Annie Blazer's Religious Studies students explore diversity through oral history podcasting

In a Nutshell

Annie Blazer’s Religious Studies course teaches students the power of oral storytelling by analyzing professional podcasts as well as creating and sharing their own. This eLearning Instructable shows you how to create a podcasting assignment by using simple, free tools to record and edit audio software (Audacity) that you can post online as a podcast (Soundcloud). All you need is a computer (Mac or Windows) with a built-in microphone and an internet connection.

Course Description

Religion and American Youth, a COLL100 course offered Fall 2016 with 25 students, focused on the religious beliefs and practices of American youth. Moving from the mainstream to the margins, students critically examined cultural representations of American youth in comparison to lived experiences. COLL 100 courses are about big ideas and here the big idea centered on ambivalence. In exploring religious beliefs and practices, the course continually returned to the idea of ambivalence in exploring the transition from youth to adulthood. Particular attention was paid to how religion contributes to these representations and experiences and predominantly focused on college-aged Americans.

Course and Assignment Objectives

Introduce students to the excitement of scholarly inquiry, and challenge them to think rigorously about important ideas. The storytelling podcast project conveyed the importance of that integration by better connecting the course content to the student work product.
Develop and practice communication skills beyond the written word and into the realms of oral, digital, and multi-media expression.

Assignments

Two large projects in this course built upon each other:

A timed Pechakucha presentation done with a partner. Pechakucha is a timed Slide Presentation format in which students have a total of 20 slides that automatically advance every 20 seconds. Students presented researched they conducted on a campus religious or cultural organization. The presentations were a “pitch” to the class to select their organization as a subject for the second big project of the semester.
A 10-15 minute podcast on one of the selected campus organizations, completed in small groups. Listen to this sample final student project shared with permission from the student(s) involved: Sample Student Project (Note that the sample student project deals with issues surrounding Muslim students on campus and was recorded in Spring 2017 before Muslim students had access to dedicated prayer space, which is now available.)

Lessons Learned

Things that worked well:

Scaffolding the assignments over the course of the semester, such as:
- Podcast listening assignments
- Practice interviews
- Storybuilding assignments
- Only once all these other concepts were in place did they look at the technology for building the podcasts
Having groups work on the podcast assignments together. Partners researched a topic early in the semester and then pitched their podcast ideas to the class.
- Only half of the ideas could be selected.
- A group whose idea didn’t get selected joined another group whose idea was selected to work on the actual podcast assignment together.
- Joining the pairs together helped stimulate more and better ideas and narratives.
The length of the podcasts, 10 minutes, was a good length and gave the students the time they needed to tell their stories without being too long.

Things to think about improving for next time:

Managing student expectations is important at several levels:
- Dr. Blazer is considering changing the title of the course to better reflect the concepts she wants the students to learn. In this case, a title that reflected the two main components of the course, Ambivalence and Communication, might better signal to the students what they should expect.
Explicitly identify for the students the skills they will learn in the course and how these skills are useful to them:
- Interview skills (listening and reacting to answers in order to ask insightful follow up questions)
- Working in groups
- Analytical skills
- Storytelling skills
- Production skills
- Note here that many skills that are valuable for success in college are not necessarily the same skills that will make you successful after college.
Require merged groups to use only new recording. Some students whose original pitch was not selected felt at a disadvantage because the new teammates had a “head start” on recording.
Add a group check-in with the instructor right after the materials are all recorded and the rough draft of the podcast is done. Students actually requested this as well.

Try it Yourself / Tools Used

Read

Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, by Jessica Abel. This text is a great introduction to podcasting, audio storytelling, and everything you need to get started.

Listen

The first step in creating interesting podcasts is listening to interesting podcasts. Have your students listen to and analyze an episode or two. If you can, find podcasts that have to do with the topic of your course. A few good choices:

The History of the World in 100 Objects (most episodes are 10 minutes or less)
RadioLab
This American Life

Record

Download Audacity audio recording and editing software to create your podcast episodes.

Audacity Tutorials: W&M users can access Lynda.com tutorials by logging in to the service through Swem Library’s login page here: http://www.wm.edu/training/lynda. Once logged in, you can visit the specific Audacity tutorials here

Host

Soundcloud is a free Podcasting and Audio Streaming web service that allows students up to 3 hours of recording space. Audio uploaded to Soundcloud is easily shared and embedded in other websites.

Visit http://soundcloud.com to learn more or create an account.

Shared Resources

Below are resources developed by Dr. Blazer for her course. If these are useful to you, she would be glad to hear how you’re using them or incorporating them into your own teaching.

RELG100 syllabus.pdf

RELG 100 Syllabus

blazer-podcast-assignment-timeline.pdf

Assignment Timeline

blazer-podcast-rubric.pdf

Grading Rubric

Podcast_MSA.mp3

Sample Project

About Annie Blazer

Annie Blazer is an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her courses cover religion in America from the colonial to contemporary period. In particular, Dr. Blazer’s courses investigate the relationship between religion and popular culture, paying attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality.

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