Now

This is my now page that names what I am focussing on right now – fall 2024.

New Job

I start a new job this fall as a faculty member in the department of arts and humanities and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Teaching

I’m teaching a master’s level course on writing pedagogies. You can tell the two strands I am bringing together from the two required texts:

• The Dynamics of Writing Instruction: A Structured Process Approach for Middle and High School Students.

• Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects.

What I like about the first text it that it roots learning design in a very clear and theoretically grounded approach. It’s not a writing pedagogy book that only walks you through one teacher’s tried and true practices, as useful as those can be. The book also addresses some of the most common genres that show up in secondary classrooms, for better or worse. The second book helps blow all of this up a bit since it come from rhetoric, composition, and design. I do love design.

I’m also teaching a workshop extension of this class that will focus on multimodal writing, especially sound writing. I’m drawing from some of the content in the excellent (and open source!) Amplifying Soundwriting Pedagogies volume and also integrating composing in Ableton Live into the course. Integrating a DAW like Live into the course means the heavy instructional lift of making some “how to” videos each week, but Live is my favorite place to work right now, and I think the videos will be worth it. I’m jazzed about the four main assignments:

• A “hear my home” type piece.
• An audio story, adapted from Crystal VanKooten’s chapter in ASP.
• An experimental/noise piece (think writing dirt/teaching noise).
• An audio paper.

Writing

• Beginning a small book about sound, literacy, loops, and other forms. The books comes from the Sound Making Publics project and, if I’m being honest, insights and question that have gathered from the past 8 years of teaching beats and DJing in community settings, but doing this as someone also thinking about literacy. This will be a short book rooted in practice but that is more conceptual, I think.
• Working toward a scholarly sound album from my collaboration with Ruth Nicole Brown in our Forms of Freedom project. We published an audio paper in Seismograf Peer last year, which I consider the first third of this album. There is exciting momentum around this scholarly genre right now, especially with the release of Ban Lauren’s Hold Me Down fall 2024 on University of Michigan Press.

Reading

Here are a few items I have at the top of my reading list this semester. Some are connected to projects, and others I’ve simply been wanting to read for a while. As I always say, the books ain’t gonna read themselves!

• On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis.
• Now and Forever: Toward a Theory and History of the Loop by Tilman Baumgartel. (Read a great review here.)
• “The Politics of Soundwriting Interface” by Steven Hammer.

Other

I’m trying to find “the hum” in Times Square.