yet who hasn’t enjoyed music, at least some genre of music.” Opera articulates a common suspicion among first-year writing instructors: students, as in many cases non-majors, “don’t love English,” so it falls to instructors to find a way to engage with them. Music seems to fit the bill: it’s accessible and it’s fairly universal. Rap also sees music as a way to connect with students, reflecting that in her experiences of teaching over the years, she would “read” her students and ask herself high to connect with them. For instance, at one institution she found a high Latino population, so she began to ask what kinds of things they listened to. Then, she explained, she would “dig around” to find the ways that the music they already knew used rhetorical devices. The effect, for Rap, is that the students “were listening to [the music] with. . . new ears.” This theme of defamiliarization is a pervasive one: writing instructors often try to create a learning moment by making the familiar—in this case, popular music—strange. If they can create this discomfort in students, they hope to make space for critical analysis and even emulation of effective strategies, including rhetorical devices. For Folk, music is a way to welcome students into what he repeatedly calls a “community of learners,” where power is distributed horizontally and not vertically, since everyone is presumed to enter with some knowledge of music. While Folk admits that this community will not be a “professional” one, he insists that if students “have a sense that we’re all in this together, it makes

74 a huge difference.” During the interview, Folk was at pains to level the playing field; he repeatedly insisted that he wanted his students to know that he was not “on the other side of the desk, [holding] all the marbles, and you’ve got to get them from me.” Instead, he strives to position himself as a fellow writer and music lover, whose work is also in progress and open to critique. This equalization of power, Folk hopes, will encourage greater agency on the part of students. If they are not trying to please a mysterious teacher who “holds all the marbles,” perhaps they will lean into the process of writing about a common interest. Ironically, perhaps, Folk has to “push things in the class to move to that end,” which in itself can be seen as an inevitable demonstration of his power as an instructor. Folk also acknowledges that the community is not a “professional” one, perhaps because of his avoidance of getting into technical aspects of music, but for him this is an acceptable compromise because it can allow students a sense that “we’re all in this together.” Opera, in a similar way, sees music as a collaborative space, since she “invite[s] them to give feedback, to talk, to take ownership and have authority in that space.” She goes on to attend to learning styles in service of accessibility, arguing that the use of a music visualizer (see Figure 4.6) can be effective in a hearing-impaired student, because they can “see” the song even if they cannot hear it. She has also found that many students with disabilities respond unusually well to music-based pedagogy, because “it is a type of processing that they have great practice and strength in, and it helps. . . activate different parts of the brain than strict lecture would. . . ” Pop uses accessibility as a key word as well, but without specific reference to students with disabilities. Instead, she claims that, especially with “community college” students who enter with varying levels of preparation, writing was very “intimidating,” and music could mitigate that intimidation with familiarity. So Opera sees the accessibility of music mainly in terms of its affordances in addressing disability. Although it is true that hearing-impaired students might struggle, there are still technologies like song visualizers that can help, and the use of music might help capture students who find it “harder to pay attention in class” or “process information as quickly.” For Pop, though, access has more to do with preparation. Her community college students, especially, can find college writing intimidating, so once again, music can serve as a valuable connecting point between instructors, students, and academic expectations.

75 4.3 What Have Their Students Been Able to Do With Music?

All of the interviewees, when asked what their students have been able to do through music, pointed to a single student “breakthrough” story. For instance, though she was not certain to what degree her students at large applied music-based writing instruction in their own writing, Pop spoke of a particular student who seemed to come alive on “song hook day,” whereas when they were discussing grammar or punctuation, the student was largely unresponsive. According to her, what was appealing was “just the idea that, ‘oh my gosh, wow, we can do something in a writing class other than talk about grammar and punctuation!’” This theme threads itself throughout the interviews: unresponsive, resistant, or underprepared students have a kind of awakening to writing through music. Folk told the story of student whose interest in the rapper Nas helped him connect with writing instruction, and even, in Folk’s estimation, made the student a better writer. Others told stories of students with whom music-based writing instruction “stuck” after the course ended. Glam, at the time of the interview, was in the process of working with a former student on an academic piece about sound in the writing classroom. Specifically, the student was able to use the experience to transfer skills into her major of sociology. This student wrote a four-page narrative about her experience in the course, and this resulted in an academic collaboration. Rap also recounted the story of a former student who came to visit her in the writing center. The student emailed her to ask about the name of an artist that she used in class, and then came to visit Rap in the writing center. The student was using parallel structure in a paper for a different course, and when it was pointed out to her, the student responded, “it kind of reminds me of that song you showed us.” So she remembered the song and was able to transfer the knowledge of parallel structure into a different domain. Opera is the exception: while she does tell one story of student success, she also observes the overall effect of her music-based writing pedagogy in end-of-year reflections from students. She notes that her grammar and sentence-fluency lesson (which uses music) is one of two lessons that students most frequently acknowledge as salient in her class:

You know, I’ve had one student who, he wrote entirely in the short, choppy sentences, and had that moment where he realized that he wasn’t being very strategic in his approach to putting sentences down. And so he talked to me some more about it after class, he’s like, ”so, what types of things can I do to really make it better?” And so we

76 talked about how, if you put a bunch of short sentences leading up to a long sentence, how does that change kind of what’s going on, or if you have a bunch of long sentences leading to a short sentence. So I now include those types of discussions in my lesson, and I’ve noticed that students then think about, in their writing, and a lot of them have reﬂected in the end-of-year reﬂection about this particular lesson. . .

4.4 What Challenges Have They Faced in Their Use of Music?

None of the instructors seemed to face signiﬁcant institutional pushback in their use of music, though Glam has occasionally sensed a kind of bemusement from certain colleagues, and she perceives an attitude that this is a “second-rate” way of teaching writing:

I think for me, and I always say this to people, I always tell people, I’m like, ”I know I’m getting my Ph.D in rhetoric, but I know more about music than I know about anything, so for me, like this is more like just a natural progression for me to kind of design these courses, so for me it comes more naturally to teach writing with music, just because I am so passionate about it. But I would say a lot of it, a lot of, kind of, the comments and pushback I get is that people just kind of view this as not serious. It’s just kind of, ”oh, well you’re teaching your kids about, like glam? Oh, you’re teaching them about the goth movement, or rap, or whatever?” And people kind of look down upon that as kind of like a second-rate way of teaching students how to write. And I’ve just kind of gotten used to those comments because I’ve been doing it for ﬁve years at this point. So when people say things like that to me, I pretty much do exactly what I do when I get pushback from students, and I try to get them to understand that cultural and social context and importance of these events; in the same way that you would kind of teach students cultural and social context of the time, if you’re looking at a book like Pride and Prejudice, or if you’re looking at an Upton Sinclair book. Like, you’re still doing that, it’s just a diﬀerent type of writing.

She has become accustomed to these sorts of comments, so she treats them much in the way she treats student pushback: she references the idea of the “cultural and social context and importance of these events,” much in the same way an instructor would attend to these events when teaching Pride and Prejudice or Upton Sinclair. Glam insists that “it’s just a diﬀerent kind of writing.” Interestingly, while Glam’s justiﬁcation of her music-based pedagogy begins with her credentials (“I’m getting my Ph.D in rhetoric. . . I know more about music than I know about anything”), she ultimately appeals to the cultural importance of music in her defense of it in the writing classroom,

77 relating it to a classic novel like Pride and Prejudice. This could be in deference to instructors who consider literature to be an integral part of a writing course, but one could also imagine an instrumental defense of music: I use it because it works. Most of the instructors, when asked about challenges, described random student resistance, but did not seem to detect a real pattern of resistance from students. Pop only remembered one student who was “vehemently resistant,” but noted that this student seemed resistant to instruction in general. Surprisingly, the student resisted any sort of pop culture assignment, explaining that she neither watched TV nor movies, nor listened to music. Pop was not buying it: She was sure that the student had read, at least, something in her life (and apparently books were also included in the pop culture category). But this student, it seems, was an anomaly. While certainly seems unlikely that the student consumed no digital media at all, it is always possible that students may have had no previous exposure to or interest in music. Then there are those, according to Rap, who simply do not like music or see the relevance of it to writing. Rap references especially her engineering students, who do not see the importance of “making language prettier.” Even pushing aside the impoverished view of rhetoric that the engineering students espouse, it is not diﬃcult to imagine a future engineer with a transactional view of language resisting the less “straightforward” approach to writing that music-based instruction might encourage. This may be, in part, a reaction to unexamined expectations of college English classes held by students. Indeed, Opera relates a kind of shift in expectations that she encourages amongst her ﬁrst-year students:

. . . students–particularly freshmen, I think they have an idea of what an English class is supposed to be, where the teacher is a very strict person who stands up in the front of the classroom, and they lecture forever, and they break your soul. At least that’s how they treat it. And I don’t fit that mold at all. I’m very casual in the things that I do, because I don’t find it to be productive to be that kind of sage-on-the-stage, at the front. But yeah, I do have to, like, get them to first buy in to the idea before they’ll really go with it. But I find, usually, by the time we hit the end of the semester, most of them have seen at least the value of these, maybe less traditional things, and I start the semester by telling them, you know, ”my bachelor’s is in theater, so I believe that playing is a part of learning.” And I’m like, ”I’m going to convince you of this thing.” And at first they really resist it, but then they start to see how, you know, these fun lessons teach them as much as the serious lectures, if not more.

78 But music can be a site of identity, and some students never quite come around to what the instructor is trying to accomplish in class. Glam recounted a story of a speciﬁc student resisting not necessarily music itself, but musical choices made by the instructor. During her glam-themed course, he constantly tried to reference Kanye West as a “counter-example.” Glam, for her part, tried to help him understand the “cultural lineage” that extends from Glam rockers like David Bowie to Kanye West. And Rap detected a thinly-veiled racist agenda in the objections of one student, who would never question her use of country music, but would object to her use of, say, Latin music, claiming that he did not see it as a good example of whatever concept she was teaching. Folk, meanwhile, dealt with a student who had an unusual medical condition: she displayed traits of musical anhedonia, which is a predisposition to dislike music. However, Folk noted that this was a rare case. Every once in a while, he explains, a student will not be “much into music,” but they can usually identify some sort of connecting point, even if it’s just a popular song on the radio.

4.5 How Do They Plan to Use Music in the Future?

Folk was inspired by our conversation to try a new exercise in class: bringing in his guitar and playing one of his songs, and then playing a revised version to demonstrate revision. We had discussed my approach of bringing my guitar to class, playing the students a song I had written, and then playing them a recording of criticism I received from Nashville songwriters. We would then discuss the ways the song could be revised, as well as the ways that all writing is negotiated, even “creative” writing like songs. With Folk’s experience as a songwriter, this lesson would be a natural choice for him. I discuss this further in Ch. 5. Pop plans to continue to use music in the future, but to scaﬀold it more, and do more formative assessment, surveying and seeing if the lessons are connecting with what students are supposed to be learning. She places great importance on making sure “our classroom pedagogy is meeting up with our theory.” And Glam sees a need for students to undertake more sonic-based composing themselves. She hopes to give them:

. . . more avenues for communication, but also so they can better relate to, ”ok, so I’m listening to, I don’t know, I’m listening to this song by Nirvana, what was it like for Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl in the studio? Well, I just recorded this in my classroom.” Right? So kind of having that, like, personal connection and understanding the actual act of sonic composing.

79 Surprisingly, Glam was the only interviewee to specifically mention the idea of sonic composing by students, but she justifies it in terms of “personal connection” rather than multimodal composing practice. But Rap and Opera both seem to want to remain in linguistic composing territory. Rap devised a new assignment where she will have students make a “soundtrack” instead of writing a standard personal narrative. So, she explains, it would be a prompt like, “if you were to choose a soundtrack for a particular moment in your life, what would it be? Why would you choose that particular soundtrack?” And she further hopes that this would be a rich site for rhetorical analysis, especially with reference to stylistic devices. This is, of course, an instantiation of music as a theme, and similar to Folk’s “Song I Love Presentation.” Opera, finally, is not sure what she will do differently, but continues to consider it, and believes that “there is a way to use music in order to teach pretty much anything. . . ”

4.6 What Else Did They Want to Talk About?

Folk was struck by how much he had actually learned from his students in the process of teaching writing through music, and made specific reference to the “loudness wars” as well as piracy. When he learns something from a student, he makes a special effort to call attention to it: “wow, you guys notice how much Mitch was talking about this? This was a new angle on piracy! I hadn’t thought about that.” So for Folk, this is another way to promote a community of learning. Glam reinforced how music and identity are intertwined, and the latter, especially, can be challenging for students. She explained that the issues surrounding music like glam include homosexuality and transgender rights, and this includes “what it means to be a person, how people express themselves. . . ” For her, students “struggle more with those ideals than they do with the music.” And Rap returned again to the idea that music had been a success in her class, both in student course evaluations and in her own excitement about teaching. For her, the weeks that she uses music are “hands down, one of my favorite weeks of the semester.” Ultimately, the five instructors I interviewed have music in common, but seemingly little else. They varied drastically in their emphases, their assumptions about the goals of composition, and their assessment methods. One instructor, Glam, approached composition very much as a course in cultural studies, with music being a way into studying concepts like glam. Another instructor, Folk, showed expressivist tendencies, and used music as a common language and device for welcoming

80 students and expressing identities. Rap emphasized stylistic concepts like rhetorical devices, and has even experimented with using music in technical writing, while Opera used music rhetorically. Pop saw a great deal of overlap between musical and linguistic composing, and used music as a “heuristic” to understand the writing process. I will further unpack these observations in the following chapter.

Figure 4.1: An excerpt from Folk’s assignment sheet.

81 Figure 4.2: A slide from Rap’s lecture.

Figure 4.3: A slide from Opera’s lecture.

82 Figure 4.4: Another slide from Opera’s lecture.

Figure 4.5: Final slide from Opera’s lecture.

83 Figure 4.6: iTunes music visualizer.

84 CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION

In Chapter 1, I introduced the exigence for this dissertation and provided the three research questions that guide this study: 1) How do writing instructors use music pedagogically in their writing classes? 2) What purposes or values do instructors have for using music pedagogically in their writing classes? and 3) How do the purposes of music-based writing pedagogy as defined by the instructors relate to principles outlined in the third iteration of the (2014) WPA Outcomes State- ment? In order to outline the relevant scholarship about the use of music in the teaching of college writing, I made several moves. First, I showed that music belongs in the category of aurality as described by Selfe (2009). Then, I used Erin Anderson’s (2014) framework to organize the relevant scholarship about music: writing instructors tend to use sound/music: “. . . as a subject of rhetorical analysis, a material for multimodal text production, and a methodological model for alphabetic writing practice” [emphasis mine]. Then, I employed Richard Fulkerson’s (2005) framework for understanding approaches to composition pedagogy in order to classify how individual instructors use music in their particular pedagogical practices. Finally, I used Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s (2012) four-part heuristic for interrogating new rhetorical options to the possible reasons for using music in the writing classroom: semiotic potentials; cultural position; infrastructural accessibility; and de/specialization. In Chapter 2, I outlined the structure of the study, which involves a Qualtrics survey distributed on two national listservs, and targeted interviews/collection of teaching materials. I also showed how the open-ended survey questions relate to the larger research questions. In Chapter 3, I described the results of the Qualtrics survey, and in Chapter 4, I reported the results of the targeted interviews and collection of teaching materials. Though the three research questions that frame this study are distinct, the results overlap significantly. For instance, the use of a certain musical approach in the writing classroom is often explained in the context of a justification for the use of music in the writing classroom, or a justification is provided in the context of an explanation. The what often overlaps with the why.

85 For this reason, I focus on one key framework previously introduced: Fulkerson’s (2005) pedagogical classiﬁcations. In the process of considering the results through these two frameworks, I also bring in WPA outcomes and other scholarship and results as they occur.

5.1 Fulkerson and Approaches to Teaching Writing with Music

In Chapter 1, I discussed the ways that Fulkerson (2005) classiﬁed composition pedagogy approaches in the 21st century: Critical/Cultural Studies; Expressivist; and Procedural Rhetoric, which he further divides into Argumentation, Genre Analysis, and Preparation for Academic Dis- course. Additionally, the category of Current-Traditional lingers from his earlier work. For Fulk- erson, every composition “approach” must answer four questions: (1) Axiology: What is “good” writing?; (2) Process: How do written texts emerge?; (3) Pedagogy: How do we teach eﬀectively?; and (4) Epistemology: How do we know these answers are true?

5.1.1 Current-traditional Rhetoric

This approach assumes that good writing is correct writing in terms of syntax, and appropriateness to genre (although the word genre is seldom used). The instructor is the model of correctness, process is permitted but not stressed, and the epistemology is one of pragmatism: writing is a set of tools that can drive industry and better people’s lives, and there is a right and wrong way to write. What is the right way? Ask your teacher. What is the wrong way? Look at the red marks on your essay, and avoid doing that again.

5.1.2 Expressivism

This approach, by contrast, is about finding an authentic voice within oneself, and using ones own experiences to create writing that is moving and effective. The instructor, in this case, becomes a means of discovering, not external truths about writing, but internal truths that can then be transferred to the page. Process is embraced, with the assumption that greater time for reflection will result in deeper, more personal writing. Finally, the epistemology assumed is a kind of Platonic idealism, where a “private vision” that precedes language is sought (Berlin, 1988).

86 5.1.3 Cultural/Critical Studies

In this approach, according to Fulkerson, composition succumbs to “content envy,” or desire to replace processes with content, such as other academic disciplines oﬀer. While some instructors in this approach embrace process, it is just as common to ignore it, because it is assumed that immersion in good writing will somehow bring about good writing from students. Unfortunately, in this model, the instructor often has a vested interest in the content, and so the evaluation method is a mimetic one: successful writing is writing that remakes the student in the instructor’s image. Pedagogy is designed to liberate students from false ideas, and the assumed epistemology is social constructivism.

5.1.4 Procedural Rhetoric

This approach puts the audience at the center of evaluation, where the instructor often invites the students to write for an imagined audience, outside of the classroom. A process-based pedagogy, procedural rhetoric positions the instructor as a coach rather than a critic, one who helps the developing writers meet audience expectations, and write appropriately for the rhetorical situation. The assumed epistemology is dialectical, where meaning is negotiated between the writer, the instructor, and the assumed audience (whom the instructor often embodies). However, Fulkerson identifies three distinct strands of procedural rhetoric: argumentation, which aligns good writing with strong argument; genre analysis, which attends to analysis of and production within various genres of writing; and preparation for academic discourse, which imagines first-year writing as a gateway to writing effectively within the academy. Table 5.1 illustrates these relationships. It is important to note that while certain interviewees favored certain pedagogies, it would be misleading to suggest that any one interviewee used any one pedagogical approach with perfect consistency. For instance, while Rap’s pedagogy might bear some resemblance to the current- traditional model, she also plans to experiment with an assignment similar to Folk’s “Song I Love” assignment: one that invites students to write from a personal perspective, and owes more to the expressivist model. And while Glam focuses on critique and analysis of music as a cultural text, she also puts a great deal of emphasis on multimodal production. So the goal is to apply Fulkerson’s framework in order to understand the diversity of the use of music in the writing classroom, not to artificially simplify any instructor’s practice.

87 5.2 Glam: Critical/Cultural Studies and Analysis

Of all of the interviewees, Glam was the most attuned to the cultural aspects of music. Her experience teaching sections of a two-semester FYC course sequence, as well as an upper-level service learning course in a major university came on the heels of her master’s thesis, which centered on glam rock and Foucault, and she explicitly mentioned “tailoring” her ﬁrst composition course toward glam, in conversation with the course outcomes. At the time of the interview, she was writing her dissertation on the sonic composing processes of musicians. Interestingly, though, when I asked her if she used music as a heuristic for invention, her answer was, “I would say I do, but not directly,” which seemed to mean that the idea was implied but never directly stated in class. In fact, according to Fulkerson’s framework, Glam’s idea of good writing seems to revolve around analytical ability. In her course description, she stresses analysis and research, as well as cultural critique. The word “composition” is mentioned, but she does not discuss how composition is to be taught or learned; she seems to assume that “close textual analysis” and “research” through the “lens of glam Rock” will accomplish good writing. In her interview, she explicitly connects this focus on content to more traditional, literature-based composition courses, arguing that her approach is similar to that of instructors who use Pride and Prejudice or an Upton Sinclair book. Like most instructors who embrace a critical/cultural studies model, Glam gives little attention to the mechanics of pedagogy. This is not to imply that pedagogy is unimportant to her, but to simply note that this form of teaching emphasizes consumption and analysis more than production of text, which is assumed to be a kind of natural by-product of analysis. In the interview, Glam revealed that she designs her writing courses around music, but focuses especially on the social and critical issues that music can illustrate. I also know from the survey results that instructors commonly use music as a site of cultural and critical analysis, as a way to further analyze, illustrate, or digest critical and cultural concepts. Music appears as a belletristic text, with aspects to be discussed, appreciated, and perhaps emulated in the linguistic mode. The practice seems to focus more on the ideas within and surrounding the music than how they work rhetorically. Interestingly, though, Glam did report a high interest in multimodality in her pedagogy. When asked about what composing options she gives her students in her courses, she replied:

88 . . . I’ve had students make websites; I’ve had students make Prezis; I’ve had students make PowerPoints; I’ve had students make videos in the past; I’ve had students actually make more tactile, hands-on ”Old School” modes, so really when it comes to that I always tell my students that, you know, I want you to be able to compose a piece in a way that not only you feel comfortable in doing so, but that that’s going to allow you to communicate the message that you want to get across.

However, she does not discuss what support, if any, she oﬀers students in composing multimodally. This was actually typical in the interviews and in the survey data: instructors would note that they allowed or even encouraged students to compose multimodally, but rarely gave any indication about if or how they supported this practice. This may be because of the lack of direct questions in the survey and interviews related to multimodal support, but it seems equally likely that this is an area of weakness for many instructors. In Sheridan et al.’s (2012) heuristic, this phenomena is part of infrastructural accessibility, or “the material and intellectual resources necessary for a given rhetorical option to be deployed by a rhetor,” which involves questions of access to the given rhetorical option, including time, money, and human and other resources. In other words, how diﬃcult is it to deploy this rhetorical option in this given setting and rhetorical situation? What materials are necessary in order to use this rhetorical option (Sheridan et. al, 2012)? The answer has a lot to do with what the instructor plans to do with music. Some approaches, such as the approach of analyzing music lyrically, requires little beyond access to a means of musical playback, and basic skills in listening and analyzing texts. Music has never been more available. As early services like Napster fell and made way for ones like Pandora and Spotify, as well as YouTube, the internet bloomed into a musical library, where anyone with fast internet access can play a dizzying variety of music at will. Other approaches, such as musical production, require greater resources. The composition of music can require access to composition and recording software, musical instruments, and training in both or either. However, open-source multitracking musical production software like Reaper and Traktion exists (see Figure 5.1), and open-source virtual instruments like Kontact Player or UVI Instruments can obviate the need for physical instruments. While it is more convenient, certainly, to have access to things like microphones and midi controllers (physical devices that plug into computers to control virtual sounds), it is hardly necessary.

89 These kinds of conversations also address issues of de/specialization, which refers to “the range of perceptions concerning the use of a given rhetorical form by nonspecialists.” This part of the rhetorical options heuristic is concerned with issues of training, specialization, and disciplinarity. In other words, it encourages questions like,

Who knows and understands the aﬀordances of music, and what training do they possess, and how does this relate to the training instructors have in common in this ﬁeld? And, how do all stakeholders perceive the use of a given rhetorical option? (Sheridan et al., 2012).

There still seems to be some discomfort in many instructors with analyzing music beyond lyrics. As discussed before, this may be due, in part, to lack of a commonly-accepted pool of terms with which to describe music in the writing classroom, and may also be due to instructor fear of overwhelming students. Recall, for instance, Rap’s identification of her classical music-themed course (without lyrical content) as a “failure,” and Folk’s reluctance to broach the topic of musical description, because he seems to see the technical terminology necessary in such a description as working against the inclusive nature of a music-themed course. Because of the nature of the listservs I approached with this study (ones involving writing centers and writing program administration), it is unsurprising that most of the respondents were trained in some form of English, communication, or writing. Only two out of 116 survey respondents reported training in music. However, remember that this is formal training in music as an academic discipline. It is not clear to what degree other respondents had informal training in music, though there is reason to believe that the number is higher. Within the five interviewees, for instance, two (Folk and Opera) reported being musicians themselves. If someone self-identifies as a musician, I am tempted to assume that they have some familiarity with musical terms and concepts, and can analyze aural as well as linguistic features of music. However, such an assumption may not be warranted. Many musicians are self-taught, and often terms in different genres can differ. For instance, in rock music, to play a riff means to play a short series of notes, while in classical music, the same thing might be called a motif. Even musicianship, moreover, does not guarantee familiarity with composing and musical production software. Many musicians are not composers, and are not familiar with the composing process, and many musicians have never applied themselves to learning digital production soft-

90 ware, which can have a fairly steep learning curve. So it is not surprising, perhaps, that more instructors do not stress or require musical production in the classroom. Glam’s pedagogy seems to address the WPA outcome of critical thinking, reading and composing, which comprises “the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2014). It is unclear how much Glam’s pedagogy allows students to “separate assertion from evidence,” which is one of the core competencies in this outcome, but it seems likely that, in the process of studying and writing about glam, students would learn this, along with evaluating sources, and certainly “recogniz[ing] and evaluat[ing] underlying assumptions” as well as “read[ing] across texts for connections and patterns.” Indeed, there is some evidence outside of Glam’s interview that instructors can use music to teach critical thinking in the writing classroom, as I have shown in the occurrences of the cultural and critical analysis code. It seems to be the case, though, that music is more often used as a topic or theme within a research course or unit than a means to teach research principles like assertion vs. evidence, evaluating sources, recognizing underlying assumptions, and so on.

5.3 Folk: Musical Preferences and Expressivism

Folk is, in a word, eﬀusive. His enthusiasm bubbled over the phone, and he could not utter enough statements of goodwill fast enough. However, he is very serious about his teaching. “Writing is hard,” he noted, “and it’s boring [to students].” So for Folk, it is important to establish a “community of learners,” and for that, music is key. Self-identifying as a songwriter and storyteller, Folk plays his own compositions in class and invites students to critique them. I do a similar thing in my practice. Sometimes students are surprised to learn that songwriters revise, and so I play them a song of mine, then play them audio clips of Nashville songwriting pros critiquing my song (see Figure 5.2).23 Then, I play them a revised version.24 I use this to explain that all writing is negotiated, even writing that is viewed as “creative”—it is still subject to critique, response, and revision. Any writing that ﬁnds an audience, I insist to them, will be negotiated in some way, and if it is not done before circulation, it will be afterwards, in comments, rebuttals, or subtweets.

23I obtained this feedback from a brief membership to a website called songu.com. A monthly fee earns participants access to a number of online courses, as well as online critique sessions with established songwriting professionals. 24I no longer have a good recording of that particular song, but for another of my original songs, see David Bedsole, “Orient Express” on the Spotify playlist.

91 Folk’s expressivist approach is to use music to welcome students into the classroom, and bridge the gap between personal and academic writing. For instance, in his “A Song I Love” Presentation Assignment, he urges students to choose a song they feel strongly about, and to explicate a song based on elements like “the role it’s played in the lives of people you know or know about”. He begins with the personal life experiences of students, and attempts to win them over into academic writing through musical connection. And although Folk nods to features of academic writing such as research, he notes in another assignment sheet that, “Writers write best when they choose topics that are meaningful and interesting to them.” Good pedagogy, then, begins with personal experience and ushers students into new writing situations by building confidence in their own internal voices. Folk’s approach connects to the Sheridan et al. (2012) category of semiotic potentials, or ways that a given rhetorical option might offer particular value in a rhetorical situation. In other words, what kinds of work can this rhetorical option perform? Rodrigue et al. (2016) argued that music offers several affordances, including creating atmosphere and setting in a space; activating emotion; generating mood; establishing tone, atmosphere, and setting; activating personal associations; and transitioning between things. It is clear from the survey data that instructors overwhelmingly see music as a way to activate to student interest, to welcome them into the classroom, to establish a common theme of discourse, to draw on existing expertise, and to ease the transition into academic writing. They experience music as a cultural touchstone, and a way to connect with and engage students. In the responses to the open-ended survey questions, the code Student interest, access, cultural relevance, taste, and preference occurred more than any other code. Even instructors who make little explicit use of music in their pedagogy often noted its value as background noise during class: within the open-ended survey questions, the code Background noise occurred several times over three of the four questions. Additionally, all five interviewees often pointed to student access as justification for their use of music in the writing classroom, noting in different ways Opera’s observation that a lot of students “don’t love English,” and music can be a way to welcome them in, build a community of learners (Folk), and even address disability (Opera). In a sense, Folk’s approach is not very different from that of Glam. He uses music as a text to be analyzed and critiqued, with more attention to lyrics than to aurality. He pays some attention

92 to the writing process, but does not explicitly link music to linguistic composing processes. The difference between the two approaches seems to mainly revolve around ultimate goals. Glam hopes to use music to make students better critical writers, while Folk hopes to use music to make students more comfortable expressing themselves within an academic writing environment. In both cases, though, the assumption seems to be that critical listening to music will somehow result in stronger writing, though the mechanics of the relationship between music and writing are addressed very little. One difference between Glam and Folk, however, is that Folk seems to take less for granted in terms of communicating expectations for students. For instance, he provides a “hit list” of things to avoid in essays. He also provides a “glossary” which is less about musical terms, and more about terms that he uses in class and in feedback on essays. For instance, he defines signal phrase, a fairly common term in the field, but he also defines prairie dog thesis—apparently his own term—which is an unexpected thesis which pops up unexpectedly, in the middle of an essay, like a prairie dog. He also defines the crappy lyrics problem, where he advises students not to analyze lyrics that are poorly written or overly ambiguous. Folk sees this glossary as another way of welcoming students into academic discourse by “translating” academic (or just unfamiliar) terms into their own vernacular. He notes, “. . . my glossary is my way of saying, ‘welcome!,” you know, ‘come in!’” Additionally, though, this impulse to define, to avoid ambiguity, may have something to do with Folk’s avoidance of delving into technical music terms. For instance, he advises his musician students, when preparing for their “Song I Love” presentations, “when you’re doing your presentation to the class, remember not everybody knows what a flatted 5th is. When you talk about the blues, you might have to do a little defining, you know.” Overall, Folk seems to see the main obstacle to student learning in the writing classroom as unfamiliarity with, or resistance to, academic discourse. In this way, Folk’s pedagogy resembles the procedural rhetoric: preparation for academic discourse model. However, the expressivist tendencies of his pedagogy prevail in his belief that, if students can be welcomed into the classroom, and a common discourse established, and if they can be encouraged to draw on their own experiences in an authentic way, then good writing will occur.

93 5.4 Rap: Music and Current-Traditionalism

While it may be unfair to label all of Rap’s practice current-traditional, much of what I observed comes closest that matching that description: Of all of the interviewees, she discussed style the most, seemed the most invested in outcomes of clarity and correctness, and emphasized the writing product more than audience, process, or situation. She mainly used music (lyrics) as a way to demonstrate various rhetorical devices such as a simile and alliteration. She played games with students where they would try to identify particular devices, and it is notable that in playing such games, there is a clear implication of a “right” and “wrong” answer. This is consistent with a current-traditional model. I am not surprised that style was on her mind. Rap, like me, has also has a background in professional communication and has taught technical writing, which tends to have a strong stylistic element. And it is likely that her background in professional communication and writing centers has lent her greater attunement to a “real world” application of writing. In fact, Rap related a breakthrough moment in the writing center, when a former student came to understand parallel structure through a lesson that Rap previously taught using music. This is consistent, from what I can see, of Rap’s pedagogy because she wants to teach specific, actionable, tested writing concepts using music, and those concepts are often related to style. And this emphasis on style is more defensible than it may first seem. Frederick deBoer (2017) acknowledged that first-year composition assignments arrive with pressure on instructors to meet certain objectives, most often related to multimodality. While he did not attack multimodal instruction in the first-year composition classroom, he claimed, plausibly, that units like visual rhetoric can eat up a great deal of instructional time. He then convincingly argued that while many stakeholders seem to think that style, if it is taught at all, is best saved until advanced composition courses, it should be taught early because first, it is “an intrinsic aspect of prose and can’t be meaning- fully disaggregated from content,” and second, it is an “essential element of making students care about writing.” This style emphasis also exists in John Maguire’s (2013) College Writing Guide and Michael Laser’s (2018) The College Writing Clinic. Though both take a dim view of untutored student writing and Laser tends to pathologize (it is no accident that the title of the book involves

94 the word “clinic”), they nevertheless offer solid instructional suggestions and lesson plans related to the teaching of style.25 In my own pedagogical practice, I use Maguire’s (2012) ideas about concrete nouns to help students learn to describe ideas in concrete terms. To accomplish this, my students compose album reviews. They choose an album from a Rolling Stone list of top 100 albums of all time, listen to it, describe it, and comment on how successful it is.26 This assignment follows a unit on descriptive writing that focuses on the use of strong verbs and concrete nouns, passing on to the students Maguire’s (2012) urging to “write about things you can drop on your foot.” Music, as I’ve previously noted, can be hard to describe, especially by those who lack a musical background, and so it is easy for students to resort to vague, fluffy stereotypes. One, of course, is the “universal language” trope. Another is that a song “made me want to dance,” or “put a smile on my face.”27 But, following Maguire, I remind them that we live in a physical world, and we are moved by things we can see, touch, taste, and drop on our feet. So instead of resorting to tropes, I urge them to listen to what is actually happening in the song. We read example album reviews and note the concrete language. And then, we look for ways to that this idea can transfer—that an invisible thing like music—or ideas—can be described in specific, concrete terms. Rap’s emphasis on correctness and product connects with the WPA outcome of knowledge of conventions, or “the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so doing, shape readers’ and writers’ perceptions of correctness or appropriateness” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2014). Conventions often include issues of style. For instance, the WPA Outcomes Statement specifically mentions grammar, spelling, and punctuation, as well as structure, tone, and mechanics. Finally, one of the marks of current-traditional rhetoric is its connection with a market economy: writing in the service of commerce. And interestingly, Rap used the rapper Dessa to illustrate

25The rebuttals to these authors (see for instance Krause, 2017) often seem to stem more from questioning their core assumptions about student writing, and disciplinary gatekeeping (Maguire was a journalist; Laser, a novelist) than deep objections to the pedagogical content itself. 26I started limiting students to the Rolling Stone list after I realized that, without such a limit, most of them would write about the same five albums, many of which dropped within the last couple of years. I defend the limitation by explaining to them that first, the list represents a variety of genres, from country to soul to rap, and second, the albums have had the benefit of time in order to help establish their lasting value. “The new Beyonce’ record may well be a classic,” I tell them. “We just don’t know yet”. 27These are instantiations of cultural position (Sheridan et. al, 2012), and are addressed in the next section of the chapter.

95 stylistic devices, but with an eye not only toward relevance to students, but a demonstration of the commercial power of language. In this case, though, she is not talking about the use of language in traditional business contexts, but in rap music. In Rap’s own words:

And so I think what it did is show that this isn’t something that I’m just asking them to do as some like worthless, you know, English rhetoric assignment. This is stuﬀ that’s actually occurring to art. . . and making people money...

5.5 Pop and Opera: Rhetorical Approaches

Pop and Opera taught in differently contexts: Pop taught in two different 2-year institutions in New England, while Opera taught at a large public university in the Southeast. However, both used music as a heuristic to understand the writing process within a pedagogy largely informed by rhetoric and the rhetorical situation. These two instructors best represent Fulkerson’s rhetorical philosophy. Pop attended to affect theory when she used song introductions as a way to explore linguistic introductions. For instance, she played Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and invited students to reflect on how such a strong feeling could be conveyed in a few bars.28 Instructors in the survey also noted the ability of music to negatively activate student emotions, and even to distract them from learning experiences. These responses were coded as Affect and distraction, and occurred 11 times over three of the four open-ended survey questions. These responses support scholars’ observations that to teach writing using music invites “certain conflicts” about ideology and personal investment (Horner, 1995), and can even work to subvert the very ideas being taught (Sirc, 1997). Some instructors found that students wanted to dance or sing to songs rather than stay on task, which others wrote that it often proved difficult for students get to past their own emotions about certain musical pieces in order to perform any real analysis. Interestingly, though, Pop only used music as a heuristic for writing in her first-year writing classes, and not in her engineering writing classes, though she used music at the beginning of class to set a mood. This tendency echoes that of Rap, who had noted in her interview, “And so I would find that a lot of my engineering students—a lot of my engineering male students—would really struggle with seeing the importance or the relevance in making language prettier.” So she tended to avoid the use of music in these contexts. 28See Spotify playlist.

96 Pop also deployed a lesson relating to plagiarism, where she used Vanilla Ice’s uncredited sampling of Queen’s “Under Pressure” to illustrate the concept, and a lesson on punctuation, where she utilized musical rhythms to demonstrate the lengths of pauses of each punctuation mark. On a more macro level, she also compared writing an essay and using the ideas of others to “covering” (performing) someone else’s work. For instance, in class, she would play “Imagine” by John Lennon and then the “Imagine” cover by heavy metal band A Perfect Circle.29 The contrasting styles would drive home her point: the same song, interpreted two very diﬀerent ways. In this way, she would invite students to imagine their essay “covering” the works of other writers. This pedagogy addresses questions of cultural position, or “the value assigned to a particular rhetorical option by various and overlapping cultural logics” (Sheridan et. al, 2012). For instance, cultural position involves metaphors and images; role and status; and cultural systems that privilege and deprivilege this option. The idea of music being a kind of meta-language recurred often in the data. Instructors, for instance, noted that music is an “international language” and music is a “universal language.” Some instructors, like Opera, hoped that the extra-linguistic features of music, like melody, harmony, and rhythm, could carry meaning in ways that not only augment, but transcend linguistic boundaries. Ironically, however, it is very common for instructors to mostly or only attend to linguistic features of the musical composition, which forecloses the possibility of activating this “universal language.” Additionally, this musical language, if there is one, is far from homogenous. Musical taste and preference often become a site of conﬂict when music is used in the writing classroom. For instance, in responding to open-ended question Q19, What challenges have you encountered in using music in your writing pedagogy?, instructors often referenced disagreements with students about taste, preference, or appropriateness of certain songs, styles, or artists in the classroom. Students objected to obscene language in Kendrick Lamar’s music; promiscuity in rap music; misogyny in country; and drugs in rock and roll. Sometimes, there is a thinly-veiled agenda behind these objections. For instance, Rap related the story of a student who resisted certain styles of music, seemingly because of their racial freight. The student would not object when she used country music in the classroom, but when she introduced rap or Latin music, he would argue that the piece was not a good example of the concept.

29See Spotify playlist.

97 Opera identifies as a musician: she is classically trained as a vocalist, and also plays the piano. Because of this, she is able to speak of some more technical aspects of music, like chords, and harmony, and rhythm. And like Rap, Opera dealt with style. For instance, as discussed in the previous chapter, she teaches a lesson that compares long, meandering sentences to dirges, and more powerful, exciting sentences to rock and roll. And like Pop, Opera uses musical rhythms to illustrate punctuation, and pays some attention to grammar in class. However, she avoids the category of current-traditional with a vocal disclaimer to students: “the rules are really arbitrary anyway. It’s a bunch of old white men who sit at the MLA and just decide what the rules are going to be this year.” Most importantly, Opera attended to rhetorical situation. For instance, she compared the rappers Tupac, Drake, and G Dragon from South Korea as a way to understand various rhetorical situations. As she explains, the late American rapper Tupac wrote in a very different rhetorical situation than the popular Canadian rapper Drake, and G Dragon as well. This notice of different rhetorical situations, she argues, allows her to illustrate international discourse, as well as different styles and citation practices. It also allows her to discuss the different audiences and approaches to audience each rapper embodies. I often show Wired magazine’s (2018) “Five Levels” video with jazz wunderkind Jacob Collier in order to introduce audience.30 In it, Wired challenges Collier, who is a twenty-something YouTube phenom, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and quite probably musical genius, to explain his ideas about harmony to five audiences: a child, a teenager, a college student, a professional musician, and a living legend: jazz great Herbie Hancock. Collier good-naturedly obliges, and travels from a simple harmonization of “Amazing Grace” with the child to a discussion of minor chords with the teenager; from discussion of traveling back to musical “center” with the college student to “negative harmony” with the initially bemused to finally delighted professional musician. Finally, he discusses harmony with Herbie Hancock, and it becomes so technical that I usually take pity on my students and stop it before it reaches its ending at around 15 minutes. When I ask students what they learned, especially with attention to the ways that Collier adapted his message to various audiences, they invariably identify certain practices: Collier’s practice of asking someone, initially, how much they know about the subject, which is a kind of audience analysis; Collier’s assumption,

30See ”Saviour” on the Spotify playlist.

98 as he moves into more expert audiences, that they understand certain terms and concepts; the ways that, as he moves more into expert audiences, his style becomes less didactic and more dialogical (see Figure 5.3). Opera’s attention to rhetorical situation addresses the WPA outcome of rhetorical knowledge, or “the ability to analyze contexts and audiences and then to act on that analysis in comprehending and creating texts” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2014). As previously noted, many instructors in the survey identify the teaching of rhetorical principles as a key motive for the use of music in the writing classroom. Analysis—both rhetorical and critical—can aid in meeting the first outcome within this set, especially if instructors couple it with the composition of a variety of texts. I also observed that instructors use music specifically to teach rhetorical concepts such as audience, and individual responses reference other rhetorical concepts such as invention, purpose, delivery, ethos, pathos, and logos. As discussed previously, both Pop and Opera see music as a metaphorical analogue to writing, and proceed accordingly. In this way, I observe resonances with the WPA outcome of processes, or “multiple strategies. . . to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2014). And this appears in the survey responses as well: instructors can use the composition of music to mirror the composition of text; they can show changes in songs to explain revision; they can use voices in music as a metaphorical parallel to voice in writing; they can use sampling in music to explain citation and copyright. I have also found that working musicians, especially songwriters, can help debunk enduring myths about process that students bring with them into the writing classroom. For example, alt- country songwriter and Alabama native Jason Isbell, during a 2013 Bonnaroo interview, was asked if his recent sobriety had shown any effect on his creative output.31 Isbell responded as follows:

No. . . it gave me more time in the day to work. You know, I don’t think that inspiration is the problem. You know, I like Chuck Close, the painter. He said, ‘inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.’ And when I read that, I thought, ‘all right, that’s the last I’ll ever say about not being inspired.’ Because I know how to write a song. It doesn’t have to be about the most world-changing event every single day. But if you actually buckle down and put your [expletive] to work, then you’re gonna come up with something. (3:51-4:22)

31For one of Isbell’s best songs, see ”24 Frames” on the Spotify playlist.

99 Similarly, celebrated R&B songwriter John Legend, during a conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, had this to say about inspiration:32

I don’t need like, kind of a lightning bolt of inspiration to say, ‘ok, I know what I want the album to be about.’ I ﬁgure that the writing process will give me those lightning bolts eventually, but I just have to go and try to receive them. I have to go and try to make it happen. And to me, the best advice that I give to writers is what I’ve seen you give to writers too, which is to write. . . (3:37)

I like to show these two YouTube videos to students in my writing classes, in hopes of debunking one of the enduring myths that they bring with them into college writing: the myth that one must be “inspired” to write. I hold out hope that the “creative” nature of the work of songwriting will drive the point even deeper: if an accomplished songwriter can write without “lightning bolts,” how much more can a college student write an assignment when the stakes are much lower? Pop, during her interview, stated that she used music as a “. . . heuristic to help students understand the writing process.” However, perhaps unsurprisingly, this approach can tend to blend with more rhetorical approaches. For instance, the interview revealed that while Rap used music to teach “rhetorical devices” such as metaphors and similes, she does it by highlighting the metaphorical resonances between music and the writing process. This rhetorical approach comes closest to what I hoped to see in my exploration of the use of music in the writing classroom. As previously noted, I see a lot of resonances between musical and linguistic composing, and while the rhetorical approach does not necessarily preclude music production, it does not demand that music, itself, be the primary output of a composition course. Instead, it views music as one rhetorical option among many, and makes room for linguistic writing to take place alongside other forms of composition. So several themes emerge from the data. First, music, when considered as a rhetorical option, oﬀers many possibilities to instructors and students within the writing classroom. However, it is most often used in the service of analysis, with some eﬀorts to use music analogically to the linguistic composing process. Though students are often permitted to create music-based multimodal projects, this practice does not seem to be expected or widely supported in the classroom. Additionally, the use of music in the classroom does not seem to clearly drive an instructor in

32See ”All of Me” on the Spotify playlist.

100 the direction of one pedagogical focus rather than another. In other words, if an instructor is an expressivist before he begins to employ music in his classroom, he will likely remain an expressivist when music is added. If she favors a critical/cultural studies approach before adopting the use of music, she will likely continue in that direction after music is adopted. There are also some pedagogical implications for the use of music in the writing classroom, which I will consider in the following chapter.

Table 5.1: Fulkerson’s approaches to composition.

101 Figure 5.1: Traktion 4 interface.

Figure 5.2: SongU instructors critique one of my songs.

102 Figure 5.3: Jacob Collier discusses harmony with Herbie Hancock.

103 CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

The first day of my EN 102: Writing and Research (Writing about Music) course, I walk into the classroom, silently, banjo in hand. I smile at the students, wave at them, but say nothing. In front of the classroom, the automated slide deck begins. It introduces me and the course, and assures students that I can actually talk, but I’m just not doing it right now. Then, the lyrics for the Civil War song “Soldier’s Joy” flash on the screen, and I begin to play and sing:33 Grasshopper sitting on a sweet tater vine/Along comes a chicken and says you’re mine Ain’t my mama’s darling boy/singing bout soldier’s joy Twenty-five cents for the morphine/ fifteen cents for the beer Twenty-five cents for the morphine/to get me away from here Dance all night and fiddle all day/that’s the soldier’s joy I finish singing but keep playing an instrumental version of “Cumberland Gap.” Meanwhile, the slide deck continues advancing. It explains that “soldier’s joy” was a potent mix of beer and morphine given to soldiers who were seriously injured. This is not a happy song. Then, the deck acknowledges that although the banjo is often seen as a white, lower-class instrument, its closest ancestor comes straight from Africa, and traditional African musicians still play the instrument in a way that closely resembles clawhammer banjo. Things are not always as they seem. Finally, a slide compares writing and music, and argues that the one has much to teach about the other. The whole time, I have not spoken aloud at all, only sung.34 Music is a large part of both my life and my teaching practice, so given my positionality as a musician/songwriter and an academic, I see no harm in admitting that when I embarked on this dissertation project, I was hoping to find a more rich, robust, and surprising use of music in the college writing classroom. While I have little desire to replace the content or outcomes of college

33See The Skillet Lickers, “Soldier’s Joy” on the Spotify playlist. 34This opening is confessedly a little dramatic. However, in my defense: Raymond Joseph Teller, the silent half of the Penn and Teller performing duo, got his start as a high school Latin teacher. In an Atlantic article, he compelling argues that teaching is a kind of performance art, where the job of the teacher is to encourage students to “fall in love with the subject.” Interestingly, Teller’s teaching philosophy comes from philosopher A. N. Whitehead’s work on the stages of education: romance, precision, and generalization. The name of Whitehead’s book? The Rhythm of Education (Lahey, 2016).

104 writing with music itself, I am persuaded that music is powerful and underutilized pedagogical tool. With its traditional emphasis on effective pedagogy, I had hoped to see the field of rhetoric and composition making innovative use of music. While I did find some outliers, especially the case study participants, I mostly found music being used as a kind of classroom ambiance device, to welcome students and facilitate good work, and music being used as a text to critique, with special emphasis on lyrics. Although there were some interesting assignments, units, lesson plans, and course designs described in the narrative portions of the survey, the overwhelming sense was that music is used in fairly predictable ways in the writing classroom, if it is used at all. Yet as I reflected on the findings, I acknowledge that perhaps I am wrong to hope for what I see as “innovative” uses. After all, if the goal is effective instruction in writing, it well may be that these practices work just fine, even if they are not particularly ground-breaking. It is beyond the scope of this study to assess just how well music-based pedagogy works in the writing class, so I do not have any basis to judge the effectiveness of lyrical analysis, music as background noise, and so on. It is very possible that the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule applies here. As I continued to wrestle with the results and their meaning, I kept returning to two frames that had haunted the margins of my mind since the beginning of this dissertation. The first is academic hospitality as articulated in Haswell, Haswell, and Blalock (2009). The second is the concept of play, which I originally used to frame this dissertation, but later abandoned at the urging of my committee. Their reasoning was (pardon me) sound: I was making an assumption that play would fit as a frame before the study got underway. Even so, however, I could not shake the suspicion that play would also be a useful frame in understanding these results.

6.1 Reframing Background Noise: Music as Academic Hospitality

I, like many musicians, have a particular pathology: a deep inability to listen to music passively. To a musician, a song is a ﬂood of information: the timbre of the singer’s voice; the texture of the drums; the low rumble of the bass; the electric hum of the keyboards; the incandescent harmonies. If you add compelling lyrics to this mix, most musicians ﬁnd it almost impossible not to listen carefully, and even analytically. Therefore, I confess that I have a somewhat derogatory way of

105 describing passive music listening: music as wallpaper, or as I more politically phrased it in this dissertation, music as background noise. I have noted already that I was initially dismayed to ﬁnd that so much of the use of music in the writing classroom boils down to little more than this: music in the background. Passive listening. However, as I continued to ponder my ﬁndings, I wondered if I was missing something. Perhaps this use of music was not simply a case of underutilizing the aural mode. Perhaps something more exciting was happening. Janis Haswell, Richard Haswell, and Glenn Blalock (2009) have suggested that writing instructors view the composition classroom as a site of hospitality. As the authors explained:

The essence [of hospitality] is host and guest, strangers to one another who yet accept in good faith their equality in dignity, privilege, and value—a foundation that holds whether the host-guest relationship is determined by power, wealth, gender, age, knowledge, skill, or learning. (p. 709)

For the authors, then, hospitality involves provision of “ease” to students, and offering of resources including pedagogy, alongside a recognition that the student/stranger may refuse any of these things. Therefore, the authors proposed a “transformative hospitality” that involved three factors: risk taking, restlessness, and resistance. Risk taking is implied because the meeting of hosts and guests is often a meeting of strangers, and this involves a kind of hopeful trust, and it also involves “convictions unfixed”—the hospitality encounter has the potential not only to change the guests, but to change the host/s. This reality is also reflected in restlessness, where encounters shift over time with new courses and the rise of contingent labor. Yet one role of the host is to provide a sanctuary, a temporary place of safety, which itself is both an act of hospitality and an act of resistance. The authors do not mention music specifically in the essay, but the connection, I would argue, is not hard to find. In antiquity, it was common to offer music as part of the entertainment for hosted guests. This practice is mentioned in the Odyssey, where King Alcinous offers Odysseus music through the accomplished minstrel Demodocus, and in the Book of Genesis, where Laban berates his brother Jacob, “Why did you flee secretly and trick me, and did not tell me, so that I might have sent you away with mirth and songs, with tambourine and lyre?” (31:27, English Standard Version). And music in the service of hospitality persists today. Just tonight, as I was writing this, I happened to come across a musician friend’s post on Facebook, where she mentions

106 her (musician) husband’s gig tonight: a string trio at an open house for an expensive house for sale. Music, in other words, to make guests feel welcome, and hopefully open their wallets. But that is not to suggest that cupidity is the only motive for music in hospitality. Deborah Kapchan (2017) discusses contemporary customs of the Suﬁs in France:

. . . But there is a public forum for the performance of Sufi ritual, and that is on the stages of community centers throughout France, where the QB Sufis regularly put on their own version of a sacred music concert (Kapchan 2013). These concerts are publicized and free. There is often a reception afterward, where audience members can meet the musicians, ask questions, and enjoy North African sweets and beverages made by the women in the order. Because of the regnant belief in the power of sacred sound to speak to the heart, the performances of these musicians are also a way of inhabiting the French public sphere differently; and it is an invitation for others to do so as well. Indeed, hospitality is at its core. For the Sufis, both sound and the example of deep, attentive listening, or sama‘, are gifts offered to the French public [emphasis mine].35 (pp. 11-12)

My family makes it a practice to welcome members of our community into our home weekly. Usually, this means I cook a big meal, and we crowd around the table in our dining room, which not coincidentally includes a piano in one corner, a hammered dulcimer on top of the buffet, and a guitar, a banjo, and a mandolin hanging on the wall. There is almost always a record playing. Not infrequently, we find ourselves watching musical performances on YouTube or, if the guests are musically minded, breaking out into an informal jam in the living room. Music a large part of our hospitality. So perhaps unsurprisingly, this musical hospitality extends to my classroom practice. Similar to Folk’s “Song I Love” assignment, I also have students write “mixtape” lists as a way to enter into the musical conversation. Using the (probably outdated, I’ll admit) metaphor of the mixtape, I ask students to list 8-10 songs that define them as a person, and describe their relationship to the song. Then, throughout the semester, I play the music from different student “mixtapes” in the background in class, largely without comment, except to note on the whiteboard, “today’s mixtape courtesy of [student].” I include the option to list sounds, like water flowing or motorcycle engines, in case there are students in the class who are truly indifferent to music.

35See Suﬁ Music Ensemble, “Ney Taksim” on the Spotify playlist for an example.

107 This, I think, counts as academic hospitality, for two reasons. First, it involves risk taking on the parts of the students (they do not know what I or other students will think of their musical choices), and on my part, since I am often surprised at the music chosen. My general rule is that I will let the music play until students are obviously uncomfortable, so sometimes that means listening to music with some explicit lyrics, and sometimes it means listening to contemporary Christian. Second, the element of restlessness is there. By encouraging students to listen to one another’s musical lives, instructors and students inevitably pass through multiple worlds and cultures. The key is restless listening. Indeed, perhaps my most often deployed metaphor, in my music-based writing pedagogy, is that of reading as listening. While this connection is, admittedly, less than mind-blowingly original, I still ﬁnd that it connects with students. All musicians know that listening is critical to learning to play. Musicians listen to artists they admire, and even those they don’t, in order to develop their own style. And when a jam session starts, a good player listens for a long time before she plays a single note, analyzing technical aspects like key center, time signature, and chord structure, but also more ineﬀable features like mood. Even students who are not musicians are often avid music listeners. I try to inculcate in them the idea, then, that to read is to listen. It is not only an act of respect and a means toward artistic development as writers, but it is also a way into a rhetorical situation. We listen in order to earn the right to write in response, to add our own verse. But we also listen in order to enter the jam: in order to play.

6.2 Playing (with) Music: Musical Play as Resistance in the Writing Classroom

I am at Band of Brothers, the Tuscaloosa brewery, and is time for the open jam. I sit behind my keyboard and look at the other players that Peter, the director of the open mic, called to the front. John is on the drums; Grey is on the guitar; Erin is playing the ukulele; Steven is holding the electric bass. “What are we doing?” I ask. Erin looks at me. “Call it.” “Ok. Something swampy, maybe? Greasy funk.” “Sounds good,” Erin agrees. “What key?”

108 I call B minor, the band nods, and I launch a riff using the Wurlitzer sound on my keyboard, spiraling down the blues scale with a triplet feel. John sketches a shuffle groove but holds back, playing on the back of the beat. Grey and Erin trade guitar and ukulele punches while Stephen answers with a bass counterpoint. As the groove assembles, everyone carefully listening, I feel Stephen moving towards the four, and I call it to the band, which lands squarely on the E major 7th before swinging back to the tonic, the home chord. People in the audience are into it now, and we’re laughing. We’re listening; we’re inventing; we’re playing. I have noted that some instructors experienced pushback from students and colleagues about the academic “seriousness” or rigor of music in the writing classroom. This is especially prevalent in courses that are coded as “practical” such as technical writing or writing for engineers. Indeed, these sorts of courses seem to arrive with an expectation that all of the activities and output must project a certain amount of seriousness if they are to be valuable. I have experienced this in my own practice: in my first year teaching technical writing at the University of Alabama, I devised a course design based on strategic tabletop games. After noting that the major outcomes, competencies, and deliverables of technical writing could be addressed using this theme, I created a course that had students pitch tabletop game ideas, form groups, create a game-design document (analogous to a proposal), create a prototype (using design principles) and a set of rules (procedural rhetoric), player-test the game (usability), and then create a Kickstarter pitch package that includes a player how-to video. I was excited about the course and there were some good outcomes, but I was dismayed to detect a tone of resistance on the part of many of the students. Despite my efforts to show the connections between technical writing and the process, they simply did not see the work as serious. Perhaps one student’s comment in the course evaluation summarizes it best: “I did not take this elective course because you and your daughter enjoy board games. I took it so I could learn the principles of technical writing, which I did not.” I was discouraged, and the following semester I began teaching technical writing in partnership with iFixit.com, a company that allows students to create content for their site and interact with real technical writers. In other words, it is “serious.” I do not think that the content has significantly changed, but I have not received an academic seriousness-based complaint in the four successive semesters I have taught the course. In my own career as a songwriter and an academic, I have struggled mightily to reconcile the two sides of my personality: the creative side, playful side, which is additive and thinks in terms

109 of associations and metaphors; and the serious, analytical side, which thinks in terms of clearly- delineated categories. The playful side loves the excitement and discovery of writing, and longs to introduce students to the joy of mixing words (and even music). It tries to rescue my pedagogy from a tedious emphasis on style and correctness in academic and professional writing. The serious side, on the other hand, prizes craftsmanship, and strives to teach students how process and effort can produce good writing, even if the student does not think of themselves as naturally creative. It tries to rescue my pedagogy from being overly expressivist, and perhaps baffling to students. Jody Shipka (2006) characterized play as “purposeful choosing” between rhetorical and material alternatives. She also introduces the concept of “rhetorical soundness,” where she plays on the word “sound” to encompass both aurality and academic rigor: the “soundness” of her students’ work (p. 356). This introduces a key concern of play theory: the prevailing, though possibly insufficient idea of a rift between “imaginative, playful, childlike” work and “real, productive, academic” work. Thomas Batt noted: “To be useful, play must be experienced, to a degree, as useless, or else it will not be play” (p. 70). Accordingly, he asked students in his writing classes to break a rule for an assignment. It could be a grammar rule, a structure rule, an etiquette rule, whatever. Students responded enthusiastically (p. 64). Yet obviously, these sorts of assignments are impractical. They do not point to any particular market value or even prescribed objective, but they can challenge expectations of college writing, and can engender greater student agency. Following D.W. Winnicott in defining play as “an activity that takes place in a ‘potential space’ between an individual’s inner life and objective reality,” Batt undertook a defense of the use of play in the first year composition classroom to dispel student anxieties of moving into a new (academic, authoritative) discourse (p. 79). In this way, I think that play and academic hospitality meet. I have already shown that a key feature of academic hospitality, according to Haswell, Haswell, and Blalock (2009) is the quality of resistance. I argue that resistance is also a feature of play, even musical play. Students arrive on the college campus with anxieties about the nature and value of college, the significant investment of time and money required, the real possibility of failure, and the threats to identity, and instead of answering these anxieties on their own terms and thus authorizing them, instructors offer them a safe, hospitable place to play. This play, Batt argues, authorizes students to actively make meaning of external standards in a “potential space” that prizes movement between serious and play spaces.

110 Haswell, Haswell, and Blalock would call this a place of “sanctuary,” but I think they are talking about the same thing.36 This embrace of play answers the tyrannies of relevance, practicality, and market economics with an impish shrug. It does not treat these anxieties as fictional, but simply not important at the moment. It asks for a suspension of disbelief. I continue to wonder if the student perception of what they are learning and the value of it really matches the reality. After all, students often arrive with some fairly impoverished ideas about writing. I find that what I want to teach them is that writing is actually quite valuable, but not for the reasons they think. Most of them have swallowed the idea that writing is a “pathway to success,” which, if not outright wrong, is certainly reductive.37 I have met great writers who barely make ends meet, and I clearly remember an adult student in Tennessee who had multiple degrees and was most likely a millionaire, yet delivered very weak writing. There are multiple factors that go into “success,” and even success itself is variously defined. Of course writing can be instrumental; I tell my technical writing students that writing does work in the world, and I believe that it does. But to define writing so narrowly is to rob it of its character as way to take action in the world in ways that may not directly translate into higher salaries, greater efficiency, or improved job satisfaction. It is also to artificially bifurcate writing into categories based on perceived use value: proposals and instruction sets are practical; poems and songs and stories are not. Academic writing is practical, because it helps students do better in school so we can get better jobs. Personal writing, not so much. And this is where the discussion can become dangerous, particularly in a field that has long been concerned with disciplinarity. Despite the discomfort of Peter Elbow (1990) and others, many students, instructors, and scholars continue to bifurcate academic (read: “authorized”) writing, and I think this can also include professional writing—the writing of scholars to other scholars, and of professionals to other professionals—and personal writing. Elbow goes so far as to argue that:

36Albert Rouzie (2005) would liken this space to Bahktin’s concept of the carnival, where identities and hierarchies are temporarily suspended. Rouzie observes that for Bahktin “carnival exerts significant positive pressure for critical change because, like play, it is set off from official reality, allowing exploration. . . ” (p. 73). Like the others, this carnival space offers a liminal space of safety, challenge, and exploration. Finally, Brock Dethier (2003) has called music a “neutral territory” in which instructors and students can meet (pp. x-xi). 37Many semesters in my EN 101 course, the first semester of the first-year composition sequence at Alabama, I deploy a “common beliefs about writing” survey to my students. I have them answer, “yes,” “no,” or “not sure,” to statements such as “a writer can only write when inspired,” or “if you don’t love great literature, you can forget about ever being a good writer”. The results are predictably varied. One they often choose as true is “writing is a pathway to success”.

111 The use of academic discourse often masks a lack of genuine understanding. . . Often the best test of whether a student understands something is if she can translate it out of the discourse of the textbook and the discipline into everyday, experiential, anecdotal terms. (p. 137)

Perhaps the personal and the academic need not be so rigorously separated. In the ﬁrst chapter of this dissertation, I discussed my sympathy to Doug Hesse’s (2010) views on the goals of college writing, especially ﬁrst-year composition: he described himself as “persuadable but pragmatic,” but continued to view the primary focus of college writing courses as linguistic writing. Set in opposition to Selfe’s (2009) full-throated call for attention to aurality, and Adam Banks’ more recent (2015) call for the essay to become “genre emeritus,” it is easy to read this kind of stance as that of a luddite, if not a crank. Multimodality is fun and playful, while writing and the essay are serious. Yet when Montaigne conceived the essay, which literally translates from the French to “attempts” or “tests,” he meant them to be explorations, not destinations. They were, in other words, open-ended. They were, in other words, playful. Here, I would recall the relationship between work and play dating back to ancient Greek use of the progymnasmata , where composition took the job of “helping students make a smooth transition of the ‘play’ of the classroom and to the ‘business’ of real-world civic action” (Fleming, 2003, p. 109).38 Composition, then, was a kind of transitional space between education (coded as play) and civic action (coded as work).

6.3 Limitations of This Study

This dissertation aims at exploration and description, but there are limitations. First, I freely acknowledge that my stance about the use of music, where I accept the subservience of the aural mode, at least in writing courses, to the linguistic, is out of step with much of the emerging scholarship in the field. While I believe this stance is defensible, I realize that this may limit the usefulness of my research to others who take a different view of the potentiality of music and the aural mode in rhetoric and composition. Another major limitation is the use of snowball sampling in the survey data, which is a nonprobability sampling technique that cannot claim to be generalizable. The difficulty involved in

38See also Debra Hawhee’s (2004) monograph, Bodily arts: Rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece, where she considers the role of athletics in the gymnasium in the formation of rhetorical proﬁciency through, among other things, the practice of “rhythm” (pp. 141-143).

112 approaching the entire population of college writing instructors in hopes of discovering those who use music in their teaching was unrealistic, so it made more sense to attempt to discover these instructors through social networks. However, it is very possible that I missed quite a few in the process. I aimed for description of what was happening in the classrooms of a small sample of the possible population, but even so, this dissertation should not be the basis of policy, but merely a stepping stone to further research. Thirdly, there is the problem of self-reporting. This dissertation surveys anonymous respondents, who may misunderstand the prompts or misremember their experiences. Or they may simply be wrong. For instance, they may perceive their music-based teaching as highly effective, when in fact, their students would learn the same concepts just as well without it. Another limitation is that the scope of the dissertation precludes a richer view of these classroom interactions, especially from the perspectives of students. Since I rely only on faculty reporting, I have no way of knowing to what degree these teaching (with music) strategies work. I cannot know whether students like or understand the strategies, other than isolated anecdotes from the respondents. I cannot be sure that they help students to meet national or institutional objectives in the writing classroom. Only before and after analysis of student writing could get me closer to answering these questions. I could have interviewed more participants. While the use of 1-5 Likert scale in question 14 on the survey (“To what degree have you used music as part of the pedagogy for writing classes in the past?”) provided a convenient filter, as I only attended to those participants who rated music a “3” or higher, I could have gained broader insight if I had broadened the interview pool. If I had privileged the rhetorical options framework (Sheridan et al., 2012) over the (2005) Fulkerson framework, different results may have emerged, or if I had attended more to the instructor resources, say, than the survey responses and interview transcripts, a slightly different picture may have emerged. I was focused on a very specific thing, which is how and why they were using music, and its possible that in that focus, I missed some other important details about their teaching. For instance, those who ranked music a 3 but not a 5 in importance in their teaching, like Rap, may see music as an important part of their teaching, but no more important than several other parts I did not discuss.

113 6.4 Pedagogical Possibilities

The goal of this dissertation is to describe what is happening with music-based college writing pedagogy, and why, and to question whether these practices can be defended based on a national outcomes statement. It cannot, therefore, dictate practice in any way. For better or for worse, though, the field continues to expect research to connect to pedagogy (Kopelson, 2008). And this dissertation does reveal pedagogical possibilities for music in the writing classroom. In addition to the fairly unsurprising practice of using music as a cultural text to analyze, instructors reported the use of music to teach a broad range of concepts, and many instructors referred to or provided presentations, lesson plans, assignments, and exercises that use music as a way to teach college writing. Though I do not know to what degree these ideas are effective or transferable between contexts, they nonetheless suggest a rich set of possibilities for music in the college writing classroom. The research suggests that before a writing instructor begins to use music in their classroom, it is worthwhile to “count the cost” of employing music as a rhetorical option. First, the instructor should attempt to articulate their philosophy of composition, and ask themselves what role music can play in their teaching based on that. Music can be an effective pedagogical tool, but only to the degree to which it matches an instructor’s intended outcomes. Otherwise, students can become confused or resistant. Then, the instructor should think carefully about the selection of music, as well as the institutional context, including available technology and community attitudes toward music in the writing class. The selection of music is fraught. While music might enfranchise some students, it also has to the ability to divide, especially when certain artists or genres challenge racial, gendered, class-based, or other identity systems. A conservative white student might disapprove of Kendrick Lamar; a black student might be offended by some country music. Also, students may feel as if some music is “theirs,” and therefore beyond challenge, critique, or use in educational contexts. Thus, the use of music could actually become more of a distraction than a pedagogical resource. Finally, the instructor should recognize that the use of music arrives with certain challenges (rigor, technology, terminology, access, etc). Though music is a powerful tool, it is not without issues in the classroom. Some stakeholders (students, mainly) seem to see it as less academically rigorous than other pedagogical resources, perhaps assuming that the seriousness of college warrants “serious” texts such as literature from the Western canon. Additionally, technological constraints can

114 condition the use of music in the classroom, such as failure of, or lack of multimedia systems in the classroom. Once the instructor has assessed the costs and beneﬁts of using music, including attention to music selection, by all means, they should use music to teach various elements of writing. This research suggests that not only is it pedagogically defensible, according to the most recent (2014) WPA outcomes, to use music to teach college writing, but it is also a good way to create a hospitable environment (Haswell et al., 2009). Students connect with others through music, and seem to readily see connections between music and certain parts of writing, like genre and analysis. There is also some evidence to suggest that music can help with memory, and therefore transfer. Music might also be especially eﬀective in reaching uncomfortable or resistant students. Music might be way to reach certain students, as it can be an important part of their identity systems. Instructors playing, studying, and seeming to approve of their music, or at least taking it seriously, can enfranchise students who might otherwise struggle to enter academic discourse.

6.5 Conclusion

This dissertation is only one small piece of a vast puzzle. As music continues to enter my life through car radios, headphones, and Bluetooth speakers, I continue to contend with the question of whether, and how, and to what degree music interacts with and informs the teaching of writing in college. One set of questions might center on invention. For instance, I might ask if and to what degree listening to music helps students write, or could it hinder the process? Do different kinds of music, like music without lyrics, have different effects on invention practices? Do invention processes for songwriters/composers have anything to teach student writers? Another line of questions could center on the metaphorical possibilities of music-based writing instruction. I have already noted the ways that musical metaphors have been operationalized in the service of writing pedagogy: citations as samples; punctuation as rhythm; writing pace as dirges or rock anthems. What other metaphors are possible? Do these metaphors work for students? Do they help them more readily see connections? And what about the metaphorical possibilities of musical styles? What do different styles of music have in common with writing in terms of their approach? Can jazz, for instance, offer lessons on an improvisatory style of writing? Does song

115 structure have anything to teach students about alphanumeric writing structure? What about the use of repetition in songs? A final set of questions could center on the possibilities of music-based writing pedagogy for memory and transfer. For instance, can songs productively help college students remember writing concepts? What concepts would best lend themselves to this practice? Could MLA format, for instance, be taught using music? As previously mentioned in the limitations section of this chapter, this dissertation was only able, in terms of scope, to attend to certain parts of the entire writing network. One key component that it did not address was students, and their experience with music. Although instructors reflected on student responses and outcomes to music-based pedagogy, all of these future studies could productively incorporate the responses of students, as well as measures that do not rely so heavily on self-reporting. For instance, in a study about music and memory, one could teach a rhetorical concept without music and test students on their recall of it, and then teach a different rhetorical concept with music, and test students again to see if they recalled the concept more fully. Steven B. Katz (1996) argued that music and sound best address affective responses, and in fact, that aurality represents new possibilities for metaphor and knowing. It can be, in other words, epistemic. Though I do not take up the epistemic qualities of music here, it is a rife area for further exploration. How can music, in the writing classroom, activate invention processes that are not, as linguistic writing is, logocentric, but instead temporal and aural? Could this musical approach to affect in the classroom begin to address the emotional processes of writing, especially revision, as recently considered by Ballenger and Myers (2019)? Perhaps most critically, scholars would do well to continue to study the relationships between play, creativity, music, and the teaching of writing. Scholars and instructors in the field rightly resist the idea that only “enlightened” minds can be taught effective rhetorical tools. They seek ways to democratize the writing process. They seek to include students who are not, by their lights, creative—or more likely, have had that creativity trained out of them. But in doing so, they should take care that they do not draw too firm a line between “creative, playful” writing—like songs—and “serious, useful” writing—like resumes, or proposals, or even essays. Instead, they should continue to seek ways to teach the whole person. Such a person can be artistic as well as analytical; can be a singer as well as a mathematician; can associate as well as analyze. Instructors can use music to

116 generate a striking accord with their students. And perhaps they can lead them to enter the jam, as paraphrased by Marvin Diogenes:

You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the set; then you put in your oar. Someone answers with a verse; you answer with a verse of your own; another riffs off of your chorus; another takes a solo off the bridge, to either the delight or dismay of the room, depending upon the quality of the player’s chops. However, the jam is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the jam still vigorously in progress.

117 APPENDIX A

COMPLETE QUALTRICS SURVEY

A.1 Informed Consent

Q1 Welcome! I am interested in understanding the use of music to teach writing in the writing classroom. I will ask you questions about your use of music to teach writing and your purposes for doing so. Please be assured that your responses will be kept completely conﬁdential. The study should take you around 10-15 minutes to complete. Your participation in this research is voluntary. You have the right to withdraw at any point during the study, for any reason, and without any prejudice. If you would like to discuss this research, please e-mail David Bedsole at [redacted]. You may also contact the FSU Human Subjects Oﬃce: 2010 Levy Avenue; Suite 276; Tallahassee FL, 32306-2742; (850) 644-7900; [email protected]. By clicking the button below, you acknowledge that your participation in the study is voluntary, you are 18 years of age, and that you are aware that you may choose to terminate your participation in the study at any time and for any reason. Please note that this survey will be best displayed on a laptop or desktop computer. Some features may be less compatible for use on a mobile device.

• I consent, begin the study (1)

• I do not consent, I do not wish to participate (2)

Skip To: End of Block If Welcome! I am interested in understanding the use of music to teach writing in the writing cl... = I consent, begin the study Skip To: End of Survey If Welcome! I am interested in understanding the use of music to teach writing in the writing cl... = I do not consent, I do not wish to participate

A.2 Demographic Information

Q2 Gender:

118 • Female (1)

• Male (2)

• Non Gender Binary (3)

• Prefer not to answer (4)

Q3 Age:

• 20-29 (1)

• 30-39 (2)

• 40-49 (3)

• 50-59 (4)

• 60+ (5)

• Prefer not to answer (6)

Q4 Racial and ethnic identiﬁcation (choose more than one if desired):

• African-American (non Hispanic) (1)

• Asian/Paciﬁc Islander (2)

• Caucasion (non Hispanic) (3)

• Latino or Hispanic (4)

• Mixed Race (5)

• Native American, Aleut or Aboriginal (6)

• Other (please specify): (7)

Q5 Highest level of education completed:

• Bachelor’s degree (1)

• Master’s degree (2)

• ABD (All but dissertation) (3)

• Ph.D, Ed. D, J.D. or equivalent (4)

119 • Other (please specify): (5)

Q6 Please choose all graduate degrees that you currently hold:

• English (Creative Writing) (1)

• English (Literature) (2)

• English (Rhetoric and Composition) (3)

• Communication (4)

• Linguistics (5)

• Music (6)

• Education (7)

• Other (please specify): (8)

Q7 Current professional identity (choose more than one if applicable):

• Graduate student (1)

• Professor (non-tenure track) (2)

• Professor (tenure track) (3)

• Professor (tenured) (4)

• Full-time Instructor or Lecturer (5)

• Part-time Instructor or Lecturer (6)

• Adjunct (7)

• Staﬀ or Administration (8)

• Other (please specify): (9)

Q8 Years teaching writing at the college level:

• 1-5 (1)

• 5-10 (2)

• 10-15 (3)

120 • 15-20 (4)

• 20+ (5)

Q9 Please choose all job responsibilities that apply (choose more than one if applicable):

• I teach at least one writing course per semester (1)

• I teach multiple writing courses per semester (2)

• I oversee other writing teachers as part of my job (3)

• I make decisions about writing curricula as part of my job (4)

• I publish scholarship about writing instruction as part of my job (5)

• Other (please specify): (6)

A.3 Institutional Information

Q10 Current institution is best described as:

• Public Research University (1)

• Private Research University (5)

• Comprehensive University (6)

• Liberal Arts College (7)

• Public Community College (8)

• Private Community College (9)

• Minority-Serving Institution (including HBCU) (10)

• Proprietary (for proﬁt) (3)

• Other (please specify): (4)

Q11 Highest degree granted by current institution:

• Technical (vocational) certiﬁcate (1)

• Associate’s degree (2)

121 • Bachelor’s degree (3)

• Master’s degree (4)

• Specialist (5)

• Ph.D, Ed. D, or other professional degree (J.D., M.D., D.D.S, etc) (6)

• Other (please specify): (7)

Q12 Institutional size (number of students enrolled): • Less than 2500 (1)

• 2500-4999 (2)

• 5000-9999 (3)

• 10,000-19,999 (4)

• 20,000-29,999 (5)

• 30,000-39,999 (6)

• more than 40,000 (7)

• Other (please specify): (8)

Q13 Geographic region: • Northeast Region (ME, VT, NY, NH, MA, RI, CT, Quebec, New Brunswick, Maritime provinces) (1)

• Mid-Atlantic (PA, NJ, DE, MD, VA, DC) (2)

• Mid-South (WV, KY, TN, NC, SC) (3)

• Southeast (MS, AL, GA, FL, Caribbean) (4)

• Great Lakes (WI, IL, MI, IN, OH, Ontario) (5)

• North Central (NE, IA, SD, ND, MN, MT, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) (6)

• South Central (KS, MO, OK, AR, TX, LA) (7)

• Northwest (AK, WA, OR, ID, MT, British Columbia, Alberta) (8)

• Paciﬁc (CA, NV, HI) (9)

• Rocky Mountain (AZ, CO, NM, UT, WY) (10)

• International (other than Canada) (11)

122 A.4 Use of Music in the Writing Classroom

Q14 To what degree have you used music as part of the pedagogy for writing classes in the past? (1=almost never - 5=very frequently)

• 1 (1)

• 2 (2)

• 3 (3)

• 4 (4)

• 5 (5)

Q15 In what writing courses have you used music as part of the pedagogy?

• First-year composition (ﬁrst semester) (1)

• First-year composition (second semester) (2)

• Upper-level undergraduate writing (3)

• Graduate writing courses (4)

• Other (please specify): (5)

Q16 How do you use music as part of the pedagogy in writing courses? (Please choose all that apply)

• I design writing courses using music as a theme (1)

• I have students read about and listen to music for class (2)

• I have students write about music in traditional genres like album reviews (3)

• I have students write about music using mixed and/or multimodal genres (4)

• I have students compose about music using diﬀerent modes besides aural or linguistic (5)

• I give students the option to compose music for class (6)

• I teach process writing with music (7)

• I teach analysis and critique with music (8)

• I teach voice and style with music (9)

123 • I teach audience with music (10)

• I teach genre with music (11)

• I teach revision with music (12)

• Other (please specify): (13)

Q17 Please describe a unit, module, or lesson in which you used music to teaching writing: Q18 What is your rationale for using music as part of your teaching of writing? Q19 What challenges have you encountered in using music in your writing pedagogy? Q20 Is there anything else you’d like to add about using music in the writing classroom? Q21 Are you willing to be contacted for a possible follow-up interview? If so, please enter a valid email address.

124 APPENDIX B

SAMPLE SURVEY OPEN-ENDED QUESTION RESPONSES

Q17: Please describe a unit, module, or lesson in which you used music to teaching writing:

• When I teach students about genre, I start with a genre they’re familiar with–music. I play a YouTube video that goes through the alphabet and visually and verbally goes through corresponding music genres. After watching the video, the students and I discuss the various features they saw and what was used to convey each genre.

• Often during peer review, i’ll put music on in the background. I started doing this a few years ago when i received feedback form peer review groups that it was hard to focus if one group was trying to read through drafts while another nearby had already started talking about their drafts.

• To help students understand media copyright for multimodal projects, I use music ﬁrst because of its familiarity to them. We look at sampling, issues of ownership, remix, etc. with music as a gateway into a larger multimodal discussion. I give students a remix project, and several each semester will choose music as a medium.

• I’ve used it in at least three ways: * to teach genre; * to discuss rhetoric, discourse; * to talk about students’ writing processes; (and a fourth: just because/for fun/for mood/for enjoyment/to make the classroom less sterile)

• In one of my 1101 classes, I do a lesson about revision where I have my students listen to studio versions of a variety of songs and then we listen to the album version and radio version. I provide artist’s notes and commentary about the revisions they’ve made to the songs and we discuss as a class what revisions were made.

• I regularly taught Springsteen’s ”Born in the USA” as an example of the importance of critical listening (and by extension, critical reading). The students were all familiar with the song, but most had never listened carefully to the lyrics and so did not realize that Springsteen was actually being quite critical in the song. It was usually a very eﬀective lesson for students. I also used 60s protest songs in a unit on rhetorical strategies, and I used the song ”Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” to explore how a rhetorical sign/image changes meaning over time and in diﬀerent contexts.

125 • One recent example: our class on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing talked about the commonalities in the play and the much more recent example of Beyonce’s Lemonade album. I used the comparison as an entry point to a discussion on gender roles and gender performance.

• I play music during peer review and other work sessions in class

• When beginning a unit on Literary Analysis, after class discussions of ﬁction/literature elements, I have the class bring in the lyrics to a song and do exercises where the students identify the elements (i.e. irony, personiﬁcation, characterization, etc.)

• Music is not a signiﬁcant component of my composition courses. As one example however, I show two music videos from the rap group Run the Jewels to demonstrate how to write about genre and composition by simultaneously analyzing the audio and visual components in the videos. Other times, I play (at a low volume) instrumental rap or metal while students free write in their journals.

• Looking at the process of remix as it occurs with sampling in music.

• A recent unit included music (or ”audio projects”) as one option students could produce. The assignment asked them to adapt results from an empirical inquiry into a non-alphabetic medium. Previously, I had assigned a different course a project that asked them to construct a playlist intended to produce a specific rhetorical effect.

• I’ve had students compose a ”mixtape” (really now a playlist) that’s designed to tell an autobiographical story, then write an accompanying rhetorical analysis of the choices they made in composition, and some analysis of the songs themselves.

• I use music throughout the semester because of its parallels with writing composition. For instance, I use Vanilla Ice’s improper borrowing of ”Under Pressure” as an example for teaching plagiarism/source citation (did this before I knew about DeVoss’s CC article). I play the beginning of songs to show a parallel between ”the hook” in music and ”the hook” in writing as something that capture’s the audience’s attention.

• As an example of remediation, I had the class watch a performance of ”Ronan” by Taylor Swift. Swift wrote the song using lines from a woman’s blog posts.

• I compare musical and cognitive dissonance. This helps students understand the latter. Iden- tifying areas of dissonance helps them identify potential topics of interest to explore/research throughout the semester.

126 • One of my lessons compares sentence variety to rock anthems and dirges. A paragraph of long, meandering sentences is compared to a dirge; a paragraph of short, choppy sentences to a song by Dragon Force. We listen to the music, talk about how it makes them feel, identify key ideas (structure, intensity, ability to retain information). Then, we look at examples of those types of writing and ﬁgure out how to ﬁx them. I end the lesson with a song that is more balanced, which lets us talk about the good things variety can do.

• I often use music to teach genre. For example, I use diﬀerent subgenres of metal music to discuss the conventions of genres and how they should be understood and used. I also use death metal music to teach revision. I have several instrumental and vocal versions of songs that I play one after another, and we discuss what needs to change in order to create a ﬁnal product. Metal Music is most useful for me when I teach rhetoric and rhetorical devices. For example, I choose themed albums by Sabaton or Samael, and we have a discussion about how the visual, the aural and the implied work together to create a text (song).

• I taught Beyonce’s Lemonade album last summer. Students ﬁrst analyzed the lyrics via Genius and then wrote about the extra-linguistic features when we listened to the songs. Students then wrote an analysis on how the images on the visual album complicate the lyrics and music.

• The topic of the course is Rock n Roll. In one case, I had students watch a video of Little Richard performing Tutti Frutti followed by a video of Pat Boone performing Tutti Frutti. After watching both videos, I had them write a paragraph comparing and contrasting the two performances.

• A [retired] lesson on how a speaker’s ethos determine’s audience reception of their rhetoric involved comparing the Dr. Dre and Ben Folds versions of ”Bitches Ain’t Shit,” which also allowed us to look into the social responsibility of white artists using racial slurs in parodic compositions. A revised version of that lesson looks at two songs from The Lion King: ”I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” sung by Simba, and ”Be Prepared,” sung by Scar. Both songs are about wanting to be king, which implies the death of Mufasa, but Scar is very up-front about that motive and Simba hasn’t thought it through. Students get to dig into how audience perception of the speaker determines reception of a text. This one also includes some analysis of visual rhetoric because we’re watching clips from the movie. I’ve also used Childish Gambino’s BECAUSE THE INTERNET album and paired it with Donald Glover’s (AKA Childish Gambino) standup comedy material and his infamous ”Instagram napkin rant” to talk about artistic persona and voice. So I guess I mostly use music to talk about voice, huh?

127 • For ﬁrst year writing, students work in groups to create ”ultimate playlists” for various themes, for example, Top 5 Break-up Songs, Top 5 Pump-up Songs, etc. Students must establish criteria and write short defenses for each song. This assignment works well early in the semester for teaching–broadly–what rhetoric means, the creation and sharing of knowledge, and other foundational concepts. The class discussions that surround each group’s ”publica- tion” provide them students with a model of academic writing as conversation. I also teach an upper-division elective in the journalism specialty called Arts and Entertainment Writing, which requires each student to choose a journalistic beat. Here in Austin, music is the most common choice. The assignments for each beat include an ultimate playlist (called a desert island playlist), straight reportage on an event, a critical review, and a personal essay.

• One semester, I had my students analyze the music video for Beyonce’s ”Formation.” As homework, we had read ”On Being Black and Middle Class” by Shelby Steele. We used the music video to discuss ways that Beyonce and her video designers used visual devices to highlight some of the same tensions between race and class discussed by Steele. This lesson was embedded within a semester-long project that required students to advocate to a speciﬁc audience for a speciﬁc change. The purpose of the lesson was to help students understand how visual devices can translate written arguments into multimodal arguments (which they were required to do with their own written arguments).

• studied music and social justice

• Music helped us to address a lesson on considering audience.

• When I teach how to write effective introductions and conclusions, I break my class into small groups. Each group gets a different genre of composition with one receiving U2’s ”Sunday Bloody Sunday.” That group assesses how the song works as an introduction to an album. They tend to discuss the lyrics, instruments used, and the song’s rhythm. We then discuss as a class how we might adapt some of those techniques for academic writing while other techniques are specific to that genre of composing alone. Later, we look at the last song from the album, ”40,” and explore what techniques are used in that song as compared to the intro. The students typically focus on the rhythm again, but we also discuss the production and the lyrical echoes from ”Sunday Bloody Sunday.” The students attempt to answer what about

128 ”40” sounds like closure. We analyze how the songs work together as an opener and closer and, again, compare that to the ways academic intros and conclusions may work together.

• Personal narrative: students create a soundtrack to their lives and describe events that are meaningful to them. Focuses on writing with speciﬁc detail, engaging an audience, conventions of the personal narrative genre. Visual analysis of an album cover. Focuses on beginning analysis, writing in 3rd person objective, making connections between visual images and the music on the album - how that image represents the music contained within. Research Paper on a topic of choice in popular music: teaches research, citation, incorporating various media, deep thinking, argumentative research essay. The entire course is multi-staged revision process oriented.

• I have students read a selection from Kenneth Burke’s ”Psychology and Form,” talking about how music is more suited to the psychology of form than the psychology of information. I have students read Abel Meeropol’s ”Strange Fruit” as a poem, commenting on its information and form. Then they view a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, which inspired the poem. We discuss the relative power of presenting the same story through diﬀerent media. Then we watch Billie Holiday sing the song. We discuss how the emotional reaction to the poem changes when it’s presented as a song. Finally, we move to a more contemporary example–recently, it’s been Beyonc´e’s“Formation”–for comparison.

• My students compose a rhetorical analysis paper using two different artists from two different genres of music. The into revolves around applying ethos,pathos, logos to music and how to effectively analyze an artist’s portrayal of a message.

• Two specific areas where a find music helpful in my writing curricula: 1) Identifying genre, specifically in relation to genre-blending and the necessity of understanding convention before choosing to deviate 2) Remix and lyric/linguistic adaptation. This is often a conversation about form and content. How do we create writing that matches the mood/tone/texture of the narrative or emotion we’re hoping to express. Also, what is the central element/thread (rhythm, lyrics, melody, visuals etc) that holds a composition together?

• My introduction to rhetorical analysis and synthesis begins with listening to some songs and me showing possible analysis over each one. We break down the lyrics by looking only at the printed lyrics and peer reviewing them like we do any other work. They must look at biographical info of the writer and/or singer/group, and then they must look at societal issues/events that occurred in the previous 10 years before the song was written. After this, the goal is ﬁnd either bleed over information or blatant referral to the issues in the lyrics of the song. It is also vitally important to listen to the musical score itself for hints to ﬁll in missing words in the lyrics. If a song is a remake, then they must also look at the original

129 singer and time period to try to ﬁnd out why it was ﬁrst released, and then why it was remade and released again. I always allow the student to choose their own song to analyze, no matter the genre.

• In the past several years, I have taught both ﬁrst and second semester introductory writing courses as well as foundational public speaking courses. In all cases, I used music as a method to discuss the cadence of language as well as introduce (or sometimes re-introduce) rhetorical devices such as similes, metaphors, antithesis, repetition, and parallelism. We use these to discuss how rhetorical devices can enhance meaning and we also discuss how rhetorical devices can detract from meaning if they are not well used or appropriate for the audience. We also discussed how cadence and rhetoric are both culturally derived and looked at how rhetorical devices would play into those. To accomplish these tasks, we listened to music from diﬀerent genres and cultures. I would often break the class up into teams and have them compete in a game to win candy or extra credit points.

• I have occasionally had students analyze lyrics to unfamiliar songs and write and/or discuss what style of music they expect goes with the lyrics, which I use as a jumping oﬀ point to discuss how style can reﬂect content.

• I wouldn’t call it using music to teach writing, per se, but I sometimes play music when students have a longer individual or group task, to relax the atmosphere and invite more discussion.

• I often teach a visual rhetorical analysis of music videos. Students choose two music videos to compare the visual rhetoric. Students also have the option to analyze the music and/or lyrics, as well.

• I use it as background for small group discussions and peer review

• I teach a music module in my ﬁrst semester FYC classes on song lyric interpretation and appreciation. We read/talk about the education we receive from understanding others’ views through their lyric and melody choices; we analyze and critique the lyrics and compare/contrast with poetry; we interpret the authors’ meanings; we look at songs that have been historically/traditionally misunderstood; we consider voice, style, and audience through lyric analysis.

• I read sentences of the student’s writing aloud and then beat the rhythms on the desk to show where the rhythms are either all the same or are too confusing.

• My freshman comp course, ”Rock Pop Hip-Hop” features music as its continual theme, so all writing has something to do with popular music (which I deﬁne very broadly). For one oral

130 presentation, students choose ”A Song I Love” (or hate, or see as signiﬁcant in some way, etc.) and make a claim/thesis about the song, then support it. They play the songs for the class, then spend four minutes supporting their thesis about the song.

• FYW: analyzing and evaluating narrative, generic, and rhetorical techniques in musical texts Upper-division: similar to FYW but through multimodal composing Graduate: theorizing pedagogical and rhetorical uses of music in teaching

• I am in the process of creating curriculum for a summer term course and will have students create blog posts where they write a minimum word count and post a link to a video or song that is relevant to the reading for that week.

• As a warm up in my classes students practice rhetorical criticism by proposing a song to be the best song ever. A diﬀerent student goes every day, tying the song into the day’s reading.

• I use protest songs to explore various elements of rhetoric and compare these w works of social commentary in other genres, comparing and analyzing them both within the context of the era/ movement of which they are a part, as well as from our modern perspective.

• See From Dylan to Donne

• Students are assigned a compare/contrast essay. They are to choose two like subjects from the media arts to compare/contrast, such as two superhero movies, two songs in the same genre or with the same subject matter, two ads, two commercials, two tv shows, etc. One of the topic and thesis examples I give them compares and contrasts Sturgill Simpson’s song ”Sea Stories” and Toby Keith’s ”American Soldier.”

• I use music as background sounds as students work. I also have used ”We are the World” for analysis of the music video. The students looked at the audience, purpose, and design. They evaluated the eﬀectiveness of these components.

• Music video analysis in 2nd semester FYC (course theme: nature)–in class, students viewed a music video and discussed both visuals, music, and lyrics from an ecocritical perspective.

131 • In the past, I often used music to teach album reviews as a way to think through analysis of a text. More recently I have moved to a multi-modal approach that features music as an option for end of term projects (I have had students compose songs for end of term projects), and I also have extensive conversations about research, citation, copyright, and intellectual property engaging use of music in various projects (ﬁlms, presentations, etc.).

• Students are allowed to listen to music while doing in-class writing. I will listen to certain songs during class if they tie in to our discussion. For example, we were talking about racial reconciliation, so we listened to Kendrick Lamar’s ”Alright” and Beyonc´e’s”Freedom”. Also, students often create their own ”soundtrack/mixtape” of songs that tie in to a book we’re reading.

• Music as pathos in digital rhetoric

• N/A

• I taught analytical thinking (coupled with a paper) using music videos as the site of analysis. Students incorporated analysis of both sonic and visual elements to explore how their chosen music video inscribed its story/message.

• I have students think about voice and music as part of their composing process using adobe premiere pro. Some of my students compose using their own music, but all are at least learning to perform using voice. We start with the voice and then move towards combining still images with music and eventually video.

• In SYC, students watch Everything is A Remix, which has segments that focus speciﬁcally on the way that artists remix music in composing new songs. Students write journals in response to the video, and we discuss in class. Similarly, in upper level writing courses, students read Arola Arola’s ”An Ethics of Assemblage: Creative Repetition and the ’Electric Pow Wow’” to understand processes of assemblage.

• In order to understand genre and audience, we looked at love songs from two diﬀerent genres of music and analyzed their content and delivery as a class. Students then wrote short journals analyzing a love song in their favorite genre of music.

132 • Most recently I wanted to help students remember the CRAP pneumonic device for re- membering what factors are important when choosing a quality source for research papers. I found this helpful YouTube video, so we listened to it in class, and the students chose better sources on their second research papers than they had in the ﬁrst round: https://youtu.be/CMaLgec2XWY

• I teach a 1st/2nd year comp course with a theme of Metal music, globalization, and popular culture. Students listen to songs, analyze lyrics, write extended analyses of readings where they can incorporate the lyrics into the writing. Projects include lyrical and visual analyses, album art analysis which connects music and lyrics to the art.

• I’ve taught composition as a remix project in the past. This would allow students to remix any forms of media including but not limited to alphabetic text, sound/music, video, or still images. Students could compose about any topic they wanted, and part of the assignment was to make a case for why the project was worth composing and why the audience should consume it. The short in-class exercise to start this project was to craft a mixtape (though ”playlist” is likely more accurate) about a topic of interest. They had to choose at least 3 songs of any type that reﬂect something that they think, know, feel, or want to learn about a topic. They free write about each of those songs to discuss why they put those songs together. I give them my topic, which is about homelessness in America and my page of rationale for why I chose those songs.

• I’ve used a video of Maya Angelou’s ”Harlem Hopscotch” set to music to help students understand the concept of multimodality, remixing, poetry, and the African American literary tradition. Here’s the link: https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=-mBHyKECPuA

• When the students write in class I login to Pandora. While a passive approach, I have observed that the students can relax, whether working alone or in groups. It allows students to engage with one another and discuss the random music being played while writing. It prevents students from immediately putting on their own Beats and closing oﬀ.

• Use music/ music lyrics to identify larger issues for argument papers; issues in the music or the artist can become the center of a media analysis project. In someways, it is less about the music and more about the message in the music or the values being represented such as through cultural hegemony.

133 APPENDIX C

SAMPLE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Glam Transcript August 9, 2017 9:30 AM Central Time Conducted via phone DB: Ok, can you hear me? Glam: Yep. DB: Ok, I’ve got a call recorder–you understand this call is being recorded, right? Glam: Oh yeah, absolutely. DB: Ok. So I’ve got a call recorder that–it’s kind of weird how it works–I call this number, and I guess they’ve got a recording device remotely, and then I have to merge the call with yours, so that it can record. And so sometimes it takes a second to do that. But, um...by the way, is it ok if I call you Glam? Glam: Oh yeah, absolutely. DB: Great, awesome. Well, thank you for taking the time, and I’m glad we could make this work, and thanks for being ﬂexible about last week; I was–I lost pretty much the whole week to some kind of a nasty summer cold, so... Glam: That’s rough. DB: You know how that is. Glam: Yeah, it’s not fun. DB: But I’m back up and at em, so. So yeah, this is a semi-structured interview, so you know, it’s a structured conversation. Glam: Ok. DB: I’ve got some questions here that I want to ask you, and I want to touch on them, but you know, we can kind of go where the conversation takes us. I was interested in your response–you– let’s see, I’m going back to your response, I have your survey response–you, for one thing, you, on

134 question 21: ”how do you use music as part of pedagogy in writing courses,” you checked almost everything except ”teaching revision with music” and ”writing about traditional genres like album reviews,” so that’s a pretty good bit of use there. Um, and so, I thought that was cool, and I definitely want to hear more about that. But before we get into kind of your pedagogical use of music, can you tell me a little bit about the context of your department? Can you give me a–can you describe the courses where you use music-based pegagogy and tell me something about the kinds of students that you have? Glam: Yeah, for sure. So I’m at a pretty large public university, and so our department would have, obviously, set learning outcomes, but for the most part, we have a lot of freedom in terms of how we attain and how we reach those learning outcomes, and then also, kind of, the types of assignments, that we do for the students. So the students here are, we have a really large mix of both traditional and nontraditional students. So we have students from higher socio-economic backgrounds as well as lower socio-economic backgrounds, we have a relatively diverse student population, so our English courses are capped at 19. Which is really nice. DB: Yeah. That’s really nice. Glam: Yeah, it’s super, super nice. So the courses that I taught at this particular university have been Composition I, Composition II, and then an upper-level service-learning course. And with all of those courses, the primary foundation is music. DB: Cool. So, tell me about your use of music in the classroom. I know that’s kind of a broad question, but–especially since you checked so many things–but what, give me a sense about what, what are some of your go-to assignments. And as you’re talking, I can–I remember now that you sent me a link to your website, so I’m gonna go there and make sure I’m not double-dipping too much. But tell me about how you use music in the classroom. Glam: Yeah, absolutely. So I first started using music, just to give you some background, during my Master’s program, is when I created my first music-based composition course. And it was ”Glam Rock and Popular Culture.” At the time, I was writing my Master’s thesis on the [sound and colors?] of glam and Foucault, and so I created this course, and what I essentially did was I looked up the learning outcomes, and then I look at–at that time, the University had specific papers you had to write, so I thought ”what can I choose for these papers? How can I tailor them towards glam?” And then I kind of, it was five or six years ago, so as time has kind of gone on,

135 I’ve created the glam rock course within that sophomore level. My students start with more of a personal narrative–they do a musical literacy narrative where they make a playlist of eight songs that impacted their lives–and kind of reflect and discuss how those songs shaped them into the musical person they are. I then kind of fast-forward into a lyrical analysis; I then do a rhetorical analysis, I then do a rhetorical analysis, and in rhetorical analysis, what they do is the students have to look at a glam rock artist in comparison to another musical artist; and then they have a research project where they actually do–they talk about a scene of glam, so sexual exploration, exploration of self, or exploration in relation to a decade. With my Comp I course, I’m teaching it in two different ways. So my Comp I course is Youth Revolt in Music, where we go through the heavy punk, goth, and grunge movements. It’s very similar to the assignments, at least it’s very similar to Comp II, the only difference is instead of having a research paper, they do a research project. So they teach people how to do the basic researching of it, and then I just designing a new Comp I course which is the History of Rap. So, and then my writing in the public sphere course, what we actually did was we partnered with the May 4th visitor’s center here, and we talked about–my students made a video about the impact of music on the May 4th massacre of 1970. DB: Oh! Interesting. Glam: Yeah. So when I say I only use music, like I legitimately only use music. DB: Yeah, I was just looking at your website as you were talking, and as you were talking about your different courses, and I was looking at your different descriptions of them. It looks like interesting stuff. When I think of glam rock, I guess I sort of automatically think of hair metal, you know, like the 1990s Bon Jovi and Poison and all that stuff, but I guess that was later. Glam: Yes. DB: Yeah, so I haven’t really listened–I’ve listened to a little bit of Bowie, of course–but that’s interesting. So you mentioned that you have students write about music using [inaubible] genres, excuse me just one second. [Transcriber’s note: Here, Bedsole briefly responds to a repair person who is fixing something in his house.] We’ve got a busted water line, so. Glam: I get it, man, I’ve got one at my apartment, too. DB: I’m always interested in the ways that multimodality intersects with music. Of course, you know, the aural mode is part of multimodality. You mentioned that you give them the option to

136 compose multimodally, or you use modes besides linguistic to have them compose for class. Have you had students [inaudible] like that? Glam: Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve had students make websites; I’ve had students make Prezis; I’ve had students make PowerPoints; I’ve had students make videos in the past; I’ve had students actually make more tactile, hands-on ”Old School” modes, so really when it comes to that I always tell my students that, you know, I want you to be able to compose a piece in a way that not only you feel comfortable in doing so, but that that’s going to allow you to communicate the message that you want to get across. DB: That’s great. So, when you think about your use of music–you mentioned at the beginning of your conversation that your program had speciﬁc, obviously, writing outcomes and things like that, as you would expect a writing program to have. How do you justify using music programmatically? And you mentioned, I think, institutional pushback. Tell me about that. How do you justify it?[00:10:12] Glam: So for me, how I justify it is, it’s simple: Music, when you’re using music, you are still looking at the same rhetorical aspects that you would look at in a ”traditional” composition course. You’re still looking at purpose, audience; you’re still looking at invention; you’re looking at how somebody is making a message; but you’re looking at it from multiple viewpoints. So you’re looking at it from both a visual, sonic, and written viewpoint. So for me it’s way more valuable, because you’re allowing the students to critically engage with something, from multiple viewpoints, as well as making sure that they are also understanding the cultural and social contexts of the time. So they’re still able to, kind of engage in that critical thinking ability. The pushback that I really receive was in a program that I was in before: I was in a private, Catholic university–relatively small, it’s a very literature-based program; there’s only a couple of rhet-comp faculty, let alone grad students–and so they felt that even the fact that I was allowing my students to compose multimodally was kind of pushing against what composition courses were meant for. And so with that, I mean, I would just kind of talk about, defend myself in terms of current scholarship; in terms of looking at, again, kind of–I mean, in total honesty, looking at the success rate of my students–and looking at, ok, this is what my students are doing, this is how they are accomplishing these goals, these are how all of the learning objectives are met, and so that’s just kind of how I

137 would cite it, I would cite it more with kind of logic and reason, instead of me just being like, ”this is a really cool thing!” DB: Right, yeah. And that makes sense, I’ve been in a–you know, I taught at a small Presby- terian college for four years, where I was–I mean, I had a Master’s at that point, and my Master’s is in Prof Comm, and I was the closest thing to a Rhet/Comp person. Glam: Naturally. DB: I mean, a couple of us, and yeah. Very literature-based, very current-traditional, very suspicious of multimodality and anything that seemed like it was moving away from the linguistic mode, so that can be a problem. Glam: Absolutely. DB: But tell me about the students. Do you have students that you can call to mind that really connected with the music-based teaching? What have they been able to do with it? Glam: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think some of the cool things that students have done with it in the past, I’m actually in the process of coauthoring a piece with a former student that I have about kind of the benefit of using sound, and what that was like for her without her college experience, but some of the things that students have talked to me about in the past is that students have been, ever since I have been teaching with music, have always reached out to me and have been like, you know, ”I’ve been able to use my portfolio on job interviews,” or, ”hey, I heard this really cool song: I think that it relates to this band. What do you think?” So like, it kind of has a wide range of students either actually using the material from our course to help kind of propel themselves further in their own career paths, or also opening up that conversation with students to get them to kind of recognize the lineage and connection between different musical artists, and just and cultural phenomenon, so that. DB: Yeah, well that’s fascinating. Tell me more about the piece that you’re authoring with the student. The piece is about the value of using music in the composition classroom, is that what it’s about? Glam: Yes. So, what I kind of noticed is, so I’m halfway–shockingly, I’ve written half of my first draft of my dissertation–so, through kind of–and I’m doing my dissertation on sonic composing processes of musicians, of course–so, when I was kind of reading all of this scholarship, I was kind of noticing that the thing that was being left out was the voices of the students. And so I feel like

138 oftentimes within our ﬁeld, as you know, that we kind of talk about those practices with students, but we don’t actually listen to what the students have to say, and so I kind of reached out to a couple diﬀerent students that I’ve had in the past. I looked at students that were either seniors or already graduated, because I wanted them to kind of talk to me and talk with me about their experience of having their fundamental music courses being based in music, and what that kind of did for their career as a college student. And so one student reached out to me and she was really interested, and she wrote me about a four-page kind of expose/narrative about what her experience was, and how kind of she used those skills within her major, which is sociology. DB: Oh, interesting. [00:15:53] And, ok, so you’re studying the sonic composing processes of musicians, which in itself sounds fascinating. Do you talk about invention using music as a heuristic in your class? Glam: Um, I would say I do, but I wouldn’t say I do it directly. DB: Yeah. Glam: Um, so, what I’ve kind of noticed that works really well is instead of, kind of, pounding into my students head, like this is what you should be doing, this is what you should be doing, at the beginning I just kind of talk more in general, broad terms. And nine times out of ten, they get there by themselves. And that’s what I want. I don’t want to force them to have to think in a certain way; I want them to be able to get it themselves. So yes, ideally I do want them to look at invention from a music heuristic standpoint, but at the same time I don’t, like, badger that into them, if that makes sense. DB: Yeah, yeah. No, I’m just thinking about that because, you know, as...myself, I’m a songwriter–as a songwriter, I always am interested in the ways that the process of invention and the process of revision, and all of those things that we do in regular, linguistic writing, the sort of resonances they have with the music writing. And I was trying to think whether there was–what those parallels would be. Glam: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I’m sorry, go ahead– DB: No, please [inaudible] Glam: No, I was just going to say, I know for me, doing my dissertation, so like, half of it is archival research–I’m actually recreating the composition process of Les Paul–and then the other half is me studying a [inaudible] musician who lives around this area. And what I’ve kind of noticed

139 and what I’ve kind of picked up to help kind of push my students–not push them, but kind of guide them more towards ”musical writing”–is just like a differing processes that occur, right? So like, it’s ok if they use more than one mode when they compose, it’s ok if they use more than one mode at a time when they compose, they’re still getting the same rhetorical aspects, they’re just getting it from different ones. DB: Yeah, absolutely. Glam: So that’s kind of what I’ve kind of been toying with and thinking about in terms of my own pedagogical stance while I’ve been doing my dissertation. DB: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think–I’m always interested in how we can take processes like sonic composing, that might seem reserved for musicians, and make them available to composers of different kinds. Glam: Oh yeah, absolutely. DB: You know, like one thing that songwriters do, I’m just thinking out loud here, but one thing that songwriters do is sometimes we’ll sing dummy lyrics over–you’ll just start playing a chord progression, and you’ll just start singing something, and the idea is to kind of come up with a melody, and the lyrics are just nonsense, you know? You could be singing the phone book, right? Glam: Yeah, absolutely. DB: Which is a little bit like freewriting. But I could imagine, like, maybe applying that to a different mode. I don’t know, like what if you just start writing about a scene, or something like that, or what if you start listening to, if you want to go back to music, what if you start listening to instrumental music that doesn’t have any words, but writing words for it? Just, whatever comes to your mind, kind of a modified form of freewriting. I think anybody could do that, even if they’re not an instrumentalist. You know? So yeah, that kind of stuff is fascinating to me. So I’d love to read your research when you’re further along on it. And I noticed that you said you didn’t teach revision using music, and that surprises me a little bit, because you actually could fairly easily do that by showing different drafts of songs and stuff. Glam: Yeah. DB: You know, like have you ever thought about doing that, or is that something that’s...?[00:20:44]

140 Glam: Um, I have thought about doing that; I’ve actually [inaudible] a little bit in my classes, but when it comes to their revision, I really want to focus on making sure that my students as themselves feel confident and comfortable with the messages that they are communicating. DB: Sure. Glam: So, even though in a perfect world, if I could figure out a way to make it work for how I teach my courses, to use music to demonstrate revision, I would, but currently I’m just, I’ve just been so focused, in my classrooms, on just making sure that my students feel confident and comfortable with what it is that they are communicating, because as you know, in Comp I and Comp II courses, students often feel like they have a stigma that they are bad writers, that writing isn’t their thing, they have to take this course, and so I really kind of want to make them feel like they are good writers, they do have something to say, so I focus more on that aspect when I teach revision, and not necessarily the musical aspect. DB: That makes sense. And I certainly understand that thinking. Just anecodotally, when students are thinking about–you know that old chestnut about, you know, I’m a bad writer because I’m just not talented in writing–you know, just innate talent and stuff like that? There’s an alt- country singer named Jason Isbell–I don’t know if you’re familar with him or not–but he used to be with the Drive-By Truckers. He’s an Alabama guy, but he’s done pretty well. And there’s a video of him–and there’s also a video of John Legend–they’re both doing interviews, and they essentially say the same thing, which is that inspiration is for amateurs. When I want to write a song, I just get in there and start writing. You know? Glam: Yeah. DB: But these guys are both like, you know, accomplished songwriters, and basically they’re saying like, you know, ”there’s no magic inspiration that comes to me. I just sit down on my butt and start doing it.” Glam: Yep. DB: So I show that to students just to say, you know, these are some of the most talented songwriters you’re going to find, and they’re not relying on that ”natural talent” idea. They’re just sitting down and doing it. Glam: That’s really cool. DB: Yeah! I’ll send you the links if you want.

141 Glam: Yeah, that would be awesome. That’s like a really cool thing. DB: Yeah. I don’t know how much of this actually connects with them–you know resistant first-year students can be– Glam: Yes. DB: But I think it’s one way to begin to deprogram that bad thinking about writing. Glam: No, absolutely. DB: Um, all right, so we talked about students that had really connected. Have you had students that have really struggled or resisted the music-based pedagogy? Glam: I think honestly, and I can say this with confidence, I’ve never had a student dislike the fact that I teach with music. I’ve had students not particularly like the types of music we study– DB: Right. Glam: So with that, what I try to do is I try to get them to understand and have conversations with them about ”ok, so I get it. You don’t like T-Rex and Mark Bowen. That’s ok. But, at the same time, look at what they did for other types of music, right? So, one instance in particular that I remember is a couple of years ago, I was teaching my glam class, and I had a student who absolutely hated glam music. DB: Ugh. Glam: And he would always try to talk about Kanye West, for whatever reason. I don’t know why. But he’s always try to use him as a kind of counter-example. And so what I kind of would do and what I would say to him is I would kind of help him to understand and to create a almost like, cultural lineage from the glam rockers up to Kanye. That way he could kind of understand the bigger picture. That, like, it’s ok if you don’t like this kind of music, it’s ok if you didn’t want to listen to 70’s, but at the same time, you have to understand that cultural, social, and musical phenomenon that was happening at that time influenced what is going on today. So I think, for me, that’s what I try to do, is that I try to help them to be able to connect in their minds with some aspect of music or culture that they truly appreciate in a way that relates back to what it is that we’re studying. DB: That makes sense. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So in terms of challenges, you already mentioned there’s a little bit of institutional pushback when you’re teaching at the Catholic college. Have you encountered any other challenges, obviously not challenges from students. Any other

142 institutional challenges or just, pedagogical challenges in terms of ”how do I do this?” or ”how do I make this work?” Glam: I think for me, and I always say this to people, [00:26:18] I always tell people, I’m like, ”I know I’m getting my Ph.D in rhetoric, but I know more about music than I know about anything, so for me, like this is more like just a natural progression for me to kind of design these courses, so for me it comes more naturally to teach writing with music, just because I am so passionate about it. But I would say a lot of it, a lot of, kind of, the comments and pushback I get is that people just kind of view this as not serious. It’s just kind of, ”oh, well you’re teaching your kids about, like glam? Oh, you’re teaching them about the goth movement, or rap, or whatever?” And people kind of look down upon that as kind of like a second-rate way of teaching students how to write. And I’ve just kind of gotten used to those comments because I’ve been doing it for five years at this point. So when people say things like that to me, I pretty much do exactly what I do when I get pushback from students, and I try to get them to understand that cultural and social context and importance of these events; in the same way that you would kind of teach students cultural and social context of the time, if you’re looking at a book like Pride and Prejudice, or if you’re looking at an Upton Sinclair book. Like, you’re still doing that, it’s just a different type of writing. DB: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, makes perfect sense. Um, well, how would you like to see yourself using music in more, different ways in the classroom in the future? Glam: I think for me, what I would really like to do more of, I mean kind of progress further on, is finding a way–and I’m actually going to be experimenting with this this upcoming semester–is having students do more sonic composition themselves. So that they can kind of understand that, kind of, what that is like to not only kind of broaden horizons in terms of just giving them more avenues for communication, but also so they can better relate to, ”ok, so I’m listening to, I don’t know, I’m listening to this song by Nirvana, what was it like for Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic Dave Grohl in the studio? Well, I just recorded this in my classroom.” Right? So kind of having that, like, personal connection and understanding the actual act of sonic composing. DB: Yeah, yeah. That would be awesome, and I’m always...yeah. Again, I’m interested in trying to bring students into...you know, I was surprised when I taught my–a taught a music-themed, a couple of music-themed composition classes last year–and I was honestly surprised at how few of them identified as musicians. I think maybe in three classes of 24, maybe two? Or something like

143 that? And it was surprising, and it was surprising how little they knew, just about music. You know, because I assumed–maybe that’s the different context of, you know, I teach in Alabama and probably, you know, maybe we were listening to the wrong music. Maybe we should’ve been listening to more country music or something, I don’t know. But yeah, it was a little bit surprising. Ok, so I’m always aware, in these interviews, that I may not be asking the questions that you want to be answering. So that’s the reason I throw in this last question: Is there anything you want to add? Is there anything that you really were hoping to talk about, or you were really hoping I’d ask about, that I kind of haven’t? Glam: I feel like we’ve had a pretty well-rounded discussion. For me, at least, in terms of what I teach and what I do, I would say one thing that I forgot to mention earlier, that I guess I could just tack on now, is that when I am teaching courses that deal–cause like, for instance, I know I keep bringing up my glam class, but like, I have a David Bowie pen staring at me so that’s probably why–is that when you’re teaching a class like that, where [inaudible] music, and you’re talking about social and cultural issues such as, like homosexuality, transgender rights, you’re looking at what it means to be a person, how people express themselves, I would say that students struggle more with those ideals than they do with the music. DB: Right. The identity portions of it, and the...yeah. I can see that. Even though you’re teaching stuff that was happening in the 70’s–I mean, obviously it resonates today, but it’s not new. Glam: Exactly. DB: Yeah. That squares with my experience too, and I think that’s pretty typical for first-years. They just, they have a very–there’s a sociologist named Tim Clydesdale who has this concept of the ”identity lockbox.” Are you familiar with that? Glam: Yes. DB: Yeah, and they kind of come in with that, and the kind of lock down, you know, what they believe and what they think, and it’s really hard to change it. Glam: Yes. DB: So, you know, I guess we can just take comfort in the fact that it’s just one–the beginning step in a, you know, four years of hopefully expanding their thinking about things.

144 Glam: Which is true, which is very, very true. And I will say, like, I haven’t gotten as much of that at the university that I’m at currently as I did at the Catholic university. DB: Yeah. Glam: Which I’m sure you know. DB: Yeah, no, that’s deﬁnitely been my experience too. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Glam, for taking the time, and I’d love to compensate you with a $50 gift card. My default is to Barnes and Noble, but I’m glad to do it to a vendor of your choice. Do you have a preference? Glam: Oh, I don’t care, dude, whatever is easiest for you. DB: Ok. Glam: Honestly. DB: Barnes and Noble it is. And so what I’ll do is about–conservatively, I’m going to say two weeks [transcriber’s note: hahahahaha!]–I’ll try to get a transcript of this back to you. Glam: Oh wow. You’re speedy. DB: Well, you know. Maybe not two weeks. At some point. [Transcriber’s note: ”Some point” is approximately 6 months] Glam: At some point in the future. DB: At some point in the future, I’ll get a transcript back to you, and if you would just take a look at it, and make sure you don’t have any corrections or just, sort of clariﬁcations, and we’ll go from there. Glam: Yeah, absolutely. DB: All right. Well, Glam, it’s been a pleasure. Glam: Yeah, thank you so much for wanting to talk with me, and I’m really glad I was able to kind of help you with this, hopefully. DB: Yeah, no, absolutely, it’s been really valuable. Yeah, and I hope we can keep in touch, and you know, trade notes about sonic rhetoric. Glam: Oh, absolutely. DB: All right, Glam, well have a great rest of the week, ok? Glam: You too. DB: Bye bye. Glam: Bye.

145 APPENDIX D

SAMPLE SURVEY CODES

146 147 148 149 APPENDIX E

IRB CONSENT FORM AND IRB APPROVAL MEMOS

E.1 Interview Consent Form

Welcome! I am interested in understanding the use of music to teach writing in the writing classroom. I am approaching you again because you indicated willingness to participate in a follow-up interview by entering your email address. I will ask you questions about your use of music to teach writing and your purposes for doing so. If you have chosen to be interviewed via video conferencing, the interview will be recorded via screen capture software (Quicktime). If you have chosen to be interviewed via telephone, the interview will be recorded via audio recording software. Please be assured that your responses will be kept completely confidential. Recordings and transcripts will be kept in a password-protected Dropbox folder. You will not be identifiable in any subsequent publications, including any scholarly material published as a result of this research. The interview should take you around 30 minutes to complete. Your participation in this research is voluntary. You have the right to withdraw at any point during the interview, for any reason, and without any prejudice. If you would like to discuss this research, please e-mail David Bedsole at [redacted]. You may also contact the FSU Human Subjects Office: 2010 Levy Avenue; Suite 276; Tallahassee FL, 32306-2742; (850) 644-7900; [email protected]. If you choose to complete the interview, you will be compensated with a $50 gift card to Barnes and Noble booksellers, or with a card of equal value to a vendor of your choice. Statement of Consent I have read the information in this consent form. All my questions about the research have been answered to my satisfaction. SIGNATURE Your signature below indicates your permission to take part in this research. You will be provided with a copy of this consent form. Printed Name of Participant

150 Signature of Participant Date

E.2 Initial IRB Approval Memorandum

The Florida State University Office of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Com- mittee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673, FAX (850) 644-4392 APPROVAL MEMORANDUM Date: 4/28/2017 To: David Bedsole [redacted] Address: [redacted] Dept.: ENGLISH DEPARTMENT From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair Re: Use of Human Subjects in Research Striking a Chord: Teaching with Music in the Writing Classroom The application that you submitted to this office in regard to the use of human subjects in the research proposal referenced above has been reviewed by the Human Subjects Committee at its meeting on 02/08/2017. Your project was approved by the Committee. The Human Subjects Committee has not evaluated your proposal for scientific merit, except to weigh the risk to the human participants and the aspects of the proposal related to potential risk and benefit. This approval does not replace any departmental or other approvals, which may be required. If you submitted a proposed consent form with your application, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting research subjects. If the project has not been completed by 2/7/2018 you must request a renewal of approval for continuation of the project. As a courtesy, a renewal notice will be sent to you prior to your expiration date; however, it is your responsibility as the Principal Investigator to timely request renewal of your approval from the Committee. You are advised that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol

151 change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report, in writing any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others. By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major is reminded that he/she is responsible for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in the department, and should review protocols as often as needed to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations. This institution has an Assurance on file with the Office for Human Research Protection. The Assurance Number is FWA00000168/IRB number IRB00000446. Cc: Michael Neal, Advisor HSC No. 2016.19758 The Florida State University Office of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Com- mittee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673, FAX (850) 644-4392

E.3 Re-Approval Memorandum

Date: 12/14/2017 To: David Bedsole [redacted] Address: [redacted] Dept.: ENGLISH DEPARTMENT From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair Re: Re-approval of Use of Human subjects in Research Striking a Chord: Teaching with Music in the Writing Classroom Your request to continue the research project listed above involving human subjects has been approved by the Human Subjects Committee. If your project has not been completed by 12/12/2018, you must request renewed approval by the Committee. If you submitted a proposed consent form with your renewal request, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this re-approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting of research subjects. You are reminded that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly

152 report in writing, any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others. By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major are reminded of their responsibility for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in their department. They are advised to review the protocols as often as necessary to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations. Cc: Michael Neal, Advisor [[email protected]] HSC No. 2017.22559 The Florida State University Oﬃce of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Com- mittee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673, FAX (850) 644-4392

E.4 Second Re-Approval Memorandum

Date: 9/28/2018 To: David Bedsole [redacted] Address: [redacted] Dept.: ENGLISH DEPARTMENT From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair Re: Re-approval of Use of Human subjects in Research Striking a Chord: Teaching with Music in the Writing Classroom Your request to continue the research project listed above involving human subjects has been approved by the Human Subjects Committee. If your project has not been completed by 9/26/2019, you must request renewed approval by the Committee. If you submitted a proposed consent form with your renewal request, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this re-approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting of research subjects. You are reminded that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report in writing, any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others. By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major are reminded of their responsibility for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in

153 their department. They are advised to review the protocols as often as necessary to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations. Cc: HSC No. 2018.25783

E.5 Protocol Closure

9/17/2019 David Bedsole [redacted] [redacted] Dear David Bedsole: On 9/17/2019, the IRB reviewed the following submission: Title Striking a Chord: Teaching with Music in the Writing Classroom Investigator David Bedsole Submission ID 2019.29847 The IRB acknowledges your request for closure of the protocol eﬀective as of 9/17/2019. As part of this action:

• The protocol is permanently closed to enrollment

• All subjects have completed all protocol-related interventions

• Collection of private identiﬁable information is completed

• Analysis of private identiﬁable information is completed

Sincerely, Human Subjects Research Oﬃce [email protected] Cc:

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162 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

David Bedsole went into college as a music major with a partial scholarship in classical piano, but his first-year writing teacher encouraged him to change his major to English. The music department chair was not happy, but it was the right choice. Bedsole never stopped playing music, but he now holds a B.A. in English from Huntingdon College, a M.A. in Theological Studies from Covenant Seminary, and a M.A. in Professional Communication from Clemson University. In over twelve years of college teaching, he has developed and taught courses in communication theory, visual communication, and all kinds of writing and editing. He currently teaches courses in first-year writing and technical writing at the University of Alabama. He also occasionally publishes poetry and fiction, and has been known to write and perform original music. He is on the board of directors of the Alabama Blues Project, and helps pass on knowledge and love of the blues to k-12 students in Tuscaloosa. He is currently learning jazz piano and clawhammer banjo.

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