Project Podcast Rationale

Introduction

Podcasting can offer an incredibly rich, authentic learning experience within any academic subject, but teachers of disciplines other than audio engineering are not necessarily equipped to support learners in producing podcasts. Project Podcast is a curricular tool meant to serve in tandem with an indeterminate range of curricular materials to enrich learning experiences and settings. Its flexibility is its most important feature, as the goal for Project Podcast is to support teachers and learners in using podcasting as a vehicle for teaching and learning other disciplines in addition to podcasting. In this paper, I introduce Project Podcast in terms of the problem it is meant to address, the materials that compose it, and how these materials and their use address the aforementioned problem. I explore the ways in which podcasting is an exemplary learning experience in the context of Project-Based Learning, demonstrate how Project Podcast is a tool for supporting teachers and students in this context, and offer analysis relating design elements of the tool to relevant classroom applications. Finally, I reflect on the limitations of Project Podcast in its current form, and explore possibilities for future expansions and refinements to the curricular tool.

Problem

The problem Project Podcast addresses is really a nexus of problems that coalesced in my music classroom at a grades 6-12 public school in the South Bronx between 2017 and 2022. These problems all revolve around the question of how. How to engage students in learning that feels meaningful to them; how to respect and reinforce their agency in an environment that typically undermines it; how to design music programming that feels appropriately mature for students who have not had consistent instruction in music throughout their time in school; how to keep an overcrowded classroom relatively peaceful and safe. The ways in which I responded to these problems led me, step by step, to the approach at the core of Project Podcast. Each element of this curricular tool can be tied to an intervention in my own teaching that worked better than anything I had tried before, so I kept it. I will address each of these elements in greater detail below, beginning first with Project-Based Learning before addressing interventions meant to facilitate more individualized attention to learners, affirm their agency, and attend to their needs related to creativity.

What is Project Podcast

The title of Project Podcast is intentional. Project-Based Learning figures prominently in the design of this curricular tool, hence the primacy of the word “Project.” PBL has the potential to launch manifold outcomes, with podcasts being one possible product. Project Podcast is intended to support students who have chosen to develop a podcast as the product of a Project-Based inquiry in which they are engaged in a class that otherwise has nothing to do with the discipline of Audio Production. This curricular tool thus fills a niche and answers how questions without supplanting the what questions of a discipline.

Project Podcast is accessible via a website and linked YouTube videos. It is composed of a growing library of video lessons that are modular in nature or assembled in sequences of a few videos that build on one another. Also available on the website is a section specifically for teacher-facing materials and a library of resources, including royalty-free music, that learners can use in their work. The organization of the video lessons is such that teachers can share the website with their students, who can then utilize them as they become relevant to their self-guided work.

Project-Based Learning

In a literature review that amalgamates a broad swathe of findings related to Project-Based Learning and student outcomes, Turcotte, Rodriguez-Meehan, and Stork (2022) report that students find school more enjoyable when engaged in project-based learning. They perceive improved “executive functioning skills, communication skills, and overall self-confidence” (pp.53-54). They feel more “capable, independent, creative, and critical” (p. 54).  These findings resonate with my own experience in the classroom, in that I found my teaching to be more congruent with the interests of my students when I began consciously building lessons and units around student-driven tasks. Further, they were more congruent with my own interests. I found it much more comfortable to support students in organizing their class time towards accomplishing tasks that they had set out for themselves than to demand attention and dictate the tasks and passage of time myself. As such, Project Podcast looks like the supports I might have designed for my students and its discussion can be organized in terms of PBLWorks’s essential project design elements discussed in the next section (Larmer, et al., 2015).

A Challenging Problem or Question

Every instance of Project-Based Learning begins with a challenging problem or question that can endure throughout the process of conducting research for, developing, and iterating a product. Regardless of the discipline, there is a compelling story buried somewhere in its subject matter, and developing the enduring question is the first stage of developing a strong podcast. Once a student or group of students has developed their enduring question, it serves as a foundation for the rest of the learning experience. It is a stand-in for support and redirection, with questions like, “how does this serve your work?” replacing commands like, “sit down” and “keep your voices low.” Organizing learning around a compelling problem encourages the students to take the lead in their work, as the problem and their chosen approach for developing a solution is what prompts every step they take. The teacher is, as a result, in more of a facilitator’s position, there to support and make suggestions rather than to provide the entirety of the learning experience. 

Sustained Inquiry

The podcast, as a form, is an excellent vehicle for sustained inquiry. Some of the best-known and most beloved podcasts are essentially little more than a recording of the creator’s sustained inquiry into a question. The initial season of Serial broke records in listenership when it was released in 2014. It was the first podcast to win a Peabody Award, which recognizes excellence in television, radio, and online media, is Sarah Koenig’s narration of her investigation into the killing of Hae Min Lee (Koenig, 2014). Podcasts unfold over time, episodically, allowing the producer to bring the audience on a journey. They are curricular, in that the producer gathers information and organizes it in such a way as to share it with the listener to maximum effect.

Primary sources take on a special meaning in the case of podcasts, as interviews allow producers to share the thoughts of experts with the listener in the voices of the experts themselves. It has been my personal experience over the course of producing several shows that it is somehow much easier than I ever would have expected to arrange interviews with high profile experts in a variety of fields. I have interviewed Grammy award-winners and I have coached student-athletes in interviewing Olympians (Teachey, 2023). This is not to suggest that one’s highest aspiration in sustained inquiry should be to speak with famous people, nor that it will always be possible to use a podcast as a vehicle to engage with these people. There are notable figures who can speak with experience on a subject of interest to students, though, and these figures recognize podcasts as legitimate and will share their time and insight with students who request an interview for a podcast. Project Podcast offers several video lessons on securing interviewees and preparing for interviews.

Authenticity

Podcasts are an increasingly popular means of sharing information. In the year 2023, 34% of individuals over the age of 12 reported listening to podcasts on a weekly basis (Edison Research, 2024). Beyond recognizability, podcasts have gained credibility among listeners, with approximately a third of all US adults hearing news on podcasts, and a majority of those listeners expecting what they hear to be mostly accurate (Shearer et al., 2023). It is worth noting that podcasts have gained enough of a reputation of credibility among consumers that marketers use aesthetic cues from podcasting as a means of advertising products to imbue them with the same credibility (Carman, 2024). These aesthetic cues typically include wide camera angles of individuals seated around a table wearing headphones and speaking into recognizable microphones. As students and their friends and family members engage more routinely with this relatively new form of connectivity, it gains a recognizability in the context beyond the classroom walls that serves as an important precursor to authenticity (Lychock, 2019).

Authenticity in learning experiences serves the all-important role of answering, or even precluding, the question, “why?” In a world of infinite possibility and omnipresent distraction, this question is unavoidable, nor should teachers seek to avoid it, as curiosity and skepticism ought to be encouraged if students are to finish school prepared to think critically and seek out their best possible lives. Rather, once the question is asked, it must be met with a satisfactory answer in order for students to be expected to pursue a learning experience with any measure of motivation. Sometimes a student brings their own answer to the question. In that case, the work of justifying the learning experience is already finished, as the student perceives an intrinsic value that is personal to them. In the case of podcasting, there is a clear instrumental value implied by the increasing popularity of podcasts among the population of the US aged 12 and older. Podcasts are a means of reaching people and finding connectivity on a broad scale. Podcasting may also carry intrinsic value for any given student, as they might already have an active podcast listening habit. It is far easier to teach someone about something they recognize and care about, rather than something with which they feel no connection and connote no value outside of the classroom.

Student Voice and Choice

Student voices are amplified through podcasting in both the literal and the figurative sense. As a relatively new medium, podcasting as a form is still experimental, with few entrenched formal conventions. The question of right and wrong has less to do with generally-accepted protocol, as it does in classical forms like painting, music composition, and prose, and more to do with the subjective space in which the producer’s work meets their audience. A podcast’s effectiveness is a negotiation between producer and listener, unmediated by any authority so long as it is able to reach the ears of the listener. In this way, students producing podcasts are really free to make choices and, though some choices may be more effective than others, none are wrong. 

The lack of hierarchical authority in the relationship between the producer and the listener can be mirrored in a flattening of the relationship between the teacher and the student. In a setting without correct and incorrect interpretation, the teacher’s role is less in bestowing knowledge on the student and measuring their ability to absorb it, and more a dialogue in which the teacher acts as a thought partner and offers ideas and support to a fellow practitioner with creative agency. This relationship, in which student voice and choice is taken into account as students weigh in on their own education as active participants and creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients, prepares students to value and engage in democratic processes while also taking a more critical view of their social surroundings (Charteris and Smardon, 2019).

Vasudevan (2010) recounts a group project to which children contribute differently but meaningfully from their various interests and specialized skill sets. Their project is a video, but the workflow is not so different from that of a podcast, in which one individual will work at the editing station at a time while others can weigh in on editing choices and every student in the group brings assets to the pool from which the composition is formed. There are many roles on a podcasting team, which adds another layer of choice in the process: participants joining a group may choose not only the subject or approach of their show but also how they as an individual will contribute.

Reflection, Critique, and Revision

One key feature of Project Podcast is the importance of critical listening. Students engaging in several of the video lessons are asked to listen critically to extant podcasts before turning their attention to the lessons they will apply to their own podcasting work. Podcasting is an iterative process, with many shows opting for an episodic structure and seasons. The process of listening closely and improving on the work that came before one’s own, and then improving on one’s own work from iteration to iteration is embedded in podcasting at its most foundational level. The ease and speed of podcast distribution, unlike that of books, recorded music, and other more traditional forms of publication, makes every podcast episode a more formative than summative event. With critical listening and reflection built into Project Podcast, learners engage with a process that is highly transferable to communications work across a wide variety of disciplines. The ability to approach work as both creator and audience, which is what Project Podcast frequently asks learners to do, is a sort of empathy that serves individuals well in any setting.

Public Product

There are few products as public as podcasts. Larmer et al. (2015) suggest that there are three reasons public products are an important feature of Project-Based Learning. First, they motivate students to create high-quality work by raising the stakes of the outcome. Knowing that a show will exist beyond the walls of the classroom instills a further layer of motivation to put one’s best foot forward. Second, they require students to make their learning tangible, and thus, discussible. When students are in a position to both show and discuss their learning, they are no longer in a limited exchange with a teacher but are instead full members of a community of learning. Finally, public products break down the divide between school and the community: they are a way of demonstrating what is going on in the classroom for families and community members who might not otherwise have any way of knowing.

The typical means of distributing a podcast makes it exceptionally accessible. Rather than wait for an open house, the audience can hear it practically instantly upon publication, from anywhere in the world. Students with families living in another city or country can share the same exact work with them that they share with their local family. Further, the product has no expiration date, unlike most public exhibitions, so it lives rent-free on podcast platforms in perpetuity until its creator decides it is time to take it down for whatever reason. The learning is what happens on the way to the creation of the podcast, yet the show serves as an artifact of this learning and its publication is what offers its creator membership in a community of podcasters that exists beyond the walls of the classroom (Vasudevan, 2010). 

Analysis

Having attended to the Project-Based facet of Project Podcast, I now turn to its design elements that make it particularly relevant in classroom settings like the one with which I am most familiar. The class size of this hypothetical classroom is at or near the maximum allowed by state law. The students who spend 45 to 55 minutes here five days per week have limited access to literacy in the digital tools that mediate social connectivity and opportunity, and their school days offer them very few opportunities to express themselves creatively. The following sections outline how Project Podcast is designed in such a way as to make the best of and push back against the limitations of this classroom setting by supporting teachers in offering more individualized attention to learners, providing instruction in digital literacy so that learners can take control of their own narrative, and introducing a creative practice that can take the place of less creativity-affirming work.

Individualized Attention

Project Podcast itself does not offer individualized attention to students, but the video lesson format of the curricular tool allows the teacher in a classroom to operate as if they have a co-teacher engaging in direct instruction. Co-taught classrooms offer greater opportunity for differentiated instruction and individualized attention than classrooms of the same size with only one teacher. Jones and Winters (2024), in the introduction to a paper on the impacts of co-teaching, summarized the literature on class size and reported a general tendency towards improved testing and noncognitive outcomes in smaller classes. Though it has no effect on class size, co-teaching decreases the student-to-teacher ratio in a classroom. It is a common strategy for offering additional instructional support for students with disabilities in inclusive environments, and is in many cases included among the mandated services to which 13.2 percent of students in the US are entitled through Federal law (Jones and Winters, 2024). Though co-teaching connotes special education, it, like many interventions utilized by special education teachers, benefits students without diagnosed disabilities as well. Jones and Winters’s (2024) findings reinforce that test scores among both students with disabilities and those without disabilities improved significantly as a result of attending co-taught classrooms.

Though Project Podcast does not come with a live and in-person co-teacher to help support the classes where it is implemented, it is designed to serve as a pseudo-co-teacher in station teaching, the model of co-teaching in which two teachers facilitate different lessons to small groups of students who rotate through the lessons one after another (Lyon et al., 2021). Each video lesson contains direct instruction and a task much like what a second teacher would implement in a true station teaching lesson. This offers the live and in-person teacher implementing it the opportunity to work more closely with a smaller group of students as if the class size were smaller (Teachey, 2022). It also affords the students the opportunity to learn from a teacher more specialized in audio production while working on tasks related to their podcast. This mirrors, to some extent, the ideal co-teaching partnership between a subject-matter expert and a differentiation expert.

Student Agency

The “digital divide,” whereby individuals with greater technical knowledge of digital technology have greater access to social connectivity and opportunity, is one of many sources of inequity in the US. Gomez, et al. (2014) make the case for the concept of the “digital native” being flawed because individuals acquire and develop their skills in digital technology through exposure at home or in other spaces to which not everyone has access. Thus school, or another, less formal learning space, is an important site for bridging the divide. Pinkard and Austin (2014) introduce the Digital Youth Network learning model, a response to the responsibility of schools to teach digital literacy, and one made all the more pressing by the unequal distribution of resources among schools for children in underserved communities. The model is composed of five key components, including modes of digital media communication, integrated learning spaces, showcase opportunities, artifact-driven curriculum, and skilled mentors (Pinkard and Austin, 2014). 

Project Podcast fits within this model in that it is geared towards teaching students the skills and understandings needed to create podcast episodes, thus it is artifact-driven. These artifacts are meant to be showcased authentically via the same platforms through which the great majority of podcasts are distributed. Audio podcasting may not be a complete expression of the various modes of digital media communication–which are verbal, visual, aural, cinematic, and interactive–all on its own, but it is a strong representation of the synthesis of the verbal and aural modes and thus fits as one of several disciplines that invite instruction and exploration. In approaching the video lessons like direct instruction, I provide some semblance of a skilled mentor, especially when combined with the teacher in the room who could choose to reach out via email for further collaboration. Not to overstate Project Podcast’s potential in serving to advance equity, it is meant to serve ideally as one of a whole array of tools offered to support students in developing digital literacy skills. Project Podcast is not a single solution to the problem of inequitable access to digital literacy, but it is one of many small steps that, in aggregate, could make for a more equitable digital playing field.

I have yet to find a way to speak and write about my experiences in the classroom that feels completely responsible and honest. My first teaching position was at the Gandhi Ashram School, a small school for children between the ages of 5 and 12 near Kalimpong, a city in the Darjeeling Hills of West Bengal. Every student at this school learned a stringed instrument and played in the school’s string orchestra. This was part of the school’s outward facing identity, as was the message that the school served only the poorest of the poor, the children of tenant farmers in Scheduled Castes and Tribes who were supposedly destined for lives of alcoholism and hard day labor without the intervention of the school. Even the inward-facing identity of the school was colored by an inspirational address offered every morning by a rotating cast of teachers in which the common thread was, “Work hard and you will succeed.” My experience of working with the students was nothing like what I might have expected based on what I heard. In between classes, the students would congregate all around the grounds of this school carved into a hillside and laugh, play, sing. This was a place of joy, not just of hard work and fear of poverty, regardless of how the teachers spoke to the students and how the principal spoke to wealthy visitors from European countries. Each and every one of these students was a complex individual with motivations and quirks and preferences, not part of a faceless mass of underprivileged children in need of help. I was in a position to get to know these children as people, and it made it difficult to speak about the school and its students in a way that was on-brand for fundraising purposes.

I found the same to be true at my school in the South Bronx, where my principal’s opening line when discussing the school was invariably, “We are a public school located geographically in the poorest congressional district in the country.” This is true, and it is true that poverty was the greatest challenge I faced while teaching, as my students and I could never fully devote our attention to the self-actualization at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Many, if not all, of the students in a given class were lacking elements from the bottom of the pyramid; yet, poverty could not keep my students from having big, beautiful, complex personalities inexpressible through demographic data alone (Maslow, 1943). This is where podcasting becomes a tool and a practice for pursuing equity. Developing a podcast is both a means of sharing one’s identity, through sharing one’s own story, ideas, and voice, and a process through which one develops their identity further, by trying on various ways of being while preparing scripts and speaking on-mic. Bettina Love (2019) discusses the tendency of education research to “White-splain Black folx’ challenges to White folx” and the shallow and self-indulgent nature of allyship in the pursuit of equity (p. 13). These critiques of the state of schooling in the US resonate with the difficulty I have in speaking or writing about my work in schools. I am not equipped to tell my students’ stories, but they are. Passing the mic to the students and supporting them in telling their own story is the best way I can think of to ensure that the story is honest. 

Creativity-Affirming Work

The role of the arts and creativity in learning experiences is multifaceted. Dewey (1934) suggests that engaging in art cultivates a consciousness of the world in which the artist has agency and the ability to affect change. It calls to question the divisions between the individual and their environment. In Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility (1995), Greene emphasizes that engagement with art inspires people to reach out to one another and “try to live more ardently in the world” (p. 382). Gonzalez Moreno and Molero Jurado (2024) make a case for creativity and social skills being positively correlated with resilience among high school-aged youth. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) writes about optimal experience, the ineffable “moments when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” (p. 3). Creative expression is one of many endeavors with the potential to unlock this flow state.

Gholdy Muhammad (2020) describes the deficit thinking that teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse students often exhibit. In centering unmotivating curriculum and instruction, teachers might confuse the failure of the curriculum for failure in the students. Curriculum encouraging creativity and inquiry-based, student-centered work has been included among best practices for gifted and talented programs for decades (Robinson and Shore, 2006), yet students with less access to resources and advocacy are blamed for the inevitable outcome of the unsuitable curriculum forced on them. Project Podcast centers the student, a compelling question, and the podcast they produce using their own voice and choice, and the product that comes of it introduces the listener to this student through their work, a representation over which they have significantly more control than the tropes in the news and social media.

A podcast is a means of sharing knowledge that invites creativity from its producer and is broadly accessible to appreciation by listeners. Planning, recording, and editing a podcast afford its producer opportunities to settle into a flow state at every step of the process. With time and experience, a producer can visualize scenarios as they might play out, informed from a growing memory bank of antecedent and consequent occurrences. One can shape a story before it ever unfolds, allowing them to plan for the best possible takes and know that they have what they need for the final product before ever sitting down to edit. As one grows more familiar with their recording instruments, the latter become more an extension of the recordist than separate entities, heightening one’s sense of connectedness to their surroundings. The editing stage is especially affirming of optimal experience, with the digital audio workstation allowing the editor to rewrite history, creating perfection through clicks and keystrokes. The heightening of one’s sense of hearing is a practice that spills out into everyday life, with equalization curves and compressor dials materializing across one’s vision as they listen to other producers’ work. Speaking of listening, a well-executed podcast has the potential to keep a listener company through household chores, commuting to and from work, and any other source of tedium in their lives. It can be a way to elevate one’s experience and steal back some time from necessary tasks for those more enjoyable without shirking one’s responsibilities. It can be a means of escape, exposing them to entertainment or understandings they would not otherwise be able to access.

Reflection

One of Project Podcast’s greatest strengths is its flexibility and potential for use alongside other curricular materials. One need not dispense with anything they are already teaching: Project Podcast merely offers additional tools and resources for teachers and learners. As such, it answers questions as to how rather than what, and it does so in a way that is oriented towards inclusion as opposed to exclusion. That said, there are some exclusions that must be identified and, hopefully, in time, rectified. One of the most glaring limitations of Project Podcast is that it is solely in English and is geared more towards high school students and adult learners than middle and elementary school students. The two directions in which I would fundamentally expand Project Podcast would be into other languages and earlier developmental stages. Each of these expansions would require collaboration with an expert in another language or elementary education, respectively, but I would pursue them enthusiastically, as they would increase the reach, accessibility, and efficacy of the tool.

Owing to several factors inherent in the discipline of audio production, Project Podcast is doomed to perpetual incompleteness: thus, I will continue to develop it over time. Throughout the video lessons, I reference technology that is constantly changing over time. Though the equipment referenced is as close to an “industry standard” as exists in the field of audio engineering, there will be new pieces of equipment released at some point in the future that will make the workflows introduced in these videos obsolete. Additionally, software interfaces change more regularly, which makes it possible to date videos based on appearance. This has the effect of undermining a video lesson’s credibility when the subject matter of the lesson is technology.

On a more positive note, making Project Podcast available via YouTube offers a measure of connectivity with viewers through the solicitation of feedback. I have found in creating videos and sharing them via YouTube that the comments can offer insight into how people are engaging with the videos and occasionally someone will share advice that I can use to improve future videos (Gearspace Forum, 2024). The video lessons of Project Podcast will not gather feedback via the comments section, as the videos are designated “made for children” and thus closed for comments, but I will invite feedback from teachers through an email address, projectpodcastofficial@gmail.com. As a perpetually incomplete curricular tool, Project Podcast can grow with the feedback of its viewers and practitioners. Having shared early iterations of Project Podcast with fellow educators and audio storytellers, I gained valuable insight that informed further development of the tool. It was in conversation with an audio storyteller that I first realized the royalty-free sound library would be a useful addition to Project Podcast, as audio storytellers commonly use music from subscription-based libraries that can be costly. Thus, offering a royalty-free library with which to practice would remove a cost impediment from the development of an important skill. The same audio storyteller suggested she would have saved a great deal of time and heartbreak had Project Podcast been around when she began working with audio seven years ago. She found it to be accessible but also thorough. Several music teachers with whom I have shared the project expressed appreciation for the format, as the YouTube videos interface easily enough with Google Classroom but also load quickly via overburdened school wifi bandwidth when compared with videos stored on Google Drive. Every teacher with whom I have conferred about the direction of further video lessons has expressed that scaffolding would be more useful to them than expansion of subject matter into more advanced territory. Thus, new video lessons will focus on recording and editing at a more granular level for newcomers to audio technology.

Conclusion

As Project Podcast continues to expand in response to feedback and changes in the discipline to which it is meant to offer membership to its users, the goal will be to support learners more effectively in creating high quality podcasts. Project Podcast will not address every problem across the full breadth of education. It is a curricular tool with a specific purpose and relatively limited use beyond that purpose, but conceiving of curricular tools in this way allows for a curricular mosaic that affirms pluralism and multiple possible approaches to the same problem. In a place and time threatening that which is multitudinous, the answer may in fact be many answers and the tools that can support those many answers.

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