Sharon Carson |

We are rolling back into NDQ blog mode after an early summer break, and this post has been sparked by an online MOOC course in audio journalism that I am currently taking from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which has its shop at the University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to some very good online courses which are open to students from all over the world, The Knight Center also hosts the LatAm Journalism Review and sponsors the Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism.

“Audio Intensive Storytelling for Journalists” is taught by radio journalist and public media strategist Tamar Charney, who has worked for NPR and other outlets. You can find some of her collaborative audio journalism here.

The course has so far been a welcome refresher on how to do good narrative journalism in general, and how to work with the aesthetics and multilayered sound art to convey the complexity of human experience.

Two of many capacities of audio are first, its ability to convey human emotional texture through variations in voice, and second, its ability to transport listeners across time by using archival sound.

Both of these “sound art” capacities have the potential to pull listeners toward a deeper hearing of the world around us, and perhaps a better understanding of the lived experiences of other people. In a time when contact with people across social, geographical and political divides is often mediated on digital platforms, the role of sound in potentially connecting, or dividing, is a critical issue for producers but also for audiences.

Thinking about these two dimensions of sound art – emotional texture and time-shifts via archival sound- reminds me of an excellent 2009 audio documentary which remains unsettlingly relevant these days, and which still succeeds in challenging listeners to grapple with some very hard and still current questions.

The Great Textbook War, produced by Trey Kay, Deborah George, and Stan Bumgardner, aired on West Virginia Public Radio and tells the story of a very serious conflict over the content of public-school textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974.

The Great Textbook War won a 2009 Peabody Award, and remains available via American Public Media and American Radioworks.

This site also includes a full transcript of the documentary, a fascinating “Reporter’s Notebook” link by Trey Kay, who reported the story and grew up in the community drung the conflict, and other links and sources.

Here’s the Peabody Award page explaining their choice of this documentary for a well-deserved award.

The Great Textbook War poses hard questions to listeners, starting with broad questions which structure the documentary as a whole: How can communities navigate serious conflicts among diverse people and perspectives? Who mediates these conflicts? Who should mediate these conflicts?

And then the story is moved along via a series of sharper questions: In a pluralistic society, who determines the directions of public education? How does history shape peoples’ perceptions of events and of their neighbors? How does a community -or nation- accommodate a diverse population and hard-won changes in historical knowledge? What undercurrent social tensions emerge during conflict over specific issues like school textbooks? Whose perspective on these conflicts gets heard? Whose does not?

And an even sharper question in The Great Textbook War: what would lead people in Kanawha County, West Virginia, circa 1974, to dynamite school buses carrying their neighbor’s children over a conflict about school textbooks?

The documentary works these questions in a longform piece of audio journalism; hope you will listen. And if you are interested in sound art and documentary design, see what you think about: the very wide range of people that Trey Kay got to sit down with him; the ways their voices convey confidence, worry, regret, anger, compassion; the sometimes startling honesty that results during recorded talk around kitchen tables; the ways that archival sound clips can break listeners out of our own fishbowl presumptions. And see whether you think the producers succeeded in opening a wide range of perspectives without suggesting that all viewpoints hold equal water.

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Sharon Carson is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor, Department of English, University of North Dakota and the reviews editor (and former editor) of North Dakota Quarterly.