Authentic Audience

The Challenge:

Design a concept map with students in one of your courses to identify authentic audiences to whom they could share their podcasts.

  • Identify groups that would want such content or would find it useful.

  • Explore different ways of connecting with those audiences. Podcasting is a mode of communication and presentation, but how might students help audiences find their podcast?

Learning is a social endeavor. Rather than assigning students derivative essays and activities that nobody will ever see, engage them in podcasting for an authentic audience, truly participating in the discourses of your discipline (Gee, 2015).

We shift between different identities and ways of using language depending on the demands of a particular context and ways of making and communicating meaning (Gee, 2014). Leveraging the affordances of digital technologies and online communities of engagement, such as podcasting, can help course instructors more readily broker connections for students with authentic audiences (Ito et al., 2020).

Gee, J. P. (2014). Decontextualized language: A problem, not a solution. International Multilingual Research Journal, 8(1), 9-23.

Gee, J. P. (2015). Discourse, small-d, big D. In K. Tracy, T. Sandel, & C. Ilie (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of language and social interaction (1-5). Wiley-Blackwell.

Ito, M., Arum, R., Conley, D., Guttiérez, K., Kirshner, B., Livingstone, S., . . . Watkins. S. C. (2020). The connected learning research network: Reflections on a decade of engaged scholarship [Report]. Connected Learning Alliance. https://clalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CLRN_Report.pdf