On Inclusive Design

Learner-created podcast assignments can be ableist and exclusionary on a number of fronts beyond simply access to equipment. Carefully considering ways to centre accessibility can both anticipate the needs of learners and establish an inclusive classroom as well as enhance the assignment itself.

Podcasting privileges the sensory experience of hearing, auditory processing, and information visualization. Learners who have difficulty hearing or who are deaf or culturally deaf will feel excluded by a learner-created podcast assignment that has taken for granted the sensory abilities of learners.

In addition, podcasting draws on listeners' ability to process and retain auditory information, which often calls upon the cognitive ability to visualize. Learners with less access to these cognitive resources, for instance those with aphantasia, will find a podcasting assignment challenging.

Like many other multimodal projects, learner-created podcasts are embodied in ways not typical of traditional print-based school assignments. The sound of one's voice produces a mental image of the person, including assumptions about their appearance, gender, sexual identity, race, location, and cultural roots, and these assumptions activate listener bias. Podcasters who are female, LGBTQ+, or who speak English with an accent report a high incidence of critical and even threatening listener feedback. How might a classroom-based learner created podcast respond to and neutralize the ways it makes some learners particularly vulnerable?

Also, assignments with which students are unfamiliar pose unique challenges because students can't predict the process of their invention. Their ability to break an assignment into steps, to know a productive ordering of those steps, or to anticipate the amount of time and effort required by each step is limited. This can cause some students great stress and anxiety.