Acoustic Epistemology in Education

Abstract

Epistemology – the question of what knowledge is and how it is acquired – is naturally an important one in the discursive domain of education. Yet, educational notions of epistemology still rely almost exclusively on text in order to define, store and convey knowledge. Formal curriculum is also primarily encoded in and understood through text. Despite the critical interventions of theorists such as Walter Ong and Marshal McLuhan who expose the visual and literary bias of our culture, as well as educators such as Barry Truax and R.M. Schafer who have advocated for the phenomenological benefits of listening and orality, education is a long way from shifting its epistemological paradigm from one that is text-centric to one that involves the body and the senses as foundational elements to knowledge construction, teaching practice and curriculum. This paper focuses particularly on orality and acoustic dimensions of communication, and proposes implications for how they might be important to educational practice and institutional conceptions of knowledge.