Making Fahrenheit 451 “Come to Life”: Sound Inquiries with Youth and Teachers
By: Doug Friesen & Rob Simon
What sounds can you hear now as you read?
What sounds are farthest away from you?
What is the first sound you can remember hearing?
Can you still hear it now?
We explore these questions in a recent article about sound inquiries with youth and teachers, which was published in the summer issue Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. We describe how grade 8 students and teacher candidates used sound and listening to remix the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 2011) to, in the words of a participating teacher candidate, make the novel “come to life.”
Our engagements with texts like Fahrenheit 451 often involve talking, being talked to, and being asked to talk. What if we began and ended with listening? Drawing on work in sound education and critical literacy, our inquiries with students and teachers explored how sound bridged a more distanced sense like sight to those more embodied senses like touch, smell, and taste. We argue that listening can help illuminate the multi-sensoriality of students’ experiences with each other, with their surroundings, and with texts in critical literacy classrooms.
You can listen to the audio of one sound play and also the audio of us attempting to silently pass a page of newspaper here:
You can access our published article about this work here.
https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1002/jaal.1168