International Journal of Communication 10(2016), 1263–1276 1932–8036/20160005
Copyright © 2016 (Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould). Licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
Learning the City Through Stories:
Audio Documentary as Urban Communication Pedagogy
DANIEL MAKAGON1
DePaul University, USA
MARY RACHEL GOULD
St. Louis University, USA
In this article, we critically examine audio documentary at the intersections of urban
storytelling, community-based learning, and urban communication pedagogy. We argue
that audio documentary is both a research method and mode of storytelling production
that can help students and listeners creatively learn about urban life. First, we focus on
the intersections of urban communication and documentary in an effort to frame how
documentary offers unique opportunities to learn about urban life and culture. Second,
we argue that audio documentary production courses offer students experiential and
community-based opportunities to learn about and do urban communication.
Keywords: urban communication, audio documentary, experiential learning, pedagogy,
community-based learning
Introduction: Hearing the City
It’s 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, and we just left a computer lab where we had been advising our
students about their audio documentary projects and putting the final touches on our own documentary.
For weeks, in an effort to prepare for an intensive 36-hour audio documentary project, we have sent our
students out into their respective neighborhoods to record the sounds of the city, encouraging them to
listen for the mundane and the extraordinary. As we travel north on the Red Line under the Loop, the two
of us have an opportunity to consider the acoustic environment of this Chicago Transit Authority line. We
hear a young couple talking quietly about where to sit and a woman toward the back of the train speaking
Daniel Makagon: dmakagon@depaul.edu
Mary Rachel Gould: mgould9@slu.edu
Date submitted: 2015–01–07
1
This is one of many projects that we have coauthored or coproduced. We rotate first author because all
of our research and productions are cocreated and developed through equal participation and
contributions. We thank Giorgia Aiello, Simone Tosoni, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful
feedback.
1264 Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould International Journal of Communication 10(2016)
Spanish into a cell phone. And we fill the space with talk about the stories our students are creating
together. After the North and Clybourn stop, the Red Line ascends from the tunnel to elevated tracks,
which is the norm for Chicago’s rapid transit system (and the inspiration for the nickname “the L” or “El”).
The sound in the car changes as the swirling air from the tunnel gives way to steel wheels clicking and
rattling on steel tracks. Soon we have an urban symphony as the beats bleeding from the earbuds of a kid
sitting a few rows behind us fill the car. He’s listening to rap, and the music syncs perfectly with the sound
of the train. In the contemporary urban soundscape, there is now a soundtrack to enhance or interfere
with, depending on one’s viewpoint, the vision of the city that appears out the windows of the train. We
take a few moments to listen to the sounds as the Red Line pulls into the Fullerton station, which is where
we exit.
We were working through the night with our students because they are participating in a
documentary “boot camp.” This assignment requires teams of students (from St. Louis University and
DePaul University in Chicago) to create a three-minute audio piece telling a story about a group in Chicago
or an interesting urban issue during a 36-hour window (Gould, 2013). The assignment creates a unique
experiential learning opportunity for our students that extends what each of us has been doing individually
in our respective courses and cities. Moreover, the documentary boot camp provides a context to consider
relationships between documentary storytelling and urban communication pedagogy, which is our focus in
this article.
In this article, we critically examine audio documentary at the intersections of urban storytelling,
community-based learning, and urban communication pedagogy. We argue that audio documentary is
both a research method and mode of storytelling production that can help students and listeners
creatively learn about urban life. First, we focus on the intersections of urban communication and
documentary in an effort to frame how documentary offers unique opportunities to learn about urban life
and culture. Here, we pay particular attention to the broad spectrum of urban communication contexts
and the diverse approaches to documentary that uniquely analyze and narrate the contemporary city.
Second, we argue that audio documentary production courses offer students community-based
experiential opportunities to learn about and do urban communication. Because of the sound-rich focus of
this mode of research and production, we have both found audio documentary to be especially useful
when encouraging students to engage with the city. The article is ultimately grounded in our individual
experiences teaching in Chicago and St. Louis separately and together through the repeated documentary
boot-camp assignment in which our students work together in both cities.
Documentary Storytelling as Urban Communication
Urbanization and the urban experience have been consistent topics of fiction and nonfiction
storytelling throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. People’s engagement with, through,
and in the city is shaped by a combination of material stability and change linked to land, labor, and
capital and through communication in and about the city. That is, the city is experienced as a material site
that remains stable (diverse populations, loud noises, architectural innovation) and is a space of rapid
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Learning the City Through Stories 1265
transformation (gentrification of neighborhoods, an influx of new immigrant groups, the demolition of a
stadium to make way for a new one). The city is also a site of symbolic action.2
James Carey (1989) argued for a ritual model of communication, defining communication as the
creation, maintenance, repair, and transformation of reality through the use of symbols. We research and
teach urban communication as a more specific application of Carey’s broad definition. That is, urban
communication is concerned with the creation, maintenance, repair, and transformation of urban
experiences through symbolic action. The city as a physical space and as a site for unique cultural
encounters is discussed, debated, framed, and modeled through communication. Although this
explanation of urban communication might seem somewhat general, scholars working in this area do not
share a single method, there is not a specific site of analysis within the city, and there is not a particular
communication context that reflects this mode of research.3
For example, urban communication contexts
would include interpersonal conversations among strangers waiting for a bus, small-group efforts to
organize a block party, the public performance of a flash mob, and senior citizens using Second Life to
redesign a local public park.
Mass media can flatten out communication, facilitating a shift away from idiosyncratic local
cultures to a more homogenous national popular culture; however, early arguments about the unique
ontic qualities of the city advanced by scholars such as Louis Wirth (1938) and Georg Simmel (Wolff,
1969) continue to resonate because the city remains a unique site of experience and analysis. We are
especially interested in the city as a location that can engage people’s senses in ways that are often quite
different from rural and suburban environments. Cities’ larger populations, broader spectrum of languages
spoken, presence of mass transportation, pace of movement in the streets, and general level of noise are
but a few examples of ways that the metropolis is both a unique spatial and communicative environment.
Although urban communication is a growing area of study that features diverse approaches to
researching the urban environment, publications have not focused on pedagogy. We fill this gap through
an analysis of audio-documentary-production and digital-storytelling courses as opportunities to teach and
do urban communication fieldwork. Our teaching and research in the area of urban communication has
foregrounded the experiential, often focusing on the ways that the study of communication can help
individuals understand and feel the city in unique ways. A sensorial engagement with the city might seem
to be the terrain of other disciplines, but how people hear the city, go about their everyday lives in urban
environments, reflect on the unique smells of urban locales, and consider the overwhelming dynamic
visual culture of the city are linked to the ways that we create, maintain, repair, and transform reality
2
We recognize that our repeated use of the phrase “the city” in this article can conflate a range of discrete
urban experiences that distinguish one city from another. We return to the unique features of different
cities later in this article, but for now we highlight some common features that distinguish the city from
other sites where people dwell or visit.
3
Perhaps one of the best ways to understand this diversity is to consider the range of topics presented in
edited publications because this format is purposefully broad. See Burd, Drucker, and Gumpert (2007);
Jassem, Drucker, and Burd (2010); Matsaganis, Gallagher, and Drucker (2013); and Gibson and Lowes
(2007). Also, see the recurring city series in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
1266 Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould International Journal of Communication 10(2016)
through the use of symbols. Each of the material experiences is framed and represented individually and
collectively through symbolic action. One mode of such representation is documentary storytelling.
Documentary is multidimensional in subject matter and approach.4
This mode of communication
helps audiences understand the urban world, to tease out myriad nuanced descriptions of urban politics,
design, and everyday life. Documentaries, like other forms of cultural production that emerge from and
represent research, are made based upon a series of choices and negotiations. Clifford Geertz (1973)
notes that texts emerging from fieldwork are “fictions: fiction in the sense that they are ‘something
made.’” This is “the original sense of the meaning of fiction—not that they are false, unfactual, or merely
‘as if’ thought experiments” (p. 15). Derrick Price (1997) identifies a similar feature of documentary
photography as cultural production when he foregrounds the common (and mistaken) use of the phrase
“taking photographs rather than making them, because the marks of their construction are not
immediately visible; they have the appearance of having come about as a function of the world itself
rather than as carefully fabricated cultural objects” (p. 95).
We call attention to this broader issue of making culture here and in our classes because a
documentary is the product of a series of choices that the documentarian must consider when she or he
does documentary work. Teaching students about documentary as a series of choices (i.e., documentary
as representation rather than reproduction) is the first step in facilitating a deeper grasp of documentary
production as urban communication storytelling.5
That is, students make stories about the urban world,
and their decisions during the research and production process (whom to interview, when to use ambient
sound, how closely to mic a participant, whether to use a cross-fade or a hard edit, etc.) shape the story
that is told. The selections are influenced by the standpoint of the storyteller, his or her interactions with
research participants, and important political and historic issues related to the story topic. Thus, the
constructed nature of documentary extends beyond the documentarian since documentaries, as
communication artifacts, are usually cocreated rather than simply being a product of a single producer’s
actions.6
This cocreation happens during interviews and participant observation, when people are recorded
doing the things that they do, and when audiences engage in the stories and retell what they hear.
Our approach to teaching audio-documentary production is grounded in a belief that
documentary is not merely a mode for representing the historical world to an audience but is also an
exciting way to cocreate knowledge. Audio documentary emerges from qualitative research and can be
assessed as a qualitative research product (Makagon & Neumann, 2009). Both of us came to documentary
through a quest for more creative and sensorially engaging ways to do and represent fieldwork rather
than through production programs. We believe that documentary production can be a creative outlet
4
“Historians and critics have frequently drawn attention to the difficulty of defining documentary, which
cannot be recognized as possessing a unique style, method or body of techniques,” writes Derrick Price
(1997, p. 63).
5
For a discussion of documentary as representation rather than reproduction, see Nichols, 2001.
6
We note that documentaries are “usually” cocreated because there are some types of storytelling, such
as an audio essay or radio diary, that could be created without interviews or ambient sounds generated by
someone other than the documentarian.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Learning the City Through Stories 1267
through which students learn about urban communication through fieldwork and by making their own
cultural artifacts. And we consider audio documentary to be one of many documentary efforts that can be
adopted by urban communication instructors seeking to integrate more experiential learning opportunities
in their classrooms rather than treating documentary production as solely in the domain of art and mass
communication production programs.
Documentary Production Through Community-Based Research
Making Meaning in the Urban Communication Classroom
Michael Rabiger’s (1998) assessment of documentary is framed by important changes in access
to documentary production tools. He focuses on documentary film and video, but the larger arguments
about documentary as a resource for contemplating and representing experiences resonates with a vision
of audio documentary as a form of experiential learning. “You and I need not pass silently from life. Future
historians will have as their resource documentaries that are grassroots visions, not just what was
preserved by an elite and its servants,” argues Rabiger (p. 12) about the proliferation of low-cost
production options and distribution outlets for documentarians. These tools offer the documentarian
opportunities to
create a record of family, friends and surrounds; to pose ideas and questions; and to
convey what we see and feel. We can propose the causes, effects, and meanings of the
life that we are leading. We can bear witness to these times, reinterpret history, and
prophecy the future. (Rabiger, 1998, p. 12)
Rabiger describes the potential for everyday people to help shape historical understanding at a
time when documentary recording technologies and nonlinear editing programs were becoming more
readily available at much cheaper prices. These technological changes have developed more rapidly since
Rabiger’s book was published. And an increase in mass communication outlets for documentary means
that producers—including students—can connect with audiences that would have been unreachable in the
past.
Identifying new outlets for sharing one’s work with a broader audience is a topic of conversation
among documentarians and scholars working and teaching across academic disciplines. “It seems
straightforward: public history should reach the public,” argues Benjamin Filene. “Yet museums and
historic sites struggle to make history matter to audiences” (2012, p. 11). He is intrigued and inspired by
“outsider history-makers” (e.g., genealogists, artists, scrapbookers, bloggers, and interviewers) who
engage “history in ways that fire the enthusiasm of thousands” (Filene, p. 12). In line with Filene, our
teaching maintains a focus on the amateur; a belief that good stories can come from multiple sources,
including, and often foregrounding, everyday voices; and a commitment to curiosity.
There is also potential for student documentary stories to respond to and help shape public
memory (at the hyperlocal level, regionally, or nationally, depending on the outlets used to share the
work). “All performances of memory,” argues Annette Kuhn, are “interactive” and “dynamic” (2010, p.
1268 Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould International Journal of Communication 10(2016)
303). She adds that “memory work is an active process of remembering that takes an inquiring attitude
toward the past and activity of its (re)construction through memory” (p. 303). This work is shaped, she
claims, by “the medium of the performance or the text” (p. 304) that seeks to tease out the memories.
Individual memories then blend with collective memories when creative projects join with others. Kuhn
studies photographs and photo albums, and we see a parallel between the photo album and audio
documentary. Individual interviews and recordings combine to create a larger story that makes up a
documentary, just as photographs come together to form a photo album. In turn, documentaries combine
to help shape a sense of urban life in an urban communication context. For example, during our third
documentary boot camp, a pair of students worked together on a story about an avant-garde performance
experience called Trapped in a Room with a Zombie. The participants moved through the space fending off
attacks from zombies and making sense of a constructed zombie apocalypse while attempting to escape
from the room by successfully completing a series of puzzles, riddles, and other challenges. The students’
documentary featured interviews with performers, participants, and a media studies scholar and sounds
from the performance experience to reflect on the cultural climate that gives rise to a recent fascination
with zombies across popular culture. This documentary focused on the dystopic vision of urban uncertainty
(economic recession, fears about global health crises, expansion of discourses about war and terror), but
did so by considering playful (or escapist) responses to such struggles.
Another group of students created a story about a very different type of performance event
staged at Chicago’s Museum Campus at Lake Michigan: Polar Adventure Days. This documentary
described the family-friendly, health-focused gathering and considered how green spaces can become
third places where Chicago residents and tourists come together, even in frigid winter. The lakefront to
the east is an alternative backdrop to the more traditional urban built environment that looms large to the
west and embodies efforts to maintain green urban places that foster interaction among strangers, or
what Ray Oldenburg (1999) has called third places.
Both documentaries focus on public life in the context of staged events. More and more such
interactions among strangers in the United States occur in spaces that have been designed (often
temporarily) for organized occasions. As Oldenburg (1999) notes, the United States has historically lacked
an informal public life parallel to that of many European nations. Experiences in the United States are
often framed and staged to help people interact during relatively brief moments, as was the case with
Trapped in a Room with Zombies and Polar Adventure Days. Taken together, these two documentaries
present listeners with a larger story about public life in Chicago and urban performances more generally.
These are not big stories about major events or sensational news. Instead, the students were curious
about experiences that emerge from everyday interactions among friends and strangers in public spaces.
The experiential learning context put the students in situations where they could interview participants,
engage in participant observation work, and consider how the re-presentation of fieldwork through sound
recordings can transition them from urban communication consumers to urban communication producers.
These efforts to represent everyday life provide a lens through which we can consider how student
researchers, participants, and listeners make sense of the urban environment at a micro level.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Learning the City Through Stories 1269
Entering the Urban Field
“Provel is woven into the fabric of St. Louis food tradition,” says Jerry, who narrates a story about
Provel cheese during our second boot camp in St. Louis. He then notes that identifying the unique
ingredients used to make Provel can be a challenge. “Tony; pizzeria owner Jeff Gieser; and Lucciana, a
Provel enthusiast, all take a stab.” Jerry’s claim previews that we are about to hear some guesswork, but
his foreshadowing does not give away the humorous qualities surrounding fluctuations in the participants’
confidence (both in words and tone). “Well, it’s a blend of five cheeses: mozzarella, Swiss, provolone,
American, and I can’t remember what the other one is,” observes Tony. Jeff starts strong but quickly
becomes flustered before finishing with confidence: “I think it’s a combination of two types of cheeses. I
may be wrong, but, it’s, oh, Parmesan and somethin’ else.” Lucciana is self-assured when it comes to the
quantity of cheeses but less so when naming the specific blend. “Oh, I believe there’s [sic] four cheeses in
there, it’s muenster, cheddar, Swiss, oh, I can’t remember. . . .”
We hear conviction wax and wane in the participants’ voices and phrasings as they describe the
Provel ingredients. There is something larger at stake when sharing one’s knowledge about this local
brand of cheese. Interviewees are also expressing an awareness of their city, an insider’s unique grasp of
a distinctive local food and, by extension, St. Louis itself. Jerry highlights this link between a city and its
distinct culinary culture as the documentary’s introduction transitions to the body of the story. “Over the
course of about 50 years, this simple food item has come to help define a city’s identity,” he claims. “But,
why St. Louis?”
For this story, St. Louis residents were interviewed about this type of cheese because the
students were curious about connections between food culture and the city’s character. Additionally, their
story was animated by a desire to analyze something that wasn’t already known by many people outside
St. Louis (unlike the Gateway Arch monument, for example) and create a story about everyday life that is
less likely to circulate via mainstream media. Of course, the focus on the local in documentary can be
replicated in other cities. Listeners outside St. Louis might begin to think about unique foods found in their
own cities. In this regard, the Provel piece links the local and the universal, which has become a recurring
feature of documentary storytelling across public radio shows in the United States in the past two
decades.7
Of course, the Provel story could be told through a documentary photography series, a literary
journalism story, or a documentary film. But audio offers a unique sensorial experience that often is
temporally specific and that uniquely engages the “theater of the mind” (Makagon & Neumann, 2009).
Radio, because it has the feeling of one-to-one storytelling—one narrator speaking to one audience
member—engages audience members in ways that are uniquely intimate. Intimacy is a recurring theme in
discussions among audio documentarians and explicitly considered in multiple manifestos written for
Transom.org over the years. Transom is perhaps the preeminent source for audio-documentary
practitioners and for people who are curious about the craft (whether that be amateur documentarians,
7
The producers of the popular This American Life radio show have most explicitly discussed links between
a specific local story and larger global lessons (see Abel & Glass, 1999).
1270 Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould International Journal of Communication 10(2016)
students in courses, or dedicated listeners). “I hunger for intimate radio, stories with heart,” writes radio
producer Rob Rosenthal (2012) in his introduction to the 2012 Transom Spring Workshop. “In fact, Walter
Harrington, who used to write for the Washington Post, says so much of reporting misses this type of
story” (para. 3). And Alix Spiegel (2014) writes in her manifesto that Ira Glass was committed to making
This American Life an outlet for types of storytelling that had been absent from radio when the show first
started. “The work did feel more intimate, and immediate, and it also sounded different from other things
that existed at that time” (p. 6), she writes.
The students that we teach in our audio-documentary and digital-storytelling classes have
varying levels of production skills. Some enroll in the classes because they are looking to add to their
multimedia production backgrounds, and others because the meeting times fit with their schedules. Either
way, we have found that students are drawn into the world of audio documentary because of the intimacy
they hear in stories played in class and in the stories they create. Moreover, documentaries with an urban
focus resonate with our students because they are conducting research in their own neighborhoods. In the
same way ethnographers “learn to write ethnographies by reading them” (Goodall, 2000, p. 69),
documentarians learn to tell documentary stories by hearing different types of urban stories.
Community-based Learning in the Classroom Without Walls
We approach our classes from the standpoint that the creation of audio documentary is an
opportunity to meet people, to hear their stories, and then to find the best ways to re-present those
experiences through narration, interview recordings, and sound. Although recording and editing
technologies can be the cause of some trepidation for students, we stress that recorders, mics, and editing
software programs are simply tools for telling a story and that it is more important for students to focus
on finding the right participants, assessing the best way to conduct an interview for a documentary
(versus a paper, work report, or journal article), and thinking about storytelling techniques that can
engage listeners in unique ways. Technology is secondary to interviewing and crafting a narrative because
it is the storytelling choices (e.g., how voices will blend with sound) that will influence the degree to which
intimacy is shaped in the documentary.
Our teaching philosophies are grounded in a belief that documentary-production courses are
opportunities for experiential education. Assigned readings, course lectures and discussion, and in-class
media are standard materials for teaching and learning; however, we develop urban communication
courses that begin from a desire to focus on the city as a site to engage one’s senses and to encourage
students to chase their own interests. We bring students into the field, often working with them or
alongside them as we make our own documentaries, as in the case of the documentary boot camp,
because we are dedicated to a pedagogical model of a classroom without walls (Makagon, 2013). Students
in our classes are encouraged to pursue stories that they are passionate about and that resonate with, but
do not necessarily replicate, experiences in their own lives. As Seaman, Beightol, Shirilla, and Crawford
note, “Experiential activities give participants the freedom to learn in highly personal ways” (2010, p.
201).
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Learning the City Through Stories 1271
This focus on experiential education facilitates an interaction between students and community
members, some of whom work in areas with a more obvious connection to urban communication
coursework (e.g., police officers, transportation officials, and people involved with community-service
programs) and some of whom have personal experiences that can speak to links between everyday life
and the look and feel of a city (e.g., street musicians, locals at a pub, and pizza-delivery drivers). When
we discuss techniques that can help students identify participants for documentaries, we stress that the
story should guide most aspects of the fieldwork and that there is no single model for telling a
documentary story. That is, experts are needed in certain stories, so-called ordinary people are fitting for
other pieces, and a blend of participants make still other documentaries most engaging. Fieldwork
experiences will in turn shape a revised vision of the story. What’s most important is that communitybased
learning links students to their cities and to the people that inhabit them.
“Community-based learning refers to any pedagogical tool in which the community becomes a
partner in the learning process,” write Linda Mooney and Bob Edwards (2001, p. 182). Collaborative
learning activities and interactions enable “students to see, hear, and smell places and meet the people
who frequent them. Students with no such prior experiences no longer have to imagine a place, its people,
or its sights, sounds, and smells” (Mooney & Edwards, 2001, p. 185). Often an outcome to communitybased
urban documentary projects is that students return with stories about places, people, or events that
were unfamiliar to them before they completed their stories. As one student remarked after participating
in the first documentary boot camp, “Getting out and recording the story wasn’t motivated by just logistics
or a grade. It was an authentic drive to find out more about the city I live in.” At the same time, boot
camp participants were put in the position of introducing group members from the other university to their
city. Acting as urban ambassadors was also appealing to the students, as one participant commented:
“Beyond the project, it is a true joy to be able to help a visitor explore your home. To show them
something unique to your city, which they can’t get anywhere else.”
In addition to students engaging their lived environment through hosting new colleagues in their
city and through collective experiential learning, audio-documentary projects offer opportunities to
reassess relationships between one’s senses and the city. Paul Stoller (1989) argues for the importance of
considering the senses during fieldwork, complementing the claims made by Mooney and Edwards about
knowing the sounds, smell, and feel of one’s environment through experiential learning. That is, according
to Stoller, fieldworkers need to consider the spectrum of sensorial phenomena. We were both drawn to
audio-documentary storytelling as an alternative to the emphasis of the visual to the detriment of other
senses in qualitative research. Audio documentary, as we noted previously, can offer students unique
opportunities to learn the city through sound. This happens through careful consideration of interview
content and critically assessment of the ways that ambient sounds can help tell a story. “If radio is like a
magazine, ambient sounds are the photographs,” writes Robin White (2001, para. 1). “Words alone can
tell a lot, but the right piece of ambient sound can give the listener a sense of having ‘been there,’
listening along with you” (White, 2001, para. 1). One way that we encourage students to create these
sonic snapshots is to have them listen to the city through different microphones. A short shotgun mic can
pick up sounds at a distance within a narrow spatial field, whereas an omnidirectional microphone fans out
to capture a wider sonic area. After hearing the unique features of each microphone, students can then
consider which one will help them record the sounds that are most fitting for the stories they create in our
1272 Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould International Journal of Communication 10(2016)
classes. Again, such choices are more than mere window dressing in a production process; rather,
recording ambient sounds is another opportunity for students to learn about the city through aural
experiences.
Once students understand the ways to collect sounds through different microphones, we put their
knowledge into practice with a soundscape assignment. Murray Schafer (1994) notes that soundscapes
are acoustic fields that take many forms. There are different types of soundscape recordings (Makagon &
Neumann, 2009), but we ask our students to record natural soundscapes. For example, students are
assigned specific intersections in a local neighborhood and asked to record sounds there during an eightminute
window. The recordings will range from light traffic sounds with some pedestrian footsteps in less
busy areas to more dense recordings that feature a good mix of action in an urban environment: different
types of traffic, commuter trains, groups of people talking, footsteps, and skateboards surfing the
pavement. Students inevitably return to class with a new appreciation for the aural landscape of the city
and a genuine realization of how sound, absent of visual translation, can tell a compelling story about the
everyday ebbs and flows of the city.
This assignment, like the documentary boot camp, is designed to encourage students to consider
the important role of intimacy in documentary recordings and to create opportunities for students to
engage with the urban environment through the senses. The soundscape assignment, a precursor to the
larger audio-documentary project, introduces students (at a meta level) to the various ways that
community-based learning can broaden opportunities to encounter strange and familiar features of one’s
city.
Conclusion: From Solo Consumption to Collective Production
Adopting experiential education pedagogies not only integrates students into the daily life of the
city for the purposes of learning, but this type of learning in a documentary-production context can also
encourage students to reassess their relationships to media as consumers and as producers. Marina
Peterson notes that “media imbue one’s experience in the city, whether in domestic domains or as one
moves through its public space” (2010, p. 64). From the cellular phone map that represents a user in
space and the direction she or he is moving to the electronic billboards offering opportunities to purchase
self-improvement, media are used and consumed in multiple and complicated ways. But media production
technologies can also help student researchers hear the city uniquely.
We seek to inspire students to consider the ways that creating documentary stories can reach a
broad audience via radio, podcasts, and Internet sites. We also have found that for many students, these
classes are their first encounters with creating content, which often challenges the assumption that
today’s students are technologically savvy simply because they can easily navigate social media sites.
Moreover, we discuss with students the range of recording and editing options that have proliferated in
recent years, although we temper an enthusiasm about the democratic features of low-cost recording
options with discussions of high-quality recording gear to highlight the differences between types of
recording packages and sound quality. We always ask our students to work with the best possible
equipment in our classes—equipment that our universities have purchased for production projects—
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Learning the City Through Stories 1273
because professional-quality recorders, mics, and headphones lead to better recordings. Because we have
access to high-quality recording equipment, we discourage students from using their own equipment (cell
phones or other digital recorders) that tend to yield lower quality recordings.8
The documentary boot camp is particularly interesting for us because this assignment links
collective experiences and shared knowledge with individual understanding and growth. “Individual
learning styles are shaped by the structure of social knowledge and through individual creative acts,”
argues David Kolb (1984, p. 99). In-class group discussion and projects can certainly create opportunities
for dialogue and collective learning; however, field studies tend to change the dynamic among the
students. We have observed that urban documentary projects provide a context for students to learn from
each other in the field rather than to depend solely on the instructor for teaching. Learning is
collaborative. At the same time, students are exposed to nuanced approaches to doing documentary work
because each brings an individualized learning style into a collective process. Similar to the traditional
classroom, students read, listen to, and discuss the same stories and lectures, but when they begin
fieldwork, they are each presented with different parts of the city that feature diverse voices, sounds,
sights, and smells that all influence the stories they create. Then each group comes back to the lab to
produce the final project. While group work certainly does present challenges, it offers a glimpse into
media production work environments beyond the campus and places students in the position to navigate
and negotiate the story-making process. Students in the boot camp learn to depend on the pre- and postproduction
support of their classmates, and, in the end, find the collaborative process rewarding. As one
student remarked, “Having group members is healthy for a project such as this type of documentary,
particularly since it’s easy to lose your perspective when you’re working on something so intensely, so I
simultaneously appreciated everyone’s involvement.”
We have found the weekend-long boot camp to be the out-of-class assignment sweet spot that
blends collective fieldwork and urban communication practice. “From field trips, a class shares a stock of
common images that facilitates discussion and can foster camaraderie among students and between
students and the instructor,” note Mooney and Edwards (2001, p. 185). These trips can range in length,
but unfortunately most instructors do not have opportunities to travel with students during a normal
school term. Therefore, projects like the documentary boot camp (offered during the weekend, a time
when students would not likely have other classes) or taking students outside the classroom for brief
periods, such as for the soundscape assignment discussed previously, can achieve participation and
learning goals on a smaller scale. As one boot camp participant commented, “It’s [boot camp] certainly
intense and demanding, but I also like that it forces you to quickly get things done. I think many in my
position would agree that we’re too overwhelmed with classes and other responsibilities to obsess about
such projects throughout the whole semester without getting completely burnt out or overwhelmed.” At
the same time, the student also felt the learning objectives were not compromised by the shortened work
period: “I feel as if I’ve learned just as much as I would have with more conventional assignments so,
again, I think the format is very conducive to a one-semester class with students juggling other
responsibilities.”
8
See the “Tools” section at Transom.org for information about the qualities of different recording
packages.
1274 Daniel Makagon & Mary Rachel Gould International Journal of Communication 10(2016)
Collaborative documentary projects also foster engagement with a broader public, which takes
shape in two ways. First, students interview people to learn more about the topic at hand and to gather
interview recordings for their documentaries. Also, returning to Rabiger’s belief that documentarians can
participate in a larger narrative about contemporary and historical life, we encourage our students to treat
their work as more than class projects designed to earn a grade and fulfill an assignment; rather, making
choices about participants, researching topics, and crafting narratives are opportunities to introduce
listeners to new stories about the city or alternative ways of hearing old stories. We urge our students to
think of themselves as translators of culture and to consider their work public. All too often students
engage in work that is private: writing a paper that is read only by the professor and then returned with a
grade. While it is not a requirement that students send their work out for public distribution (on
community or public radio stations, Internet sites, or social media outlets), we do push students to find
homes for their documentaries, and we make suggestions that will facilitate this shift from course project
to publicly available documentary.
Again, to consider audio-documentary production as more than the simple fulfillment of an
assignment for a specific class is to begin to understand how storytelling helps shape our sense of an
urban past, present, and future. The documentary assignment puts students in situations where they
engage with interview participants, do participant-observation fieldwork, and consider how the representation
of this fieldwork through sound recordings can transition them from urban-communication
consumers to urban-communication producers. As the rhetorician Walter Fisher argued, humans are “in
action and practice, as well as in [their] fictions, essentially story-telling animal[s]” (1984, p. 1). During
the process of making an audio documentary, students can be “directly in touch with the realities being
studied” (Keeton & Tate, 1978, p. 2). The experiential dimensions of this type of coursework are further
developed when students are able to take listeners into a scene, to show listeners rather than simply tell
listeners. “Always try to record the sound of what people do,” instructs Robin White “If you weren’t there,
what would they be doing right now? What does that sound like?” (2001, para. 10).
This ability to show through sound is in part a product of quality preparation (which can be more
difficult in a 36-hour window) and being able to consider a range of possibilities that can emerge if
participants are asked good questions. Students have 36 hours in this assignment to form a team; record,
edit, and narrate; and then be ready to present. All the while, some parts of each team are negotiating a
new city as they all struggle with temporal limits. Participating in the boot camp allows all of us to dwell in
the serendipity of short projects.
The stories created during our documentary boot camp assignment have reflected a range of
urban experiences and have been recorded in different types of neighborhoods. And these audio pieces
highlight how the two cities from which we work (Chicago and St. Louis) share similar features but also
offer distinct opportunities to learn about unique spaces and practices. In the end, we have found this
assignment and the other experiential-learning assignments we have created in our audio-documentary
and digital-storytelling classes to be important opportunities for students to learn about urban
communication, to understand better how symbolic action frames and explains the ways that urban
experiences are created, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Students are not only exposed to a body
of diverse theories and applications but also introduced to ways of doing urban communication through
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Learning the City Through Stories 1275
documentary fieldwork. This community-based experiential-learning process ultimately has students
engaging with the city as a site of significant cultural production and meaning.
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