For those looking to check out and discover some of Brantford’s key tourism attractions, historical sites, and public art pieces, can now do so by immersing through short-form audio tours.
Over the past several years, students from Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus had the opportunity to capture the essence of certain sites around town, such as the Sanderson Centre of Performing Arts, the Brantford and Area Sports Hall of Recognition, the Bell Homestead, the Woodland Cultural Centre and more.
Avery Moore Kloss, a Laurier Brantford Digital Media and Journalism instructor and podcaster-in-residence, was the one to kick-start the Best of Brantford Audio Tours and approached the City of Brantford about collaborating.
“I had pitched the idea of doing audio tours to Kara Davey [Manager of Tourism, Culture and Sport for the City of Brantford] and she was really interested in seeing what that would look like,” she recalled. “So we did a test episode on the Sanderson Centre with Glenn Brown and that’s the only one in this series that I produced. Because I’m always trying, in both of my roles at Laurier, to help students get real world experience they can leave school with, after that first one was done, I asked Kara, ‘What if we had the students do the rest of the stops for this audio tour?’ and she was totally up for it.”
From the City’s perspective, the Best of Brantford Audio Tours enhance on-site experiences while also leveraging the digital format to reach a wider audience from anywhere in the world.
“Using the Sanderson Centre as an example, the audio postcard can function as a self-guided tour for visitors on site, while also serving as a promotional tool to spark interest and encourage future visits,” said Davey in an email to the Brant Beacon. “These stories are intended to foster community pride among residents and help attract new audiences to Brantford by showcasing the city’s existing tourism attractions.”
Moore Kloss went on to say it was a great project because it gave the City an opportunity to engage with young creators, while simultaneously giving her students something tangible to walk away with.
“It benefits the City because it’s getting these put-together pieces from young creators in town, and for the students, they’re getting to put something on their resume,” she said. “Often in journalism school, you write a bunch of stories and we post them to our own online publication, but it’s not something where you can necessarily go out and say, ‘I have a professional piece in audio or video, or whichever it is, that is for a client or for a municipality so that they can leave school with published pieces.”
When it came to ironing out all the details, Davey and her team selected which locations to spotlight. The first 14 locations included the Sanderson Centre for Performing Arts; the Walter Gretzky portrait at the Walter Gretzky Municipal Golf Course; La Landscape de Kanata outside of the Brantford Public Library’s main branch; The Great One sculpture and the Brantford and Area Sports Hall of Recognition at the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre; the Bust of Walter Gretzky at City Hall. Additional stops also included the Woodland Cultural Centre. Myrtleville House, the Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre, Glenhyrst Art Gallery, the Canadian Military Heritage Museum, the Brant Historical Society, the Bell Homestead National Historic Site and the Take Your Shot art piece at the Wayne Gretzky Centre.
“City of Brantford Tourism staff identified a few key tourism markets to begin with, including culture, sport and culinary,” said Davey. “From there, the focus was narrowed to attractions that are uniquely representative of the city or that foster a strong sense of local pride. For example, Brantford is widely recognized as ‘the Tournament Capital of Ontario’ and the ‘Telephone City,’ making it fitting to highlight tours that reflect and celebrate those well-known distinctions.”
Over the course of 2023 and 2024, Moore Kloss’ students had the chance to go out and interview a variety of people from the community, and put together a short audio tour that could help immerse listeners in the experience.
“I think it was really fun for them because this project came at a time where students were very much burnt out from the pandemic and virtual interviews,” she said. “So they were tasked with going to a place and getting a feel for it. They were each assigned a tour guide by the city who could show them around and agreed to be recorded, and their task was to create a piece that makes someone feel like they’re there. And with audio, it’s such an intimate art form that you can actually do that if you do it the correct way.”
“One of the outcomes we wanted was for people to come and explore more, but at the same time, if you’re homebound, if you’re ill, or if you’re out of town, you still listen to the tour and feel like you’re actually looking at that piece of public art or you’re actually in that place,” continued Moore Kloss. “I think they did a really good job of that and I think it was one of the first times for a lot of these students where they really had to think, ‘Okay, how do you immerse someone in something just with audio?’”
When asked if she had any favourites out of the series, the podcaster said while she particularly enjoyed the ones on the Bell Homestead, the Woodland Cultural Centre and the Glenhyrst Art Gallery, they’re all special and different in their own unique way because they capture a moment in time.
“I really wanted to show these students how their journalism education applies in other ways. Sure, an audio tour may not be big journalism, but it is a really important use of their storytelling skills to capture a moment and a place in time,” said Moore Kloss. “… I hope what people out in the community get from this is that we have to keep telling our stories; we have to keep documenting our stories because to keep storytelling going, is such a human activity in a world that is filled with more and more artificial work. I just think this is a really lovely project that we got to do where these students got to live in history, they got to live in culture, and then they got to tell the story of that, and it’s documented and will be kept within the City of Brantford.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
