Teachers Teaching Teachers #55 - 05.30.07 Re-mediating Speech Class

Paul Allison — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:25:01 -0500

Our guest hosts on this podcast were Troy Hicks and Dawn Reed from the Red Cedar Writing Project! Here’s how they describe their work:

As podcasting has become a part of our language arts classes, weave seen first hand the ways in which it gives students an audience for their work. By its very nature, podcasting is an oral phenomenon and while it involves the writing process, examining the production rebroadcasts as a speech act also merits our attention. We, Dawn Reed and Troy Hicks, have been interested in how podcasting — because of its ability to record, edit, and revise oral language as well as to time-shift content — can be used as an extension of speech class in high school.

Our project this spring attempted to engaging students in responsible, ethical,and productive composing activities thorough blogging and podcasting. We set out to study how creating and publishing a podcast modeled on NPR’s This I Believe essays could change the composing process for students. In so doing, Dawn’s students created and published their own podcasts, and the two of us discovered a few things about our own technology skills, the school infrastructure, and students’ ability to rise to the occasion that we would like to share with you.

Also, we would like to discuss three ideas that we began our project with and think about how these were actualized:

To understand how blogging and podcasting can be considered a part of Michigan’s new “online experience” for high school students and, rather than take a class fully online, teachers might incorporate elements of digital writing into the irregular classroom work.
To consider themes that emerge from a project like this and how a K-12/university research team can better understand those themes through collaboration.
To reconsider how teaching “speech,” a curricular partner to composition, changes when the media for production includes podcasting.In that sense, we will discuss how purposes and genres change, as well as the affordances and constraints of podcasting, both from technical and pedagogical perspectives.

Join us in the conversation! Add a comment here.

writing project

Teachers Teaching Teachers #55 - 05.30.07 Re-mediating Speech Class