SoundAffects the World: Global Voices for the Classroom of Tomorrow
SoundAffects is a small charity with a big idea, to connect children of every age, on every continent, by recording their voices and making these recordings available to classrooms world wide.
About Us
SoundAffects links children across a globally challenged world, through the powerful medium of professionally recorded and presented audio material.
We connect classrooms by recording the voices of children around the world, talking primarily in English about their daily lives, their dreams, and their concerns for the future. Then we take advantage of the latest audio technologies to make this regularly updated sound archive available to schools world wide.
Sound Affects aims to build this global resource by becoming a North/South partnership that will use the skills of international radio broadcasters and educationalists from every continent.
Our Vision
By using recordings of children’s voices to connect children in classrooms world-wide, SoundAffects provides a global dimension that enhances their understanding of the diversity of today’s world, and provide them with the global perspectives they will need if their world is to become a safer and more just place.
Our Mission
To build an easily accessible and renewable sound archive that includes children in every continent, talking about the significant aspects of their lives as tomorrow’s global citizens, in ways that are as useful in the classrooms of the South as they are in the classrooms of the North.
The Story So Far
In 2007 two experienced international radio broadcasters, Penny Boreham and Caroline Swinburne, shared the idea of using their professional skills to record children in different continents exchanging views and experiences, and making the resulting interviews available to be played back as audio recordings in class. They named their project SoundAffects, and launched it as a charity in 2008.
In that year, and in 2009, Caroline and Penny travelled first to Ghana, and then Sri Lanka, recording children in classrooms in each country, and setting these recordings alongside the voices of children from linked schools in the UK. Some 6000 children in the UK, and around 11,000 in Ghana and Sri Lanka, reacted with huge enthusiasm to hearing the voices of their peers from their partner school on the other side of the world.
By the end of 2009, SoundAffects had identified a widespread need among schools worldwide for effective and affordable classroom materials to support the teaching of a global dimension throughout the primary and secondary curriculums. By pioneering the underused medium of audio recording, allied to the latest IT and web technologies, in the UK, Ghana and Sri Lanka, SoundAffects had also demonstrated that its approach could meet this need for a new kind of classroom resource. In a major new departure, SoundAffects has therefore decided to build on its early success by using the internet to make a new generation of audio recordings available to much wider audiences in schools in both the North and the South.
To achieve this, SoundAffects has divided its activities into two divisions.
SoundAffects Education offers audio-based topics for UK schools, and the community of the world’s International Schools, with already recorded material from Ghana and Sri Lanka, as well as working to record new material from many other countries. Material is designed for use at Primary level (UK Key Stages 1 and 2) and Secondary (initially UK Key Stage 3). It is issued in Topics, each consisting of around twelve short audio clips, accompanied by lesson plans, background material, and one or more still images per clip. All material is downloadable directly off the web by new and existing IT technologies, and is offered at a competitive price.
SoundAffects Worldwide focuses on creating similar audio-based material to enhance and enliven the teaching of global perspectives in the classrooms of the South. It works with partners in the schools and educational organizations of the South and among interested Northern NGO’s and funders, to establish and deliver a comparable service of recordings that will enhance and supplement classroom teaching in Southern countries. The aim is to make SoundAffects as useful and effective in the classrooms of Africa, Asia and the Middle East as we hope to be for children following the Global Dimensions curriculum of schools in the North. SoundAffects Worldwide will sustain and develop its work enhancing school partnerships, continuing to gather unique child driven recordings which allow young people themselves to exchange views about, and help set, the global agendas of the future.