Producing Political Knowledge: Students as Podcasters in the Political Science Classroom

Abstract

Given the increasing prevalence of podcast listening, especially among young adults with college education, it is important to consider how student-produced podcasts can impact the student experience in the classroom, contribute to a more participatory course, and help achieve learning objectives. To engage these issues, this article reflects on the podcast assignment completed by five courses of students, three introductory American Politics classes and two Political Ideologies classes. This article seeks to examine how podcasts can work as a tool for students to research, analyze, synthesize, and present political information in a specific pedagogical and rhetorical setting; in the course of doing so, students become actively engaged with the audio public political sphere. I focus on assignment design, learning objectives, and my own pedagogical reflections in order to reach some tentative ideas about the pedagogical potential of podcasts in the political science classroom.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• political learning
• technology
• podcasting

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Joanna Tice Jen and the participants of the Virtual Enhanced Classroom track at the 2017 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The critical and constructive feedback from anonymous reviewers and the editor of the Political Science Instruction section of the Journal of Political Science Education have substantially improved the manuscript. Jedidiah Rex at Beloit College and John Locke at SUNY Plattsburgh have been essential to this assignment; they have led workshops with students, provided resources, and enthusiastically discussed the assignments. Most of all, I thank my students for their thought, enthusiasm, wit, and overall engagement with the assignments discussed in the manuscript.

Notes

1 For the Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semesters, I was teaching at Beloit College, a small liberal arts college in Southern Wisconsin. The later semesters involve courses at SUNY Plattsburgh, a comprehensive public college in upstate New York. That the assignment was mostly successful at two different kinds of institutions is an indicator of its pedagogical potential.

2 The assignment and learning objectives for earlier versions of the project are similar.

3 Susan Summers Raines (2003, 432) describes active learning as strategies that shift the instructor “from the role of ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side,’” with the objective of “creat[ing] a lesson plan that maximizes student learning, encourages critical thinking, aids information retention, and allows students to apply key concepts and knowledge gained through readings and lecture to real (or realistic) problems.” For a sampling of analyses of implementing active learning strategies in the political science classroom, see Archer and Miller 2011; Clark et al. 2017; Glazier 2011; Murphy 2007; Omelicheva and Avdeyeva 2008; and Perry and Robichaud 2019. For an overview of active learning strategies, see Rutherford 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John McMahon

John McMahon is Assistant Professor of Political Science at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he teaches courses in political theory and American politics. His research interests include modern and contemporary political theory, the politics of emotion, feminist thought, Black political thought, and political theories of work and labor. His work has appeared in Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, and New Political Science, among other journals. He is also a cohost of the Always Already Podcast, a critical theory and political theory podcast.