Podcasting as Pedagogy in the Classroom with Dr. Jasmine Harris

Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month on Amplified, we’re sharing an excerpt of a conversation between Dr. Jasmine Harris and Dr. Hannah McGregor. They discuss their contributions to Podcast Studies: Practice Into Theory, and the role of podcasting as a pedagogical tool in the classroom as a way of moving towards increased equity in higher education.

• Transcript

  [00:00:00] [Theme music plays underneath]

  Natalie Dusek 0:00
  Welcome to Amplified: an audio blog, a podcast, about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. I’m Natalie Dusek, Amplify’s project assistant, and today we’re sharing an excerpt from a conversation between Hannah McGregor and Jasmine Harris. This excerpt comes from a full episode of The Podcast Studies Podcast, so if you like today’s episode, you can listen to the full session over there. Jasmine and Hannah discuss their contributions to the volume Podcast Studies: Practice Into Theory, and specifically Jasmine’s use of podcasting as a teaching method to challenge traditional academic structures and create more inclusive learning spaces. The discussion highlights how traditional academic approaches often center whiteness and exclude diverse voices, and how podcasting can be a tool to disrupt those traditional pedagogical methods. Thanks for being here.

  Hannah McGregor 0:02
  So we’re here to talk about our respective contributions to Podcast Studies: Rractice into Theory, edited by Lori Beckstead and Dario Llinares. And I thought we could start off by just very briefly explaining what our articles are about. So Jasmine, could you start us off, maybe summarize your contribution to the volume. Tell us who you are, a little bit what yourcontribution to the volume is, and sort of how that fits into your work more generally.

  Jasmine Harris 0:34
  Yeah. So I’m Jasmine Harris. I am currently the department chair of Africana Studies at Metropolitan State University. When I wrote this chapter, I was the Program Coordinator of African American Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. And my chapter is a very sort of practical pedagogical one. The title is Rethinking Knowledge and Becoming Podcasters. colon, there’s always a colon,

  Hannah McGregor 1:05
  Gotta be a colon [laughs]

  Jasmine Harris 1:05
  Right? [laughs] Otherwise, it’s not a title. Three assignments as Pedagogical Tools to Decolonize College Classrooms and and I meant this to be a practical pedagogical sort of exploration of the ways that we can effectively use podcasts as a tool in the classroom to create environments of equity and to try to move beyond the various of colonial approaches that most of us take to pedagogy in higher education, because we’ve rarely received any training, and so we’re just mimicking and repeating our own experiences as students. And that means that our classrooms are oftentimes very colonial without even understanding, you know, how we are perpetuating some of those ideologies, and focuses around learning and evaluation and assessment in the classroom. So this, you know, paper talks a little bit about theoretical approach to that I use a lot of Patricia Hill Collins, she wrote a book in 2009 that I don’t see enough people quoting, actually. You know, everyone goes to Black feminist thought, but I thought that this was excellent as well. Um, it’s called Different Kind of Public Education, and I use it as the foundation for a lot of my research, which is really about the experiences of Black people in historically white serving spaces and colleges and universities being one of those spaces. And one of the things that Collins says right at the beginning of this book, and it’s sort of foundational to her argument throughout the book, is that classrooms are where we create citizens in the United States, and not in a technical way, right,

  Hannah McGregor 1:08
  [Laughs] not in a legal sense,

  Jasmine Harris 3:05
  Right, not in a legal sense, but in the sense that we teach. You know who belongs and who doesn’t belong by the way we teach, what we teach, who we gravitate towards as students when we teach, and because all of those things have market whiteness as the default, that means that when you are talking about students of color in the classroom, that they are instantly and inherently not citizens and don’t belong. And so how can something that I am constantly thinking about as a as a professor but also as a researcher, is and you know, and someone who does a lot of service for Black students on historically white serving campuses. But what can we do to strip away some of those expectations and understandings of language, of learning, of knowledge production that are particularly centered around whiteness and so this chapter really just provides an example of how you might as a faculty member, sort of think through those things, and uses podcasting as one example of a way to walk through your pedagogical approaches in the classroom to try to create something different.

  Hannah McGregor 4:42
  Yeah, I love that so much. I was so drawn to your piece when I read it, for a variety of reasons, including that sort of one of one of my soap boxes, in my own position, is trying to convince people you can’t evaluate students on skills that you’re not teaching them just this very simple thing [laughs].

  Jasmine Harris 5:00
  [Laughs} Right?

  Hannah McGregor 5:00
  Like you can’t grade writing if you’re not teaching writing, right? Because if you’re not teaching writing, and then you grade writing, what you’re doing is grading students for how wealthy they are, like

  Jasmine Harris 5:11
  Exactly.

  Hannah McGregor 5:12
  It’s grading them for the life that came before they entered your classroom.

  Jasmine Harris 5:17
  All of that cultural capital, right?

  Hannah McGregor 5:19
  100% and all of this sort of, these tacit structures in the classroom, these notions, these undefined notions of rigor, of scholarly excellence, of you know, what we think a university student should be like or look like or act like like, those are all such profoundly racialized and classed forms of policing, access to, you know, the world that the university hypothetically opens up for students, right? But, you know, people are so attached to, I guess, to just keep, keeping doing what they’ve always done, yeah,

  Jasmine Harris 6:00
  Well, and you know, it’s so interesting because we make faculty take all these implicit bias trainings, right? And we’re constantly sort of talking about stereotypes. But I think that when it comes to pedagogy, because of the way we are socialized in higher education, as though what we are learning, what we are researching, is social fact that will live beyond the context of the moment. And that’s so wrong, right? When I was in graduate school, you know, taking, I’m a sociologist, so I was in a sociology program and taking contemporary social theory. And one thing that they the professor, but also sort of sociology as a discipline, really hammered home to us in classes like this, was that the forefathers of American sociology come from the Chicago school, right the University of Chicago sociology department that was formed and became popular in the mid to late 1920s and then really sort of take center stage in the 50s with Talcott Parsons and who I hate, but and others.

  Hannah McGregor 6:12
  I’ve never heard of him, but I’m ready to hate him

  Jasmine Harris 7:24
  Ugh awful. And I remember, you know, reading all of these theories, like Talcott Parsons and being like, oh, you know, this feels so bland, right? And and and white centric. And it wasn’t until maybe 10 years ago, because this didn’t happen until 10 years ago that I started reading and learning about W.E.B. Du Bois and his team of sociologists and sociology faculty at Atlanta University, which is now split into Atlanta Clark University and Morehouse Spellman, those used to be one institution in the early 1900s before the Chicago school was established. Right and W.E.B. Du Bois publishes the Philadelphia Negro in 1899 it’s a 600 page mixed methodological, you know, sociological tome that the Chicago school methods The Chicago School won’t use for 30 more years, right? But that work was largely ignored. And so I bring up all of this to say that in higher education, the one place where it’s always difficult for us to acknowledge bias and stereotypes is in our pedagogy because of the way that we’re trained, because of the culture of graduate school that teaches us, well, these are the forefathers, and that’s it, right? There’s not like additional conversation to be had, lest you not pass, you know, social theory, and you need to pass that class because it’s a requirement. And so then we get into the classroom and we say, well, I’m teaching Introduction to Sociology. I have to introduce these people as the forefathers of American Sociological thinking. And that, one removes all of the people of color that were doing this work before, but two, whitens your classroom and your pedagogy, I think, in a way that a lot of academics are afraid to, ashamed to, cannot, you know, because it’s not conscious admit to, and that that means that it’s a much bigger struggle for us to encourage them to make some of these shifts, right? You have to be willing to see that and to separate yourself from it, right? This is the way that I was trained. So that’s what I understood. I see now where that is, you know, creating borders and boundaries around thought production and knowledge production that don’t work for all of my students, but it takes a lot to get faculty there.

  Hannah McGregor 8:10
  100%, and a lot of unlearning and a lot of vulnerability and a willingness to move yourself out of that center of sort of unquestioned expertise and authority within the space of the classroom and and that’s, um, that’s stuff that a lot of people don’t want to let go of

  Jasmine Harris 10:21
  Right.

  Hannah McGregor 10:22
  In your own piece, you point out that students unfamiliarity with podcasting can actually be a benefit that, like the average undergraduate actually isn’t a big podcast listener, and so they come into your classroom like maybe not really knowing the medium at all, and so without a bunch of pre existing baggage about, like, what a podcast is supposed to sound like. So could you talk a little bit about, sort of, in your teaching practice, how unfamiliarity and, like, the strangeness of a medium people aren’t familiar with actually becomes a useful tool?

  Jasmine Harris 11:00
  Yeah, first of all, that was sort of a shock to me when I first started trying to introduce podcasts into my classrooms back in 2015 so I’ve been doing this for about a decade now. I really loved them, and I think I was a little bit disillusioned about how close generationally

  Hannah McGregor 11:19
  [Laughs]

  Jasmine Harris 11:19
  I was to my students at that point that I was like, of course, I listen to podcasts, you should know. And so the

  Hannah McGregor 11:26
  Hello fellow youths [laughs]

  Jasmine Harris 11:27
  [Laughs] Right? We’re all youth here. We all do this, right? And, you know, I was, I was sadly mistaken, right? And I realized that I needed to take a step back and introduce the medium. And in doing so, I was able to shape their understanding of what knowledge is in this context in ways that I might not have been able to do if they had already come into it, sort of fully formed podcast listeners with a list of their favorites. And that’s not to say that most students have never listened to a podcast. They certainly have, but they’re not, you know, as well versed in it as as I expected them to be, but that the other thing that’s really good about that is that it allows for one a sigh of relief, right? I think that when students see a syllabus that isn’t full of academic articles or books, right, they’re like, oh, it’s just listening that I can do, right? And so you already have them on board in a certain kind of way, but it also allows them to expand how they think about where they fit into these conversations and what kinds of contributions to the conversations are useful, right where, oftentimes in higher education classrooms, especially and especially with, you know, students from minoritized populations, you will see a hesitancy to participate in class discussion, to answer, you know, big rhetorical questions that the professor asks at the beginning of class, because there is a fear of participating in the wrong way. And that when you take away that sort of haughtiness of the typical kinds of of things that we assign and instead introduce them to something, a medium that is in a lot of ways, completely new to them. They are more at ease, and they are more willing to become knowledge producers in a different way than I think we we try to sort of force them to be in a more traditional classroom. I remember, you know, in 2015 asking for this internal grant to to buy podcasting equipment. That’s how far away we were technologically in 2015 right? You still really needed mics. And, you know, yeah, this whole thing. And I remember the Dean asking me, why, you know, why? Why podcasts? And and I said, I think that there are students in my classes who have something to say, and because of all of these sort of, you know, barriers, external barriers to joining that conversation, to joining the knowledge production that comes from that kind of conversation, they are simply opting out, right? And I sort of make a little bit of this argument in this paper, but I wrote this other paper a few years before this chapter came out. It’s called Uncomfortable Learning, and all of my work is like, I have to teach like white students bout race and gender construction and class construction, and that gets hard, right? You know, as a Black woman, so how can I overcome these things? And in that article, I talk about these sort of two groups of opt-outers in classes, right? It is the minoritized students who feel like they don’t belong, that they don’t know how to participate in these kinds of conversations that are structured around this very sort of historically white privileged understanding of the world, of the culture, of all of that. And then there are those mostly white students who are opting out because they don’t want to participate in the topic at hand, because it makes them feel whatever negative emotions are coming up for them. And you know what I said to the dean, and sort of trying to explain this was, I think that this addition is going to limit their ability to opt out. And I think if I do this right, and I didn’t do it right the first time, but I eventually got it right, right, but that if I do this right, not only will they stop trying to opt out, but but they will actually want to actively participate in the conversation because, because it will be presented to your point, like a conversation where anybody can jump in and you don’t have to have some particular background, or you don’t have to say something that’s quote unquote smart, right, that everyone can and will and should participate in the conversation, I think, gives them permission to say things that they otherwise would hold back for, you know, whatever reason,

  Hannah McGregor 16:51
  Yeah, yeah. And it’s that that, that making strange, right, is part of it, but also, there’s specific things about podcasting as a medium, and I find this so interesting, because, you know, if we look back at the history of podcasting as a medium, like it was white dudes to start, for sure, and when you look at the top podcast right now, it remains white dudes, like they’re still really dominating the medium. So there is also this, like, you know, it’s hard to make any arguments about, like, well, it’s intrinsic to podcasting, but it’s like, well, that’s fine. If it’s not, I don’t know intrinsic to the medium. It’s how it’s been taken up by a lot of creators, right? So could you talk a little bit about what podcasts you have your students listen to? I’m thinking too about your like, your point about sort of reshaping canonicity, rejecting the origins of your discipline, insisting on different histories. For where you know sociology comes from, what sort of thinking goes into like, when you are introducing students to the medium. What do you have them listen to?

  Jasmine Harris 18:04
  Everything. And the things that I like. But again, because we’re bringing them to this sort of medium that they’re not very familiar with, sort of open the door right for all sorts of things. And as I said, sort of selfishly, I give them things that I also listen to, and I ask them to go and explore things that they may like, right? So one that I that I really like, and I use as an example of cultural critique, it’s called The Read, and it is hosted by Crissle and Kid Fury. They’re two black queer creatives. Gosh, I think they just had their 13th year anniversary time. I’m a faithful listener, right? But that’s a very specific kind of podcast, right? That these are two people with queer perspectives, with creative perspectives, that are people of color, right, Black people who are critiquing the world around them through those very particular lenses. It’s not my mother’s favorite. For example, when she comes to visit and she’s in my car. I’m like, oh, okay, I’ll turn this off. You don’t want to listen to this, right? This isn’t for you, but it is one useful and very popular sort of example. Ear Hustle is another one that I asked the students to listen to podcasts hosted by people who are imprisoned, recorded in prison, which I think is really interesting, and sort of speaks to your chapter about sound right and place making. And you know, do you want the listener to be able to hear the sounds going on around you to sort of provide context for the conversation that’s happening, or do you not right? And Ear Hustle is one that my students are always so interested in, because it’s recorded in a prison. Most of them have never been to a prison, and so they’re not just hearing this conversation, but they’re also hearing in effect, you know what it is like to be inside of this sort of institutional facility. Serial is is a great one as like a sort of true crime podcast that is less conversation, more exploration of a topic. Higher education has a great podcast. It’s called Diverse Issues in Higher Education. I actually did a podcast with them when my book came out last year, but they in particular, have conversations about the sort of changing landscape of minoritized identities on college campuses with scholars of color, who are, you know, on the ground, dealing with these things and trying to address them at our respective campuses. But so those are just three examples of podcasts that I would have students listen to. You know, sometimes it also sort of depends on the demographics of the class. You know, if I have more men identified students, I might throw in a sports podcast, like Bomani Jones, for example, who does a podcast called The Right Time. He’s a Black man, a Black man from the south, and all of his sort of exploration of sports is through that lens. And he constantly sort of brings it back to that perspective as what’s driving, you know, the discussions that he’s having. And he brings on a lot of guests that are writers in the sports world and people of color writers in the sports world, which I really love so but if I have a class that’s mostly women identified students who, unless you know, it seems like they’re all on, you know, sports teams or something, then I might leave that out, because they wouldn’t be that interested in it, but the point is to show them that what is interesting about podcasting is that, as a medium, it’s very much like music, right? And it is diverse in a way that a lot of higher education scholarship simply can’t be. You know, when I first started in higher ed, I had a bit of an existential crisis. You know, as a Black woman faculty member on a historically white serving campus, I was one of just a handful of Black faculty, and I started getting all of these students, you know, coming to my office and like, emotionally unloading on me, which I understood, but I also had a difficult time processing early and I remember writing an anonymous piece for Conditionally Accepted which is a column for, oh gosh. Now I can’t remember the name of the blog. I can’t remember the name of the blog, but when I, when I wrote it, the editor was like, Well, do you are you sure you want to publish this with your name? You know, we can publish this anonymously. And I remember thinking, Oh, I suppose, because I’m, you know, talking too much about my emotions and the relationship between my emotions and my job and and he’s worried for me, you know, someone on the tenure track, that that may harm me on the way. And so there’s just not that kind of open. I mean, we’re changing a little bit now, in the last 10 years since that happened, but part of that, I think, is people like us who are trying to expand and push open some of these walls and boundaries that we’ve made around what’s proper, you know, in in higher education, and you know, for for better or worse, in terms of how people respond to it, I think that we are doing the work that needs to be done if higher education is going to become a more equitable place.

  Natalie Dusek 24:35
  Thanks for listening to Amplified, a podcast, an audio blog, about the sounds of scholarship. If you have comments or additional althoughts on our conversation today or on any of Amplify’s initiatives, please don’t hesitate to reach out. See you next time.

  [Theme music out]

• Guest Bio

  Dr. Jasmine L. Harris is Professor and Department Chair of Africana Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Dr. Harris completed her PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2013 and earned tenure in 2020.

  Dr. Harris views her research, teaching, and service as intertwined, each influencing and shaping the others. Her examinations of Black life in predominately white spaces are founded on personal experiences, including Black students at PWIs, Black DI football and men’s basketball players at universities in the Power 5 conferences, and Black sociologists producing knowledge in a white-dominated discipline. Dr. Harris has been published in major national newspapers, including Newsweek, The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2021, she was featured in the Vice News documentary “College Sports, Inc.”

  Repped by The Howland Literary Agency in New York City, her book, Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education, was published in 2024 by Broadleaf Books.

• Links and Resources

  Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory edited by Laurie Beckstead and Dario LLinares

  The Podcast Studies Podcast

  Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities by Patricia Hill Collins

  The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study by W.E.B. Du Bois

  Uncomfortable Learning: Teaching Race Through Discomfort in Higher Education by Jasmine Harris

  The Read Podcast

  Ear Hustle

  Serial Podcast Series

  Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

  The Right Time with Bomani Jones

  Inside Higher Ed: Conditionally Accepted

  Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)

  Written and produced by: Natalie Dusek and Hannah McGregor