My approach to using podcasts in composition classes was influenced by several factors: my own binge-consumption of the first season of Serial<\/i>, the growing momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, campus programs linked to a year-long exploration of Muslim identity in America, and a desire to have students consider audience more deeply in their research and writing process. The season of theatre and performance programming at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center was part of the Beyond Sacred: Unthinking Muslim Identity<\/i> grant, from the Association for Performing Arts Presenters. I felt that productive intersections on exclusion in the United States could be drawn between campus happenings connected to the grant, and the larger, national political moment. My aim was to facilitate student engagement in their own areas of interest in terms of social issues and activism, while immersing them in a variety of research and writing processes. By providing students with a platform for exploring forms of exclusion or injustice, I also hoped to expose all<\/i> of us to the different and varying political interests and life experiences among us. Addressing the issues facing particular groups of people requires that students acknowledge human differences in the face of oppression. Audre Lorde points out that a \u201cprofit economy\u2026needs outsiders as surplus people,\u201d and thus \u201cwe have all <\/i>been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing.\u201d Instead, we must \u201crecognize those differences,\u201d as Lorde suggests, which will in turn enable us to \u201cexamine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation\u201d (115). Asking students to research and present on a social or political cause that they find compelling\u2014whether they find it directly applicable to their own circumstances or not\u2014encourages them to examine stories about human difference and share them with others.<\/p>\n
The concept of an \u201caudience\u201d in composition is particularly important (as well as being one of the objectives set for the ENG 101 course at LaGuardia Community College). Often, research papers are written in a vacuum, with the only exchange of ideas happening between student and professor (and a handful of peer editors along the way). Most writing in a range of occupations, however, assumes a particular audience: even we, as scholars, or teachers, write for our peers and colleagues. Why then should students write solely for their instructors? By devising multimodal and digital projects that are designed for a larger reach, we can encourage students to not only envision an audience, but to write and research specifically with an audience in mind: an audience that moves beyond the limited confines of the student-to-professor exchange. This awareness of audience necessitates that students articulate and meet a range of demands and skills: the purpose of writing, the possible diverse interests and backgrounds of their audience, the rhetorical methods they will deploy, how they will \u201chook\u201d their audience, and accessibility of the product. Cynthia Selfe advocates for multimodal learning, arguing that, \u201cwhen we limit our understanding of composing and our teaching to composition to a single modality, when we focus on print alone\u2026we ensure that instruction is less accessible to a wide range of learners, and we constrain students\u2019 ability to succeed\u201d (137). More modalities, she believes, allow us to \u201cexpand the field of play for students with different learning styles and different ways of reflecting upon the world,\u201d and better prepare them for the \u201cchanging set of communicative needs in a globalized world\u201d (137). The end result of a multimodal project like a podcast also generates an easily shareable project, enabling an environment where students become a community of listeners and responders to one another. Of course, that is not to say that students cannot become a community via peer editing or discussion groups, but my students tend to display greater eagerness to listen to several podcasts than read several papers.<\/p>\n
When deployed as the end product\u2014and as an object of study\u2014in a composition classroom, podcasts can demand a range of strategies and instructional practices that tap into the skills listed just above, and present opportunities for scaffolding writing and research skills. Podcasts are also affordable for students to make, and do not require very expensive digital tools or advanced technical training: my students executed their podcasts with smartphones for recording audio, and used the open source program Audacity (with many instructional videos available via YouTube: a round-up of the ones my students found most useful is linked here<\/a>, which includes a good overview on basic <\/a>editing<\/a> in Audacity<\/a> as part of the CNET \u201cHow To\u201d series). While the sound quality was quite obviously not as high as more expensive equipment would yield, the podcasts produced were audible and easily shared among students.<\/p>\n As a way into the course, I elected to delve into the historical roots of exclusion in the U.S. In the wake of Ferguson, an exploration of how \u201crace\u201d and \u201cethnicity\u201d are constructed and then reified provided a timely case study for our initial class discussions. For instance, an early session in the semester focused on building context and connections, and providing students the broad strokes of the history of lynching.\u00a0 After watching\/listening to Billie Holiday\u2019s \u201cStrange Fruit,\u201d students also read Mat Johnson\u2019s graphic novel Incognegro<\/i>, about a black reporter in the 1920s who can \u201cpass\u201d and goes undercover in the South: he reports back on the lynchings and violence he witnesses to the Harlem newspaper he works for. In addition, students listened to a Radio Diaries<\/i>\u2019 podcast that was a recovered oral history of a lynching (and included a survivor). We discussed the various forms of media; the multiple messages, stories, and voices captured in each instance; and drew connections between artistic renderings and historical realities.<\/p>\n But, ultimately, the aim was for students to assert their own agency: by considering their own potential audiences, defining their areas of interest, and exposing their listeners to a particular argument they wished to make. To scaffold this process, I found Kristin L. Arola, Jennifer Sheppard, and Cheryl E. Ball\u2019s Writer\/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects<\/i> and Anne Frances Wysocki and Dennis A. Lynch\u2019s Compose, Design, Advocate<\/i> to be helpful. These two texts advise students through the reading, research, and writing processes; both texts also orient students towards an awareness of their audience, and ask them to consider the practical applications of their research and writing. For instance, Wysocki and Lynch ask students to craft a statement of purpose, wherein they \u201ctie purposes, audiences, and contexts together, see how they interrelate, and suggest concrete choices for production\u201d (32). The textbooks facilitated inquiry into a topic and a deeper consideration of audience, providing models of student work and detailed questions to guide students through the process.<\/p>\n During the course, each student recorded two podcasts. These recordings could be done collaboratively, or as solo endeavors, but the second built upon the first, in terms of skills and\u2014potentially\u2014content. The first recording was a \u201criff\u201d podcast, where students mulled over and responded to texts and media we had encountered thus far in class together. The \u201criff\u201d podcast might not necessarily posit an argument: students could use this as way of reflecting and making connections, without making an explicit claim per se. To help prepare them for the initial recording, students developed a written design plan, which included a statement of purpose, and a research narrative with talking points. This assignment asked students to articulate clearly what they intended to explore (the topic\/theme), and to choose texts that we shared in common that were most appropriate for their \u201criff.\u201d In addition, students clearly had to set up quotes and references for their listeners, since the visual cues would not be in place due to the change of medium: this was a very efficient way to highlight both citation practices and the introduction of textual evidence. Because we were drawing on shared texts, students were better able to advise one another on their choices during the peer-editing process. I recorded an example with colleague Naomi Stubbs as a model, and executed a written design plan\u00a0as well.\u00a0 The reader can listen to our model podcast linked here<\/a>. These models served as a point of reference, and offered yet another potential podcast format for them to consider: a \u201cchat\u201d that was perhaps more informal in nature than some of the prior recordings we encountered. The \u201criff\u201d podcast also gave students an opportunity to play with the digital tools required to execute the project, and acquainted them with the research and writing process. The audience for the first podcast was their own section of 101, along with another section I was running during the same semester. Students deposited their \u201criffs\u201d into a Dropbox folder shared between the classes. They were asked to listen to at least two or three other podcasts in preparation for the midterm, where they responded to the products, reflecting upon the analyses offered and making broader connections.<\/p>\n The second podcast had to include at least one interview subject, and had to be explicitly argument-driven. The impetus for including an interview subject was three-fold: to encourage engagement with a member of the community; for students to identify a subject and justify (in the design plan) the subject\u2019s \u201cexpertise\u201d or unique qualifications to speak to this issue; and to encourage students to approach their subjects with a developed and carefully considered list of questions. Students devised a research topic\/question, and pitched their statement of purpose to their composition peers orally during one class session. The pitch was suggested in Writer\/Designer<\/i>, though the pitch proposed in the textbook is more in the spirit of an \u201celevator speech\u201d and a means of \u201cconvincing audience members that\u2026you know what you are talking about;\u201d our pitches, however, also served to point out gaps and solicit further input and sources (55). Students used it as an opportunity to get feedback, narrow the scope of their project, and\/or receive suggestions on how they might need to provide more background for the audience before launching into the interview. The statement of purpose additionally included their intended audience, the best\/worst outcomes, their personal connection to the topic, and their thesis. After receiving feedback, they completed this initial part of the design plan and moved on to the next steps: showing how they were going to deploy the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos; developing their research narrative; and identifying the aforementioned interview subjects and questions. This entire design plan was completed before they began recording. I created a Prezi<\/a> to walk students through the process and give them a sense of the overall shape of the project before we went through the various stages.<\/p>\n The range of products was impressive and spoke to the many and diverse interests and concerns held by students. One student explored standardized testing, after helping her child prepare for a high-stakes standardized test. Another focused on broken-windows policing, and interviewed a criminal justice professor at the college; this \u201cclassist and racist policing\u2026has been devastating for our community,\u201d the student claimed in her design plan and podcast linked here<\/a>. A particularly effective podcast looked at the lack of resources for single parents (especially mothers) who are enrolling in college classes, interviewing both fellow students and staff at the college. The student said she \u201cstrongly believes\u2026an improvement in these programs is necessary and that it will help more single mother students that will eventually finish their degree;\u201d she went on to discuss statistics on the lack of programs and college drop-out rates, along with available initiatives and programs in the plan and in her podcast. Others used talking points and findings arrived at in their initial podcasts as jumping off points to explore issues like misogyny, colorism, or Islamophobia more deeply. Many students pointed out the personal nature of their work: \u201cmy motivation for this\u2026stemmed from the fact that I am a Muslim and have personally felt discriminated against on a number of occasions,\u201d one student revealed, before interviewing friends and family about \u201cliving in America before 9\/11, directly after 9\/11 and how they feel now.\u201d This particular student hoped to push back against media portrayals, and move beyond the limited or biased representations others might have \u201cheard, seen and read on television and\/or minor articles.\u201d Another student focused on immigration, particularly looking at the issues facing the Mexican community; though he was legally safe and protected, he worried about the status of other members in his community, especially when deportation could tear families apart: \u201cthese undocumented parents help build the\u00a0economy\u2026[and] they have built a new life in the U.S.\u201d In his podcast, this student also focused on the effects on children\u2019s mental and emotional health if their parents are deported.<\/p>\n Our original plan was to share these final podcasts with an even wider audience; however, several students did their podcasts on immigration, and even after utilizing the voice-altering functions in Audacity, students were anxious about protecting undocumented interview subjects. Though we made this another inter-class exchange (and thus left it in a semi-closed forum), the sharing was productive, and students responded to each other\u2019s podcasts as part of their final reflection for the class. The podcast-generating process laid bare some of the fundamental components of research and writing that we attempt to instill in students: carefully choosing, justifying, and explaining research sources; identifying experts and relevant sources (even if the experts, in some cases, were identified via their backgrounds and experiences, rather than their educational or occupational credentials); careful planning; the inherent process-oriented nature of writing and research; and writing with a particular audience and objective in mind. By asking students to position themselves as advocates for a particular social\/political cause, they were encouraged to draw upon their own experiences and the community around them, instilling a sense of agency and revealing how the personal is always political.<\/p>\n Arola, Kristin L., Jennifer Sheppard, and Cheryl E. Ball. Writer\/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects. <\/i>Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 2014.<\/p>\n CNET. \u201cHow To – Edit Your Podcast Using Audacity.\u201d YouTube,<\/i> uploaded 5 June 2014, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uAyF-i604Hs&feature=youtu.be.<\/p>\n Johnson, Mat. Incognegro. <\/i>Vertigo, 2008.<\/p>\n Koenig, Sarah.\u00a0 Serial.<\/i> WBEZ Chicago, 2014, https:\/\/serialpodcast.org\/<\/a>.\u00a0 Accessed 1 April 2017.<\/p>\n Lorde, Audre. \u201cAge, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.\u201d Sister Outsider<\/i>. The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 114-123.<\/p>\n Selfe, Cynthia L. \u201cThe Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.\u201d Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook<\/i>, edited by Claire Lutkewitte, Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 2014, pp. 113-149.<\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/b><\/h5>\n