Most of the time, when talking about ‘voice’ in the context of education, it’s an abstract thing—the student voice, the minority voice, the voice of the community—rather than referring to our own sonic, resonant, unique voice which conveys so much more than the words we speak.
I was fortunate to receive support from the Professional Staff Development Fund (PSDF) to undertake The Confident Voice course at NIDA Open, and it transformed my awareness about my voice and how I can use it in teaching and communicating. While the sound of your voice and the attitudes and emotions it can convey can have powerful effects on your learning and teaching environment, there is more to voice than its phonic qualities. Using your voice is an exchange—of information, ideas, and energy. And effective use of voice is a multifaceted skill requiring sensitivity—to your environment, your audience, and yourself. And it requires courage—to take up space, to ask for people’s time and attention, and to feel worthy of these.
As voice training isn’t typically a feature of teacher training and development—even though voice is such an important element in teaching and learning environments—I’ve distilled what I learned and offer it here as practical guidance for using your voice more intentionally and effectively.
My voice is embodied, vibrations made corporally and carried on breath. Because I’m tired today, I’m using my voice to write some of this article, watching sound turn to text on my screen. Your voice might be embodied in the same way mine is, or you might use your body differently to create your voice (ch. 11), perhaps you use technology to render thought into sound. I write this account from my embodied perspective because that’s my experience, acknowledging that yours may be the same or different.
Caring for your voice
Warming up is part of preparing to speak. Even a quick warmup before a class or presentation will help your voice be ready to do what you need it to do. Physical vocal techniques engage the whole body, with the idea that the voice is connected to the whole body. To get ready to use your voice, warm up your body, breath, resonance, and articulation. Warming up your body can be anything—dancing, jogging, stretching, any type of movement. Relax your face by yawning. Take a few deep breaths using your whole diaphragm, then practice controlling your breath by exhaling slowly. Move on to some sighs, lip trills, and humming and then singing some words—our teacher’s favourite exercise for this one was ‘singing’ the days of the week on one note on a single exhale, then doing the same thing with a different note.
Pay attention to the vibrations of your voice and where they resonate in your mouth, face, and body when your voice is low, high, and in between. Practice articulation with simple exercises such as cycling through consonant and vowel sounds, e.g. tay, tee, tiy, toh, too, shay, shee, shy, show, shoo etc, and with some fun tongue twisters (make them cheeky if you like, e.g. “one smart fellow, he felt smart, two smart fellows, they felt smart” etc). There are many resources online for vocal warmups.
To relax your voice, develop smooth control over your whole vocal range, expand your range, and recover after vocal effort or strain, you can use semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises. Try these by breathing through a wide straw, making vowel sounds through it, gliding up and down your vocal range, or singing through it.
Using your voice
Using your voice is about finding the story. Bring your words to life by communicating the images, feelings, sensations, smells, or sounds associated with what you’re saying, inviting your audience to be involved in your story. If you’re not excited by, connected with, or interested in, the content of what you’re saying, try to find, and share, enjoyment in the process of communicating it.
To bring your words to life, you can intentionally play with the elements of speech—consonants, vowels, pace, pitch, volume, pauses—to give texture to what you are saying. This texture invites your audience into your story, giving them places to engage, to reflect, or to join you in enthusiasm or emotion. Using punctuation gives your audience space to rest, for your points to land and settle, and for you to take a breath.
When speaking, take your time—use pauses and silence to command the space, and slow down for more power. One thing we learned which I find particularly useful to practice, is driving through to the end of the thought, sentence, or line. Sometimes when we speak, we allow our voices to trail off and de-energise as we reach the end of a sentence. This can give an apologetic sense to our speech, a kind of throwing away of what we are saying, like it’s not important, that we don’t believe in it, and that it can be ignored or disregarded. Practice keeping the energy all the way through to the end of each thing that you’re saying. This doesn’t mean necessarily to speak forcefully, or to strain, but to carry your conviction all the way through—being relaxed while you do this will help you connect with your audience.
Presence and giving
Part of using your voice is using your physical presence. This means to hold and command the space not only with your voice, but also with your embodied self. Our teacher described this as being physically committed to what we’re saying—being aware of yourself and making the decision to be fully present in your physicality when speaking, to take up space and inhabit it, to unapologetically ask for people’s time and attention. An aspect of paying attention to embodiment in this way can be feelings of uncomfortability, awkwardness, or unworthiness. This uncomfortability can also extend to the possibility of sometimes, and necessarily, making people uncomfortable because of what you’re saying, and so feeling their uncomfortability in the space.
It can help to frame the experience of speaking in front of people, rather than as an experience of excruciating self consciousness, instead as an opportunity to give—a sharing of your words, your story, and your energy. This framing can help to balance your attention to yourself, with attention to your audience, and with your purpose in being there with them. Game and Metcalfe write about the pleasure of writing, and of using words to connect with your audience, in a way which can also be helpfully applied to speaking, “Writing to a trusted reader is not a statement from the dock but an invitation to a dance, offering a sympathetic partner the chance to play with your text, to hear its harmonies, to note its dissonances, to make it part of their own experience, to put it in motion, to realise its possibilities.” (p. 33) The relationality inherent in this ‘invitation to a dance’ is a way to place ourselves in an interaction with our audience, creating a space for people to not only engage, but to bring something to the encounter. This is not speaking as performance, with us on stage nervously anticipating judgement, but speaking as giving—inviting, perhaps enticing, our audience into a co-created experience.
Play and foolery
The process of learning and practicing with voice can be a playful one. During the course, our teacher encouraged us to always be investigating in all the exercises and activities, seeing what we could do with them, rather than just going through the motions. She encouraged us to play with the components, try different things, adjust, and experience ourselves in new ways as a result, shaping and crafting our own personal and collective learning from the raw ingredients provided. This approach challenged us to engage all our faculties, and to fully inhabit the learning experience. I was well outside my comfort zone for a lot of this course—dancing, yelping, and singing with a diverse group of people I’d only just met! Being able to feel like this and be able to participate anyway, brought home the importance of having comrades in foolery, of acknowledging our vulnerability and together making an environment in which it felt safe enough to take the risk to try new things. This approach to learning can be extended into teaching and learning in general—making it a collective endeavour of support, challenge and fun which benefits all participants.
Using what comes naturally
Effectively using your voice is about authenticity. I had anticipated that the course would teach me vocal techniques, perhaps something about posture, or projection—that it would teach me ‘the way to do speaking’. Instead, I learned that effectively using your voice is not about standing heroically and roaring like Hugh Laurie’s Prince George in the comedy series Blackadder the Third, as he earnestly takes instruction from actors on how to give a speech. Effectively using your voice is about combining all its ingredients in your own particular way. One of my classmates in the course had a very quiet way of speaking. When we came to do our monologues at the end of the course, she had selected a short poem to present. Standing to speak this simple piece, her presence combined the vulnerability conveyed by the words of the poem with her tender bravery in holding the space to offer it. Her quiet voice and gentleness was so affecting, and we listened in captivated silence in the space she created. While techniques can help you use your voice more intentionally, effectively using your voice is most powerful when you work with what comes naturally to you.
In our final session our teacher left us with the idea that voice is about how you want to show up in the world. For me this means embodying my full and authentic presence, in all its variety and uniqueness, using all of what I learned to make the most of what comes naturally to me, and sharing what I have to say. Voice is so much more than speaking words—learning to use your voice well can enliven your teaching environments and help you and your students to venture, to be brave, and to keep exploring and learning.
Thanks to Dr Samantha Poulos for their comments to improve this article.
