Continuing Studies: for Higher Ed Podcasters

So pod club is a play on the idea of a book club, but of course, instead of books as the common text, we used podcasts.

And what we found in that study which really struck us as so different than what we'd seen and what we'd participated in as classroom teachers ourselves, when it comes to book clubs or
article studies or anything like that, our participants seem to relate differently to the ideas that were shared in the podcast episodes than I've ever experienced with printed text.

Welcome to Continuing Studies, a podcast for higher education podcasters to learn and get inspired.

I'm Neil McPhedran, founder of Podium Podcast Company.

And I'm Jennifer-Lee, founder of J Pod Creation.

Podcasting is broadcasting.

We want you to know you're not alone.

In fact, there are many of you higher ed podcasters out there, and we can all learn from each other.

You are right, as always, Jen on that one, and as we like to remind you off the top, please check out HigherEdPods.com
where we are building a directory of higher education podcasts and a community for higher education podcasters.

Jen, we're a little over 900 higher ed pods in the directory now, and we're really trying to get to a thousand in the next month or so.

I think there's a ton more out there that we haven't even uncovered.

That can be,

I know every time I turn a corner, there's like another higher ed podcaster.

There's another network or another event, which is one of the things we're gonna talk about today.

I know.

I'm really excited about that because people are registering for the event as well.

Oh, that event.

Yes.

There's that event, which is the Higher Ed Pod Con.

There's so many.

We're gonna talk about,

But our guest today is talking about another event for higher education podcasters too.

But on the Higher Ed Pod Can, we've got a lot of people registering and we started to get some speaker submissions rolling in, so go check that out as well.

HigherEdPodCon.com and there's more information there and you can register.

But today we're chatting with Dr. Lindsay Persohn.

She is assistant professor in literacy studies at the University of South Florida.

She is co-host as well of a really cool podcast called Classroom Caffeine, and she's pretty much an OG.

She's been hosting and producing podcasting since 2012, and it's really cool how she uses podcasting in her teaching.

And she also is doing academic research around podcasting, so she is a really good one to chat with today.

And she's starting pod clubs.

It's something that is a simple idea like a book club, but it's podcasts.

And I think that's something we're gonna see more and more because it's a way for us to all share knowledge and our stories, which podcasting is all about.

So we're gonna get into that with her.

So let's do it.

Hello Lindsay, thanks for joining us here on Continuing Studies.

Hi, glad to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Wonderful.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

We're so excited to have you.

Because you also are doing a conference in the education space, EPOD, you've been part of it last year.

You're gonna be part of it again this year.

And so we wanted to get to know a little bit more about that.

But before we do that, how did you even get into podcasting?

Sure.

So I host and produce a podcast known as Classroom Caffeine.

The big idea behind it is that it's designed to support the translation of education research into teaching practice.

And the idea for the show really started from my own experience.

I feel like that's where a lot of podcasts begin.

But as I was finishing my doctoral studies, I was supporting a very large public school district's library media services.

And so as I was traveling between about 115 schools across 2200 square miles, I found I had a lot of time to listen, but the job did not
allow me to have a ton of time for reading, reviewing, understanding and putting into action, um, the good work of education research.

So I wanted a podcast that talked a little bit more broadly about how research can inform education.

A lot of the education podcasts that I was able to find focused pretty narrowly, like on one particular research paper, one project, and I wanted
to hear from folks who talked a bit more broadly about their work in education research and kind of what they were learning from a meta level.

And I think the desire to do that really came out of sort of this abundance of research out there.

And you know, if you're just getting started on an education journey, journey in teaching.

How do you take all of that in?

How do you process decades and decades worth of research while you're also doing kind of the day-to-day work of teaching?

So Classroom Caffeine, I ask guests one really key question and that is, what do you want listeners to know about your work?

And so some of them do talk about specific studies, but lots of folks talk across decades of work in the field of education.

And so you get kind of a distillation of ideas with lots of specifics woven into those conversations, and it's also a really storied approach.

I always start with, you know, what moments in education have sort of led you to this work, and it's a great opportunity to get to know experienced
researchers, new researchers, really highly effective teachers, and the work that they do and what they want the world to know about it.

Two things.

Can I just say that first off, the name of the podcast is awesome.

Classroom Caffeine.

Love it.

So clever.

Secondly, and we talk about education as a whole through podcasting, but we never talk about how you structure the questions to engage with the journey
of the people, because everybody loves to ask and hey, I'm guilty of it, but everybody likes to ask, tell us about your journey or tell us about yourself.

What I loved about it is you said right there, what is the education that led you to that research?

I ask about moments in education and it's really cool to hear people's stories because of course, you know what we share is obviously selective.

It's highly selective because it has to be.

So many guests respond that reviewing the questions and preparing for an episode really led them kind of down this memory lane, this journey of thinking about what are the most impactful experiences.

Some of 'em talk about things that happened decades ago in their own schooling experience, or in their beginning teaching or in their beginning path as a researcher.

So it's really neat to hear how those stories intertwine.

And fun fact about the name of the show, it was going to be called Teacher's Ride to Work because it was designed to fit into a teacher's commute.

But then we have this thing called the COVID Pandemic, where no one was riding to work.

And so back to the drawing board on the name of the podcast because it just didn't make sense while no one was in fact riding to work.

So we ended up, we ended up with Classroom Caffeine, and I do love alliteration, so, it works.

The working title also good.

Jen, we need to restructure how we start each of these episodes.

I think I've learned something already.

And what are we, five minutes into this conversation that we can apply to our own podcast here?

This is great.

Well opens it up and like to your point, is it's about the story.

It's about getting them to feel comfortable that they tell you something unique and different.

And that's why we podcast, regardless of what topic you're podcasting on, it's a story.

That's why we're listening.

I'm really interested in how you've incorporated podcasting into your teaching and your course materials and so on.

So let's circle back to EPOD after and just sort of keep going on how you're using podcasting.

I think it's really interesting.

Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure.

Yep.

So, uh, well first of all I'll say I have been fortunate to speak with so many scholars who have been influential in the
field of literacies and, um, including, you know, our textbook authors, the authors of, uh, articles that our students read.

And so what we've done is to embed many episodes of Classroom Caffeine within our coursework.

And what we find is that sometimes it is a substitute for a reading because you know, we're able to give
our students, and I mostly teach pre-service teachers and in-service teachers in their literacy coursework.

So the podcast episodes whenever we use one as sort of a standalone with no readings attached to it, I find
that sometimes it's sort of a just right level of information, particularly for undergraduate students.

We want 'em to understand the gist.

We want 'em to understand the story of the research.

And you know, often we also use podcast episodes to introduce really complex topics.

One example, we have a course on disciplinary literacies in our college, and that is for folks who are
preparing to be teachers, kind of outside of what we might typically think of as like elementary education.

Maybe they're, they're going to be high school teachers or guidance counselors or PE coaches.

And in the state of Florida where I live, they're required to have some of their reading competencies.

So in this course, disciplinary literacies, we talk about what disciplinary literacy is, but it's, it can be a little challenging to sort of wrap your head around exactly what that means.

Like what do you mean by thinking like a historian or the literacies of history and we have a wonderful, very well known guest in the field, Elizabeth Moje, and she talks about this idea.

She talks about how the field even came to be and how we connect with it, and how we can understand what
disciplinary literacy is and how it supports learning, how it supports thinking within the disciplines.

And what we find is that by listening to this podcast episode, our students launch into other readings and viewings
and their work of the course in a very different way than they did before we incorporated the podcast episode.

Like I said, it's a little bit hard to grasp, and the way that Dr. Moje talks about it, it just kind of makes you, you know, oh yeah, yeah.

You know, you're kind of shaking your head and listening along going, well, that makes sense.

That makes total sense.

And it's, because it is a story, it's shared in a way that's very different from what our students took from printed work around the idea of disciplinary literacy.

So we've used it as a replacement for readings.

We've used it as a supplement for readings, and it seems to work very well for an introduction to complex topics.

That's really cool.

I think it's neat because sometimes I know, this is me too, we all have different learning styles and sometimes when we're reading we're not necessarily grasping the content.

Not always.

So like to have that other medium to be like, okay, I've read this and now I can like listen to it and see if it's the same.

We also get feedback from students that they enjoy having something different to engage with rather than just articles and textbook readings.

They appreciate the ease of listening, the ability to multitask.

We know our students are often overwhelmed with their coursework as well as all the rest of life.

So if you can fold your laundry while you're doing your studying, you know, I always say we feed two
birds with one seed and it makes a positive impact on their learning and their engagement in the course.

We were chatting with someone a few episodes ago, and I'm drawing a mind blank who it was, just talking about how evolutionary as humans for millions of years, we've heard oral stories.

Do you think that's part of it a bit as well?

It's just like we somehow just naturally connect with an oral story in a different way than maybe, as Jen was saying, sometimes we struggle a little bit with reading it.

Totally.

Yeah.

I totally think we connect with oral storytelling traditions in a very different way.

You know, I wonder if we maybe connect with it on kind of a genetic level right?

Because, you know, for many, many thousands of years we've told stories as humans.

It's a major way that we communicate, right?

If you think about even, you know, I do a lot of work in the area of children's literature and so much of what we tell children, particularly
a hundred years ago, we tell 'em a story and we admonish them about what to watch out for in the world and how to act and how to behave.

And I think that all those things really resonate with us as humans.

If you think about babies, they start by listening, right?

And so I do think that there's something cellular that we react to whenever we hear stories, rather than trying to process everything through written, visual text.

And I think audio is just a clearer format because when we're texting, I think especially where everyone is today, where everyone's
a little bit more sensitive because lots of things are going on, texting, you have no idea what the tonality is of that text.

And so sometimes people are taking things wrong and I think that can be said for also reading.

Like when you're reading things you might not necessarily get what that author is trying to put across or what they're trying to teach you.

And when you hear someone say it, you actually get to understand.

I mean, that goes back to a theory in education.

Lev Vygotsky told us that it takes many more words in writing to explain what we mean than it does to use kind of all of our senses of listening.

The visual interactions that we see, you know, if we're talking with somebody face to face, their gestures, their body language, and also the tone, the volume of our voices.

We use all of those things to emphasize ideas, to express sarcasm and really to shape a context that it takes many, many more words in writing to get to that point.

Yeah, for sure, so.

Tell us what teacher pod clubs are.

That is really interesting.

What, what are these, what are teacher pod clubs?

Teacher pod clubs are fun.

In the world of education, as in many careers, teachers are given a lot of professional learning and most often it's sort of this one size fits all.

Everybody's gonna study the same thing.

It's something that an administrator somewhere has decided.

We bring everybody into a room, maybe have a guest speaker or whatnot.

Or maybe we have 'em read professional articles or professional books.

The team that I work with around Classroom Caffeine and some of the research that we've done, several summers ago, we piloted
a study with a group of four teachers, who were, they, they were at a very small elementary school, um, in the southeastern US.

And we brought them together, asked them what they wanted to learn about for their professional learning, and then we compiled recommended playlists of podcast episodes for them.

So after each meeting they would get a list with links to two podcast episodes to listen to, and then we brought them back together to discuss what they heard.

So pod club is a play on the idea of a book club, but of course, instead of books as the common text, we used podcasts.

And what we found in that study which really struck us as so different than what we'd seen and what we'd participated in as classroom teachers ourselves, when it comes to book clubs or
article studies or anything like that, our participants seem to relate differently to the ideas that were shared in the podcast episodes than I've ever experienced with printed text.

In particular, so on Classroom Caffeine, we use first names, even though most of the folks I talk with our esteemed doctor
this and doctor that, but we call each other by first names to promote accessibility and relatability to those stories.

So what we found is that our teacher participants in pod clubs, they also referred to the researchers by their first names.

They talked about their work in these highly contextualized kinds of situations that they also very readily related to their own work in education.

So for instance, one of the episodes that we gave that initial group was with a wonderful literacy education researcher, Patricia Edwards, and
she talked about parents as partners in schools, and we heard echoes of her language, I mean direct quotes in the conversations that teachers had.

And it wasn't that they had the text in front of 'em, and they're searching for just the right quote, as we might with a book or an article.

They were quoting from memory and they said, well, Pat said this, you know, and they sort of lay it out in a very, in layman's terms.

And then they started talking about how they were going to apply those ideas in their own school setting.

So what we found is that in pod clubs having that audio text in common, it seemed as though teachers were more readily able to envision how the education research might impact their own environment.

We also found that everybody came to pod clubs having listened to both podcasts in their entirety, which we know is not always the case when it comes to book clubs.

You know, sometimes someone's running in, they've maybe read the preface or they read the first chapter and didn't get to the rest of it.

So that's the other neat thing about podcasts is you know what your time commitment looks like, and if you don't have that amount of time, sometimes you can listen faster.

Whenever I listen to podcasts, I often listen to them at faster than like a 1.0 speed.

It does help to kind of save a little bit of time and condense that message, but it's not for everyone.

I was just going over stats with someone the other day.

It's like people listen to 85% of a podcast, and it doesn't matter if it's a small podcast or a huge podcast, people are more willing to listen to 85%, opposed to a book.

So our goal, our vision is for educators worldwide to engage in this platform to say, here's what I'm thinking about.

Here are the questions I have.

We have four of us act as moderators on that site, and we can say, have you listened to this episode?

May we recommend this episode?

And my real dream would be to also get our podcast past guests involved in pod clubs.

Can you imagine listening to someone who you know is just this worldwide known researcher in education and you pose a question that's related to their field and they're the ones who reply?

That sort of to me would be like the ultimate of our asynchronous online pod club.

So we're in the process of making strategic moves to work towards that goal.

It's really good.

I love it.

It's a great website you've got actually.

So we'll put a link to that in our show notes.

Thank the wonderful Stephanie Branson, who is a friend and colleague at Northern Arizona University.

She's been our webmaster, um, since the start and she volunteers her time.

No, that's great.

Love it.

So you mentioned in your last answer, asynchronous learning.

Can you sort of just unpack that a little bit?

I think that in, it's inherent in what you explained, but it's, it's interesting use of the term.

Yeah.

So we think of it as asynchronous on demand, tailored professional learning that we're able to offer with podcasts.

As I mentioned, sort of a contrast to that scenario I was talking about earlier, where teachers are often invited into a huge room where everybody's gonna learn about the same things.

And we as educators know that that doesn't always meet the needs of teachers.

We push for differentiation for our students, but it's like no one's really thought about how to differentiate learning for teachers.

So asynchronous, meaning you can tap into it at any time, it can be done on your own schedule.

You can dip in and dip out sort of as you please at your leisure or as you need professional support.

So asynchronous, just meaning that we don't all have to be in the same place at the same time.

But instead, we can still interact with each other, we can still engage with other professionals kind of on our own terms.

And I think that that's another, that's another part to this equation.

You know, I've been in education for over 20 years now, and in that time, particularly in the United
States, and particularly in my context in Florida, teacher autonomy has been eroded just again and again.

And so I think one thing that we're looking to do is to build back in some of those autonomous practices where teachers get to decide what they want and how they want to engage because so
often ideas and workflows and professional learning is really done unto teachers, and so we want to ensure that that teachers are also getting what they feel they need and on their own terms.

That's great.

I think that's a really great use of the term.

If I think about some of the podcasts that we work with that are essentially the professor that is really focusing on his or her subject matter, expertise, I've kind of thought
about it as it's a way for them to reach outside of their classroom and teach more broadly than maybe the, the 200 students that they have assigned to them over a semester.

But you've taken it to the next level there as well.

If it's not just reaching outside of the classroom and giving a larger exposure, it's how those people can consume it at their own pace as well, as you've explained there.

So I really like that.

Thank you.

That's our goal.

Yeah, that's good.

So let's swing over to the UK and talk about EPOD.

It's a conference and going to the second year if, am I correct?

And it's education through podcasting?

Yes.

Is the theme of it.

So maybe just give us a little bit of insight into EPOD.

Sure.

So actually last year at the inaugural conference, a doctoral student and research assistant I've worked with for the last several
years, and I actually presented our pilot study on pod clubs and talked about how we are moving into other territory with pod clubs.

So I first learned about EPOD through a book about podcasting.

I was reading it's Ian Cook's book that came out, I think in 2024, maybe the end of 2023, about scholarly podcasting.

And in some of the prefacing material, he mentioned EPOD, and I thought, huh, I've never heard of that before.

So I swam over to their website, and at first I thought, I've missed the deadline, but then I realized.

The uk, they do the date differently than we do in the US.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

Where the day is ahead of the month.

And I still had about a week left to get an abstract submitted.

Leah Berger, that Doc student and Stephanie Branson and I put together a couple of abstracts and sent those in.

Leah and I went together to present not really knowing exactly what to expect.

It's hosted at Morley College by Morley Radio in London at their Waterloo campus.

When we went there, it was such a delightful experience.

It's a fairly intimate conference in that there is time and space to talk with others.

It's also a really diverse group of presenters.

Not only geographically diverse, but also ideas.

'Cause as I mentioned, it's hosted by  Morley Radio.

So there is a lot of sort of technical kinds of production conversations, conversations about how, uh, radio and podcasting are similar or different.

And of course others who are focusing on how we use podcasting to translate research, how we use it in education in a very broad sort of sense.

So not necessarily from the field of education where I come from, but how we can use podcasting for educative purposes.

So it's a really wonderful group of folks.

In fact, I think Leah and I may have been the only ones from the US.

But we had colleagues from Canada and Italy and Australia and all over.

It was really such a wonderful experience.

So wonderful that I wanted to help them organize the conference this year.

So I asked if there was anything I could do to volunteer and have become a part of that organizing committee.

But it's a great opportunity to think about podcasting, to think about not just the quality of what we produce, but also the impact and beyond.

It's a really fun conference and I learned a lot and met some really wonderful people.

One of the really unique things about EPOD is that, and you mentioned it when you're a contributor, but, uh, and you're actually sort of putting forward
almost like a paper, not just a presentation, but do I have it right that the actual presentations are turned into an academic publication of sorts?

Yep.

So the present, everyone who presents is invited to submit a chapter for consideration in a book published by Rutledge.

The first book, it's like conference proceedings, but it's not necessarily framed as conference proceedings.

It's part of a series, and there are, podcasting and education between entertainment and education is the book series that this becomes.

So yeah, everyone who presents is invited to submit a chapter for consideration, which is an awesome opportunity to share work and get that out there.

'Cause I don't know about you all, but we've had a little bit of a rough go of getting some of the work around podcasting published.

Because it seems as though people don't really know what to do with it.

We don't quite know what to call it yet, or where it belongs, where it should be housed, you know, in our information systems.

So yeah, it's really nice to have that kind of direct, direct path to publishing your work based on conference presentations.

Yeah, it's a really wonderful feature of the conference.

That's great.

When you're saying getting published, you mean sort of in the academic world, like what you've just
talked about and podcasting, academia, but also the research you've done around it, so on and so forth.

Right.

I mean, there is no journal dedicated to podcasting, so a lot of times studies around podcasting appear in field specific journals, like work around podcasts and medicine appear in medical journals.

And you know, if you're thinking about something that's more methodological, it might be on the qualitative studies sort of journal.

But there isn't really anything that's specifically dedicated to podcasting.

And so this book series that Rutledge is doing with the support of the EPOD conference is a great opportunity to get things together in one place.

Stephanie Branson, who I mentioned earlier and I did a scoping review of podcasting, particularly in education or how it's been used to educate and yeah, really all over the place.

The field is super scattered.

I mean, we had a lot of conversation about terminology and definition of terms.

Because we don't even always call things by the same name, so it makes it really hard for a field to be cohesive in any way when we're not speaking the same language.

We're not showing each other our work, so to speak, in journals that are familiar to everyone in podcasting.

It's just not that organized.

And then the other half of me says, maybe it shouldn't be, because podcasting is such a transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary
kind of platform that maybe we don't have one place to put that, but sure would make the publication process a little easier.

Yeah.

I mean, not at that deep of a level do we see it, but just at a sort of institutional level, it's amazing how many times we've introduced fellow podcasters to each other at a university.

We're finding there's a lot of podcasters at universities that aren't even sharing best practices, let
alone down to that deeper level that you're talking about, which is research associated to it and so on.

You know, we're trying to build a directory with the higher ed pods, and we've almost got a thousand
higher education podcasts in there now, but it's just incredible, the more we look, the more we find.

And if we could start pulling that together a bit more, and then there's so much more that you're talking about as well, too.

Well, I think it's just podcasting is just still really young.

Like anytime we go to the conference, they say we're only in their first inning compared to traditional media.

A lot of people, I'm at networking events, they're like, oh, I didn't even know that there would be a type of company like yours.

So it's like, I think it's just a lot of people and then some people are like, oh, that's really smart.

I get it.

Podcast is a very buzz word and people feel like they've been inundated with that word since COVID.

And so I think a lot of people are like, it's saturated.

It's actually, it's not, if you look at the studies, but it's just because people are like, oh, podcast, podcast, podcast.

Well, and I think, you know, there's a pretty statistically significant information that tells us that a lot of podcasts don't really live on beyond the first couple of episodes.

So if we say the market is saturated, there are a lot of starts, right?

But there are a lot of dead podcasts out there, that's for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a great segue.

I think one question I'd like to leave our great conversation with is, for those educators, researchers out there considering launching a podcast or even more so
like, starting to use podcasting in their curriculum and their teaching, what advice would you give them based on your own experience of doing this for a while?

So that's actually one of the presentations we're going to share at EPOD.

We're gonna talk with some instructors, professors, about their decision to incorporate podcasts into students learning modules in particular.

So I'll have more to share on that.

But I will say that already we are hearing from colleagues that students appreciate the format.

They appreciate that ability to multitask, that we touched on earlier for those complex topics that are hard to understand on paper.

Or that you don't wanna give your undergrads a 35 page research paper to read when they can get what they need from a podcast.

So it's about expediency of learning, it's about meeting learners where they are.

It's about helping to improve understanding, you know, and podcasts sometimes get some pushback for inaccessibility to anyone who may be deaf or hard of hearing.

But of course now we also have great AI tools that develop pretty decent transcripts.

So you know, most podcasts I feel like have transcripts, and I ,think that's an important thing to look out for for instructors is just what's the accessibility look like?

Does it require your students to download some sort of weird one-off tool or is it something they can get publicly?

I think there's some really good stuff you're unearthing so far and there'll be some other great stuff I'm sure.

We'll make sure all those resources you talked about sort of over the last few minutes, we'll put all that in our show notes too, so there's lots of great stuff you shared here today.

Great.

Thank you so much for coming up.

Thank you.

Yeah, this was great.

Glad to be with you guys.

Thanks for having me,

Jen, that was a great chat.

I really enjoyed talking to Lindsay, I learned a ton, I gotta say.

Especially as we mentioned it when we were chatting, we need to start using that mechanism she uses at the top of all of her interviews.

That just approaches everything so differently.

Yeah, that's something I think about a lot and because of my broadcasting background, and not only that, just like listing a
lot of podcast is I understand it's something that people take a long time to learn sometimes how to structure an interview.

Like if you listen to people that have done it all the time in traditional formats like Oprah, they don't ever ask like, tell us about your journey or whatever.

So you really wanna find a way in that's gonna open the person up.

And when she talks about specifically research people light up and they, they kind of give Lindsay all the facts about their life automatically without her having to be like, tell us about yourself.

So I could nerd out about that because that's something that I try to do with many of the clients we work with.

But maybe we can try it because nothing wrong with tell us about your journey, but everybody does it.

So I like us to be unique.

Anyway, we learned a time ton Lindsay.

It was great episode, and there was a lot of call outs and a lot of things that she mentioned, so we'll put all that into the show notes.

Yeah, so there you go.

Hope to see you at either EPOD or Higher Ed Pod Con in Chicago, and we'll talk to you next time.

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