Pairing Texts and Podcasts: Teaching Scholarship as Conversation in First-Year Seminar

Abstract

This article describes how pairing texts with podcasts helped students in my first-year seminar to enter into scholarly conversations. The experience was noteworthy because, prior to bringing podcasts into the class, my fall 2022 cohort of first-year students went silent during discussions of the assigned readings. Where my usual instructional techniques, such as small group analysis of the text, failed, podcasts succeeded in leading students into lively discussions that contextualized, expanded, and challenged ideas that they had encountered in the academic literature. While this report may be limited to my experience using podcasts in a credit-bearing course to develop understandings of Scholarship as Conversation, I believe that the strategy can be adapted for different scenarios and to advance other information-literacy concepts laid out in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.