Teaching Podcasts in the Secondary ELA Classroom: Challenges and Opportunities

Podcasts and podcasting projects are increasingly used in high schools as a means to engage students with screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating, and eye-opening content. They also work at enhancing teaching no matter the learning experience, including: remote, in-person, flipped, hybrid and blended. Since the pandemic, the need to engage students has only increased. As an NEIU student working towards a Master of Arts in Secondary Education, and a recipient of the Research and Creative Activities assistantship, I enrolled in Edie Rubinowitz’s podcast class to learn the nuts and bolts of podcast production. In this class, not only did I learn the work of the very medium I wanted to teach, I began to see how incredibly radical it was – anybody with a recorder could tell their story. It was with this excitement that I began to implement a podcast curriculum in a local Chicago High School in the spring semester of 2023. In this presentation, I describe my implementation of a podcast curriculum and the revisions that curriculum underwent in our course team meetings and in my classroom teaching. The goal of my research is to describe how podcast curricula can support student engagement, bring historical texts and real world events to life, and create opportunities for students to express their “hidden” identities as writers and storytellers. I have discovered opportunities for integrating audio and non-audio texts together that have made the curriculum relevant and purposeful beyond the classroom. This is what I want to share