Discourses
The Challenge:
Connect students with professionals or members of the community of practice relevant to their program of study and/or future career path to record a podcast conversation about an authentic question, topic, etc.
Identify discipline/professional-specific concerns. Make sure that those concerns inform the content and presentation of the material. Conduct pre-interviews with professionals.
Students draw upon past life experiences as they construct new meaning and perceive their present college experiences as they strive to forge a new identity within a specific discipline, career path, and ways of engaging in "capital D" Discourses (Gee, 2015) within specific communities of practice (Eisner, 1979).
By facilitating student engagement with professionals currently working in industries and roles relevant to their program of study, they can begin to assume these identities of practice and "talk the talk" for authentic purposes (Norsworthy & Herndon, 2020). Podcasting across digitally-mediated or networked spaces can be especially helpful for college students during times when face-to-face interactions are not possible as they find their place and a feeling of association within their future profession or discipline (Bjorkland, Jr. et al., 2020).
Bjorkland, Jr., P., Daly, A. J., Ambrose, R., & van Es, E. A. (2020). Connections and capacity: An exploration of preservice teachers’ sense of belonging, social networks, and self-efficacy in three teacher education programs. AERA Open, 6(1), 1-14.
Eisner, E. W. (1979). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
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.
Norsworthy, C., & Herndon, K. (2020). Leading by ear: Podcasting as an educational leadership tool. Journal of Leadership Education, 19(3), 61–68.