Learning Race and Learning Podcast Talk: The Usefulness of Podcast Production in Race Courses

• In Event: Visual and Audio-Based Media as a Research Technique to Explore Issues of Equity and Social Justice

Abstract

Race is difficult for students – especially white students – to discuss in higher education classrooms (Author, 2018). Techniques for encouraging engagement on issues of race and racism are varied but generally focus on prioritizing “safety” from confrontation on their views, or “bravery” awarded by even basic participation in the discussion. Both approaches absolve white students of responsibility for racist ideologies and discuss racism in passive, abstract terms. Blueprints for how to reconcile these difficulties in the classroom are diffuse, many dependent on traditional pedagogy. Instead, student-developed and produced podcasts ask students to engage with issues of race and racism conversationally, informed by course materials, but happening outside of the classroom walls.

This approach, because it is in a format with which students may be unfamiliar, challenges students’ expectations, and limits their ability to avoid participation in discussions on these issues (Author, 2019). While initially disconcerting, in this demonstration I will examine how well podcasts encourage frank, but informed and respectful, discussions that are hard to foster in the physical classroom. Publishing these podcasts on public podcasting platforms like Apple, Spotify, and Soundcloud, and advertising podcast episodes on social media raises the stakes in student development that encourages skill-building, rather than avoidance, among students. The use of podcast development as a pedagogical tool in higher education classrooms teaches students how to engage in public discourse in different settings and challenges them to better understand the origins of their race-based ideologies and the impacts on real people, often the very students with which they are recording.

Author

• Jasmine Harris, University of Texas, San Antonio