Teaching With Podcasts
Notes from my classroom
I discovered podcasts in graduate school. I started listening to Hidden Brain, a podcast that highlights research on human behavior because it matched my professional interests. Soon I found myself going down a rabbit hole as I started tuning into podcasts on a variety of topics — books, movies, identity, politics, science, religion, sexuality, and relationships. I was hooked. At the time, I had no idea how much this media form would impact my teaching approach.
One day, I was planning a lesson on how babies think and reason about the world in terms of concepts and categories for a graduate level developmental psychology course. I found myself thinking about an episode I had listened to titled The Power of Categories on Invisibilia. One of the stories featured on this episode is about a person named Paige who reported experiencing sudden and multiple shifts in their gender identity, often within the course of a single day. Paige’s struggle to find belonging in the world in the absence of a stable gender category is a powerful reminder for all of us to check our inclination to simplify human experiences. I felt that the story would help me discuss the advantages and limitations of using concepts and categories to make sense of the world with my students. The lesson plan was a success and it made me start thinking about how I could integrate podcast episodes into my courses more regularly.
I have been incorporating podcast episodes into my teaching for the last two years. It is important to preface my insights on using podcasts as an educator by saying that I teach social science courses to adult students in an university setting. So, my reflections are rooted in my experiences within a specific context.
Does it Fit the Lesson?
For someone who listens to podcasts as much as I do, it is very tempting to want to create a lesson around interesting podcast episodes. But just like any other educational resource, it is important to have a sound justification of why something adds value to my lesson plan. So, unless I am able to clearly articulate how an episode fits into my lesson plan, I resist the urge to include it. Instead, I make a note of the podcast episode and jot down ideas on why I found it interesting. Engaging in this note-taking process has helped me identify podcast episodes in which the researchers whose works my students are reading are invited as guest speakers.
When my students read Alison Gopnik’s research on the unique intellectual skills of infants in my cognitive development course, I paired the course reading up with a podcast episode titled What Do Babies Think? from Talk of the Nation. In the episode, Gopnik communicates her findings with a wide range of audiences in mind and goes on to take phone calls from listeners who have questions about children in their families with hopes of understanding them better. Students in my class come with varying levels of prior knowledge and readiness to read academic research. Pairing peer-reviewed articles up with a podcast episode makes the reading material engaging and accessible for all graduate students and demonstrates an effective way to maximize the reach of scientific research beyond academia to them.
Does it Spark Conversation?
One reason why I personally enjoy listening to podcasts is that they allow me to learn and think about perspectives and experiences that are different from my own. The podcast episodes that linger on my mind typically do not tell me what to do or how to live my life. They leave me thinking and asking new questions. In my courses, I require students to listen to the podcast episode ahead of class and submit a discussion question before class meetings. Reading the student questions gives me a sense of their identities and how it shapes the way they are thinking about a course topic. Collective advance preparation for a class discussion on a podcast episode keeps us mindful of the diversity in our classroom community.
In this connection, I will share one example of a podcast episode that generated multiple viewpoints and links to real world experiences through conversation in my classroom. I was teaching my students about cognitive dissonance — inconsistencies in our thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes. For this lesson, I had students listen to a podcast episode titled The Founding Contradictions: Thomas Jefferson’s Stance On Slavery on Hidden Brain. The episode led us to discuss the fairness of using current ethical standards to judge the actions of people in history. But what made the discussion timely and stimulating was when one student brought up JK Rowling and how they found it difficult to reconcile their love for the writer’s Harry Potter series with her controversial comments on the transgender community. While some students felt it was possible to separate the art and the artist, others felt that they could not think of Rowling’s literary work without thinking about how she has undermined the transgender community with her remarks. The conversation gradually evolved to debating the merits of calling people in as opposed to canceling them. I doubt whether simply reading an academic piece about cognitive dissonance would have led us there.
Does the Structure Work?
I never assign episodes without having listened to them first. Not only does this help me judge whether the content is appropriate and aligned with the course topics, but it also helps me understand the format of the podcast itself. Formats make a difference to how easily they are able to hold a listener’s attention. Some podcast formats include story telling, some entail conversations between people, some involve interviewing an expert and asking them questions, and so on. Some may have a little bit of all of these elements. For students who enjoy listening to podcasts, like me, the format may not be a problem. But, this is not the case for all students.
For my research methods course, I use a podcast called The Black Goat. The podcast is hosted by three psychologists — Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullet, and Simine Vazire. It is a great podcast for anyone engaged in doing social science research because it highlights contemporary issues and dilemmas around methodological practices. I make sure that the podcast topic is linked to what students are learning about in my class. For example, when students are learning how to ask an innovative research question, I have them listen to an episode titled Creativity and Rigor. The episode tries to tackle the issue of whether researchers can be creative while ensuring that they pick and implement appropriate research methods to collect, analyze, and report data. In other words, the hosts ask — does methodological rigor cripple good story telling in research? For each Black Goat episode, the main topic is discussed for around 30 min by the hosts. Before the hosts get into the main discussion, they engage in small talk and respond to a letter from a student or a professor who needs advice on a professional dilemma in academia. It took me a while to recognize that the small talk and letter response were distracting for some students. Now, at the beginning of the semester I tell my students how to listen to the podcast — in this case, fast forward to the conversation related to the class topic. Additionally, I give students a choice to read an academic article or listen to the podcast conversation on the same topic or do both. Things have been working well since I made these small changes and gave students a choice.
Even though I have been using podcasts to teach for a while now, I am still learning new things everyday. Recently, I created a list of podcasts that I have been able to integrate into my lesson plans with success. The purpose of creating this resource was to share it with other educators within my professional network who teach within higher education settings. As I was working on developing this resource list, I realized that not all podcast episodes are accompanied by audio transcripts. In my experience, students with specific types of disabilities (e.g., ADHD) prefer reading the audio transcripts over listening to the audio recording. This is an important point to consider when deciding to include podcasts in courses.
At present, I am focused on understanding the experiences of educators who have been using podcasts with their students in contexts similar to or different from mine. What works? What could be better? Who knows, maybe one day I might even plan a new study around these questions.
