Narrative & Audio

I Got In!

In college orientation, students may have anxiety about starting conversations and meeting new people in this extremely new environment. Having a tool that gets their attention, sets a conversation topic, and serves as a resource that triggers memories of their own experiences can help to ease that anxiety. Also, it’s not common to have university wide content that prioritizes the musical tastes of hip hop generations. So, in this design I aimed to create an audio experience that included a hip hop beat to foster a more welcoming energy for students who are overlooked in this area, which often includes the BIPOC community, to evolve ice breaker concepts used by orientation instructors.

To create this audio narrative, I combined the details of a few of my experiences receiving college acceptance letters and scholarship awards. This one minute story is about the journey of finding out on social media that this would be the day that you should have a letter at home waiting for you from your dream school. From the racing heart beat that many of us had from anticipating this moment to approaching our homes, opening up the door, and dropping everything to open the letter to find out that we got in, this learning design uses sound effects and a voice over to tell this story. A hip hop beat serves as the background music that carries the narrative, which was arranged in Soundtrap using provided loops. The sound effects were downloaded via Zapsplat but the voice over was recorded in Soundtrap and the entire project was edited in this digital audio workstation as well.

The target audience for this learning tool is first-year college students, more specifically BIPOC students and those who listen to hip hop music.

Learning Objectives

Students will discuss their personal college acceptance letter experiences within small groups.
Students will build community during college orientation by sharing their personal stories of receiving their college acceptance letters.
Students will develop a sense of belonging as members of a hip hop generation through the music selection within the podcast style ice breaker audio.
Students will be able to initiate the process of comparing and contrasting their personal experiences of receiving their acceptance letters as they listen to the audio narrative, which will prepare them for their group discussions.

Learning Theories

According to Crook & Sutherland, “a sociocultural perspective is the appropriation and mastering of symbolic and technical cultural tools within social practices” with increased coordination between these tools and the users from exploration and introduction to transparent use of these tools to interact in the learning environment (Crook & Sutherland 16). The individual and the world are intrinsically linked, therefore the learning environment is not just considered to be context but pivotal to the learner’s knowledge development. With this ice breaker activity, students are prompted to have group discussions and are given an audio to initiate that process by triggering an internal comparison and recall of their personal acceptance letter experience.

Situativity

Storyboard

Documentation

If I were to continue working on this project, I would re-record my voice-over audio to fix some pronunciations, adjust the timing of a few words to match the sound effects, and focus more on the audio mix to make sure the background music or the sound effects didn't over power my voice. I'd also search Soundtrap for some sound effects that I was unable to find on Zapsplat (i.e. a female inhale/exhale) and record some sound effects myself that I was unable to find on either platform (i.e. footsteps in the house). Furthermore, to complete the audio as an aid to an ice breaker activity, I would add a sentence directing students to share their stories in their groups and prompting them to seek further assistance from instructors.

Citations

Clark, James M., and Allan Paivio. “Dual Coding Theory and Education.” Educational

Psychology Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 1991, pp. 149–210. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23359208. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Crook, C. & Sutherland, R. (2017). Technology and theories of learning. Retrieved from

http://ebookcentral.proquest.com

“Emotion, Motivation, and Volition.” Learning and Cognition: the Design of the Mind, by Michael E.

Martinez, Merrill, 2010, pp. 153–188.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally

Relevant Pedagogy.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 34, no. 3, 1995, pp. 159–165.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1476635. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Mayer, Richard E. “Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning.” The Cambridge Handbook of

Multimedia Learning, edited by Richard E. Mayer, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 2014, pp. 43–71. Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology.