Jones students craft audio essays

07/02/2009 10:08 AM

By Micah Maidenberg
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An Olympus digital voice recorder. /Photo credit: Theo on Wikipedia.

High school literature classes often task students with reading the classics and crafting essays about them. Jones College Preparatory teacher Ray Salazar, however, wanted to get his students to tackle literature and their own lives in a different sort of media. So he created The Sound of the Page Project.
"The Sound of the Page Project was something I developed as a result of my interest in getting my students to go beyond the written page with their writing," said Salazar, who contributes his own audio essays to National Public Radio.
With a $1,600 grant from the Oppenheimer Foundation and funding from Friends of Jones, Salazar purchased voice recorders and asked his students in his AP English and Latin American Literature classes to create audio essays.
In the English class, Salazar's students used the voice recorders to explore various personal experiences meaningful to them. Students in the Latin American lit class explained the arguments they found in Esmeralda Santiago's memoir When I Was Puerto Rican.
"They had to figure out what arguments Esmeralda was making about her life and her experiences," Salazar said. "It's not just, 'Here's what happened to me.' It's, 'Here's what happened to me and why it's significant.'"
In both classes, the point of the project was to develop students' rhetorical and critical thinking skills.
Debbie Gonzalez's piece begins with a salsa riff before her narration starts:
"Hearing the vivid sounds of salsa and merengue provoked even the holiest parts of me. As I sat on a chair near the dining room table I witnessed how my aunts and uncles tune their bodies in unison to the music. In the midst of such eruption of passion and melodies, I secretly contained the urge to join them."
Music fades in once again, and then Gonzalez talks about her religious upbringing.
Gonzalez, an 18-year-old Jones graduate from Humboldt Park, said the project got her thinking more about audience, the necessity of which didn't always come across when writing a traditional essay on paper. And the process of creating audio had her focused on little details more than usual as well.
"In an audio essay, you are the details - the way you it, the music you put on," she explained. "Those are the details you want ... In helps you connect with your audience."
All the audio essays are available on the Jones Web site, or on iTunes.













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