Sonic Studies in Educational Foundations

Echoes, Reverberations, Silences, Noise

Walter S. Gershon, Peter M. Appelbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000731101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published as a special issue of Educational Studies, this volume demonstrates the ways in which sound considerations can significantly contribute to educational foundations.

Regardless of their origin or interpretation, sounds are theoretically and practically foundational to educational experiences. As the means through which knowledges are passed from one person to another, sounds outline the fluid, porous boundaries of educational ecologies. This book draws out and expands upon the already-present sonic metaphors that exist at the center of philosophical and historical foundations of educational studies. Contributions demonstrate the ethical dimensions of this line of inquiry, emphasizing the need for education to offer both a right to speak and to be heard in order to take on a truly democratic character. By highlighting emerging attention to sound scholarship in education, contributors attend to and otherwise explore sound possibilities for educational theory, policy, and practice.

This book will be of great interest to graduate and post graduate students; libraries, researchers and academics in the field of educational foundations, philosophy of education, education politics and sociology of education.

1
In 8100 Again

The Sounds of Students Breaking

Boni Wozolek

Not only is Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s argument applicable to understandings of sociocultural norms and values in general, but her work has strong implications for the consistent and constant ways that schooling devalues and discards queer youth, who are in many ways the focus of her work. Yet, when it comes to suicide, schools often take unwavering positions of support for those grieving the loss. This is often demonstrated by attending to events immediately leading to or following a student’s suicide. For example, was the student bullied? Was there evidence the school knew about the bullying? If so, administrations are frequently quick to point out anti-bullying policies in the district and, in many cases, enforce those policies fervently against students who can be held culpable for the suicide through bullying, a move that also just happens to remove culpability from administrators, who are ultimately responsible for school safety. In such public cases as the suicides of Eric Mohat, Taylor Alesana, Emilie Olsen, and Stephen Patten, to name but four of the thousands of students who kill themselves annually across the United States, students are often denied the support of antibullying procedures while they are alive.¹

As briefly noted, implementation of antibullying policies as a response to suicide can perhaps best be understood as defensive shields that are consistently used to legally protect the district against grieving parents rather than a measure to proactively support students who are bullied at school and are therefore at risk for suicide and self-harm. When death impacts other students and staff in a way that might put others at risk for suicidal thoughts or behaviors, grief counselors often suddenly descend on the district and are available in the building for immediate student and staff support. These support systems and policies are significant, and their impact should not be overlooked. However, the problem being raised here is not with the strong reaction to suicide that is presented in schools but to the often-overlooked significance of being proactive or, as Sedgwick (2013) argues, the necessity to be attuned to LGBTQ youth. In short, schools tend to concentrate on the noise created in the wake of a voice being silenced rather than the sounds of students breaking.

The sounds of students breaking is discussed in this chapter with an emphasis on “the break” and the moments that precede these tragedies. Focusing on these moments is a direct response to the often-reactive nature of schools that attend regularly to the impact after a student engages in self-harm or suicide rather than thinking proactively about students’ mental health and well-being. Similar to Moten’s (2003) attention to the break in sonic and musical terms, I am conceptualizing the break in two ways that are significant. This is because Moten theorizes the break from two inseparable positions. The first is the framework that the break cuts through historical and contemporary contexts. Using Frederick Douglass’s account of his aunt Hester’s brutal abuse at the hands of her slave-owner and Saidiya Hartman’s resonant analysis of the incident, Moten argues that while the “graphic and emblematic primal scene” (p. 2) of the abuse is significant, it is also representative of the sociocultural and political context that allowed the incident to occur. Further, not unlike Spindler and Spindler’s (1982) dialogue of making the familiar strange, Moten’s attempt to “defamiliarize the familiar” seeks to “give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays” (p. 3). This is at once an attention to the performance of self (Goffman, 1959) that is both borne into and replicated from the context around and within the break and serves as a refusal to casually reproduce the all-to-familiar violence that ravages the bodies of queer youth.

Second, Moten’s conceptualization of the interplay between the spectacle, witness, and person within the break is an important facet of this complication. Using Billie Holliday’s “Don’t Explain,” Moten describes the complex nature through which Holliday is at once negotiating her own break and simultaneously resisting audience interpretation within the moment of the break itself, an interpretation always necessarily driven by both historical and contemporary contexts. Queer youth are similarly in a state of being that constantly resists and reverses dominant norms and values while living with/in their own break and moments of breaking. As a response to such resistance, Moten writes that

[witnessing] motherfuckers are scared … Check yourself in the midst of an explanation that could only reveal the trace of what can’t be explained… Don’t explain what they already know… So Lady interprets. She reads. But what she reads exceeds and undermines any coercive anticipatory idea.

(p. 106)

Moten powerfully describes two facets of resistance in this passage. The first adds to the well-trodden dialogue on resistance to norms and values by marginalized peoples and groups (e.g., Cooper, 1892; Gilbert, 2014; Quinn & Meiners, 2009; Woodson, 1933). The second speaks to the reaction to those identifying or witnessing marginalized individuals and groups. In sum, what does it mean to interpret another’s way of being or, on the other side of the same coin, to undermine an interpretation with your own ways of being and knowing? Within the interaction of interpreting and being interpreted, the break cannot always be predicted, as is most often the case with suicide, for example. However, the predictability of a break is of secondary significance to an attention to the full context of the multiplicity of factors interwoven in the break.

In a society that is constantly engaging in violent images (Murray, 2008; Tatz, 2017) and sounds (Gershon, 2017),² the break is evocative and exists in affective relationships between those who experience the break as witnesses and those who find themselves breaking. This is particularly the case as an increasing number of youth who are prone to self-harm and suicide use technology to record the precise moment of self-inflicted violence, regardless of its “success.” Maddie Yates, Leelah Alcorn, and Zander Mahaffey are but three examples of youth suicide where technology was integral in the public display of self-harm in which they either used media to post notes or, more graphically, to record the moment they killed themselves. The preservation of suicide through social media opens a space where the act becomes indelible, even, in many ways, beyond the liminality of a given life span.

As the break is negotiated between witnesses and those breaking, the access to these sounds and images only increases affective tensions between bodies and events. For example, even for those who are not present for the moment of violence, imagining the sounds of the break, of the self-harm, is affective in its sticky preservation (Ahmed, 2010) between bodies, places, and spaces. Yet, attending to these affective relationships is easy to envision. For example, without difficulty, one can imagine the sound of a pill bottle opening, the sniffle of a person crying, a pen scratching nervously on a paper, a gun cocking, or the final exhale from a lifeless body. These are the sounds of the break, the final moment before suicidal thoughts are actualized. Although those of us who work with LGBTQ youth are haunted by the break, we must not become arrested by this moment. Rather, if we are to combat the overwhelming statistics of queer youth suicide, we must not become overly entranced by the sound of breaking students in ways that allow us to neglect the process that breaks students.

In addition to Moten’s sonically oriented theorization of the break, it is important to conceptualize the break as it relates to affective interactions. In the language of affect theory, scholars like Massumi (2002), Barad (2003), and Puar (2013) have attended to the human and non-human factors that are resonant and significant to such events. Not unlike Massumi’s account of domestic violence, the process of the break is seen here as an incident that is at once folded into a singular event while also existing and unfolding across contexts. In other words, while self-harm is inflicted in one moment, there are factors that greatly influenced that moment. Sociocultural norms and values that are nested in both historical and contemporary ideals, social interactions with others, and an unforeseen number of other layers are significant to questions of depression, self-harm, and suicide (Gibbs & Rice, 2016; Russell & Fish, 2016). In sum, the music a student plays as a part of a self-harm ritual is central to the break as one of many human and non-human interactions of breaking (Williams, 2017). Although it is described as a break, often heard as a moment of silence to broader movements across scale, it is important to remember that even the moment of silence is preceded by an affective anticipation and lingers as it recedes (Gershon, 2017). In sum, even the silence itself has movement and sound. In schools, this is often positively described in the moments before a student’s body lights up with understanding of a topic, the second when the teacher and student affectively share the “aha” moment. Similarly, it is also felt in the silence when an insult lands on a student, before classmates can comment on the cruelty, but the tension of the aggression is felt across and through the room. It is the moment after a child has fallen but is winding up to cry; there is no sound, but there is certainly noise felt across the space.

It is important to note that sound, and the multiple ways it functions across layers of scale, is not absent from affective dialogues (e.g., Gershon, 2017; Goodman, 2010; Kassabian, 2013; Thompson & Biddle, 2013). As scholars like Gershon (2017) and Goodman (2010) argue, sound reverberates across histories and contemporary contexts and through bodies and beings. In sum, everything has the potential to resonate and be in vibration with other spaces and places. The imbrication of work explicating sound, affect, and these reverberations is significant to framing the multiple ways that students break and become broken through schooling. As I have explicated elsewhere (Wozolek, Wootton, & Demlow, 2016), the school-to-coffin pipeline is an example of how schools, teachers, administrators, counselors, and teacher educators contribute to the funneling of LGBTQ students into spaces of depression, despair, and, in many cases, suicide. This pipeline, much like the school-to-prison pipeline (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, 2005), is knotted with affective reverberations (Gershon, 2013b, 2017). These pipelines resonate with subsonic and sounded histories and contemporary iterations (Smith, 2007). In the case of the school-to-coffin pipeline, Queer Battle Fatigue (Wozolek, Varndell, & Speer, 2015) can be felt and heard throughout the pipeline. Being and becoming within this pipeline, under the pressures of fatigue and violence against queer energies, vibrates not only between bodies but between sociopolitical and historical contexts. As it will become clear from the following narratives, the school-to-coffin pipeline and the varying degrees of Queer Battle Fatigue that support and maintain the pipeline are affectively sounded and grounded throughout schooling. Without attention to both affective tensions as they relate to the sounds of the break, the core of violence that engenders hostilities against queer bodies in school cannot be thoroughly explored.

As previously stated, this chapter attends to the sounds of students breaking as a process rather than focusing on the break as a product. Sound, as understood in this paper, is the vehicle through which the depths of experience are understood. The dialogues surrounding sound as a node for analyzing experiences like marginalization and resistance are longstanding traditions (Cooper, 1892; Gates, 1988; Gershon, 2013a; Miller, 2005; Perry & Delpit, 1998; Woodson, 1922). In schools, contemporary conversations about sound have opened our understandings of the daily lives of students, teachers, and administrators and the systems that constrain and enable these local actors’ ways of being and knowing through schools and schooling (Gershon, 2013b, 2011; Pinar & Irwin, 2005). Using sound to unpack schooling not only resonates across contemporary fields like curriculum studies, educational foundations, sociology, anthropology, and sound studies but is also significant to unpacking the “discordant notes of… freedom [and] disunion” (Woodson, 1922, p. 355) in schools, particularly as they relate to broader social norms and values.

This chapter begins with a collage of narratives collected during a one-year ethnographic study at a large Midwestern high school. Specifically, these sounded narratives were collected by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, queer, and/or questioning (LGBTQ) identifying students, ranging from grade 9 to 12. The majority of these students have been sent to what is locally known as “8100,” the inpatient ward in the local hospital for people who have attempted suicide. Although I was unable to visit 8100, I was able to collect several accounts from students whose suicidal attempts landed them in this space for variable amounts of time. I was also able to speak with local psychologists who are associated with the hospital and have had access to the space through their own practice. From these data collection points, it is my understanding that 8100 functioned, on one hand, like a psych ward in its structure that was managed by rules like cell phone restriction, substance control through staff who dispensed medications, and a predetermined schedule that included group therapy, art therapy, and individual counseling sessions. On the other hand, this space was predominantly for youth under the age of 18, and the hospital was therefore in contact with the schools. However, unlike students who spend time in the juvenile detention center or in medical hospitals for extended illnesses, teachers were not solicited for homework so students could keep up on their studies in class. Often students would return from 8100 and discuss feeling overwhelmed as they struggled to keep up with their studies, despite the extensions that were possible through their hospitalization. Additionally, in accordance with medical privacy policies in the United States, teachers were legally unable to be informed as to why students were missing class, a barrier with which teachers expressed frustration, as they often could not keep an extra eye on students for continued mental-health concerns, particularly as they returned to their daily lives as students in an environment that was often marginalizing to their ways of being.

What is important to note about this data is that they were collected as a part of a sonic ethnography (Gershon, 2017). This means that traditional forms of ethnographic data collection and analysis were followed (e.g., Agar, 1996; Behar, 1996; Geertz, 1973) to find iterative and recursive patterns to gain a deep understanding of cultural patterns. However, students also engaged in a sonic mapping (Gershon, 2013a) project where they walked around the school and collected sound files to tell a narrative that the students felt exemplified their experience in schooling. The guiding question for these maps was as follow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributor Bios
• Editors’ Introduction: Resounding Education: Sonic Instigations, Reverberating Foundations
• 1 In 8100 Again: The Sounds of Students Breaking
• 2 Earwitnessing (In)Equity: Tracing the Intra-Active Encounters of ‘Being-in-Resonance-With’ Sound and the Social Contexts of Education
• 3 (Re)Mediating (Un)Heard Resonances: Tracing the Rhythms of Aurality in a Residential College Community
• 4 Gottschalk’s Engagement With the Ungovernable: Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the Bamboula Rhythm
• 5 Polyphonic Teaching: The Ability to Facilitate Multiple Voices as a Crucial Teaching Skill
• 6 Tuning Out of This World: Silence and Mantra at an Urban Ashram in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
• 7 Vibrations in Place: Sound and Language in Early Childhood Literacy Practices
• 8 Sound Education: Black Joy, Eugenics, and the Afrosurreal at School
• 9 Where Are the Sounds of Education? A Piece in Two Voices, Here and Out There
• Index