Students learn the art of telling stories in sound. Focused in Endicott, N.Y., this project collapses the walls between the university and the community in the collective endeavor to gather, edit, and broadcast meaningful stories of the town’s changing landscape and character. These audio stories explore the meaning of place. They bring landscapes alive by focusing on challenges to ecological health, on the changing nature of places and cultural identities, and on the power of memory and retrospect to shape understanding. The audio sketches take a variety of forms, from first-person accounts to non-narrative portraits. Guided by a community advisory board, students pair up with community members to talk about their lives and work, to explore local soundscapes—what Don Ihde calls “the noise and voice of the environment, of the surrounding lifeworld”—make field recordings, write for the ear, and use digital editing systems to create compelling pieces that link students, community members, and listeners in new and powerful ways. A dedicated website is in development to broadcast these stories, many of which also aim for local and national radio audiences.

The intent is to enlist students and community members in the joint effort of storytelling, of interpreting places and people through narrative. “In the most general sense, once the life experience of people of all kinds can be used as its raw material, a new dimension is given to history,” writes Paul Thompson in his seminal work on oral history, The Voice of the Past. By working closely with community members, students have the opportunity to build up a composite, multidisciplinary, narrative history of life and work in a particular region while the community seeks meaning for its own changing character.
Once the home of Endicott-Johnson Shoes and International Business Machines (IBM), Endicott, N.Y., has faced numerous challenges since its industrial collapse, as have many of New York`s regions and communities. Endicott offers us vital stories of how people shape places and how they are shaped by them in turn.

In spring 2007 and again in spring 2008 I have offered a course in audio documentary focused on Endicott, N.Y. The result is a growing body of student work. Additionally I have built strong relations with the community to gain access to stories and issues, and have partnered with the Center for Technology and Innovation (CTI), and with Union-Endicott and Johnson City high schools to help develop a network of story gatherers. CTI received a grant from Fox network’s History Works! to develop this approach in the high schools, and I’ve been involved in training teachers and students there, while Cornell students have mentored high school students. I received a Cornell University Faculty Innovation in Teaching grant to develop a website appropriate for broadcasting the resulting stories.

Measuring the intangible benefits of hearing, collecting, and crafting people’s life stories is difficult. But students have been profoundly affected by the responsibility to care for the words of others, and community members have been deeply moved that their stories are valued. This singular portrait of a post-industrial New York town, I would hope, will expand into many portraits of New York’s spaces and places.

Audio documentary

Cornell University Faculty Innovation in Teaching grant.

Jonathan Miller, national public radio journalist