Introduction of the Assignment
It can be a challenge to create assignments that draw out enthusiastic engagement from students in topics like history. In the spring semester of 2022, I worked as a teaching assistant in Dr. Liana Vardi’s undergraduate course, “World History since 1500,” in which I took on the responsibility for facilitating discussions of lectures and class readings within two 24-student recitation sections of the class. Dr. Vardi encouraged me to design mini-assignments. Concerned with prior feedback about their preference for non-writing assignments, I decided to have them complete five-minute food-history–themed podcasts in the place of traditional papers, in the hopes that excitement about the format might bring students closer to the material.
Assignment
Before assigning the podcast task, I delivered a lecture to help my students prepare their work. In addition to introducing the requirements, I played two sample podcast episodes for the class. The first was a five-minute excerpt from the podcast Eat Drink Asia, about the Chinese food Xiaolongbao. I suggested that my students take notes of the podcast’s structure and consider mimicking it in their own work: it should start with an interesting hook, which could be a short story or a curious question; and they should then provide an overview of the history of the food topic they chose. The second example was the first five minutes of a Rosa Parks–themed episode from Dig: A History Podcast, after which I requested that students discuss the speaker’s use of evidence in the podcast. Students then had three weeks to complete their podcast assignment: in the first week, they were assigned to several groups of 5–6 members and were required to brainstorm topics with their team members; following this, they were required to complete the podcast assignment in the following two weeks virtually or in-person and record it on Zoom.
After-assignment Feedback and Assessment
After completing the assignment, I invited my students to take part in an after-assignment survey, and 30 answered. The results offer some interesting information, which resonate with my observation of students’ boredom with writing essays in humanities courses.
First, as shown in figure below, most students seem to prefer the podcast assignment. Their preference could be attributed to the fact that Gen Z students are accustomed to expressing themselves through voice and video instead of the written word.
Second, as shown in Figures 2 and 3, the average amount of reported time spent between writing and podcast assignments are not significantly different. The findings encourage history instructors not to worry about additional workloads when assigning podcast projects to students.
The last result compares independent and teamwork assignments. As shown in Figure 4 below, there are no significant differences between the two formats.
Comprehensively taking the results into account, I contend that podcast assignments could match students’ interests and patterns of behavior without adding significant additional workload. Hence, it is a strong supplemental format of assignment to the traditional writing assignment from the perspective of student enthusiasm and time spent on homework assignments. But what about the pedagogical quality of the process and of the work produced?
Reflections on the Assignment
Reviewing the practice of the podcast assignment and the feedback from students, I take some important lessons. First, communication between students should be considered when designing teamwork assignments. While it is not my first time working as a teaching assistant, the first attempt at requiring students to work in a team is challenging. In a history class, most assignments, such as reading responses or longer essays, usually discourage students’ unapproved collaboration and cooperation. I had never thought about the frustration students encounter when communicating with their peers when completing their assignments. However, I received dozens of emails from students with inquiries about their group mates’ contact information. Next time, I will consider using apps such as Slack to facilitate students’ group work, which could improve the efficiency of teamwork in the future and, though it adds a new technology, could help stave off some intragroup frustrations.
The second insight I took from the assignment involves how to balance the needs and concerns of students from different backgrounds. This world history course is a general education class, and so a large proportion of enrollees in this course are not history majors, meaning that this class is the first and only college-level history course they take. Without college-level training in historical research, they can feel frustrated when collecting information in preparation for an assignment. While I tried to make sure each group had at least one student who was a history major, some groups’ finished work was unsatisfactory. For instance, they would offer a general overview of a certain food’s history while not referencing any figures or events. Moreover, they were prone to quoting primarily from non-academic resources, such as Wikipedia, in support of their arguments when producing their podcasts. I reached out to some of them after class and received feedback about their limited knowledge.
Despite these unsatisfactory results, these groups should not be blamed for referencing non-academic resources. These issues are common in written assignments of first-year courses as well, and information literacy training is a necessary component of any college-level education. When teaching a podcast assignment in the future, I plan to invite a humanities librarian to introduce students to efficient academic library search methods.
Noting that these problems are common to traditional written assignments as well, I believe that the preference students expressed for the podcast assignment indicates a particular value of this kind of alternative assignment in the humanities classroom. Taking Gen Z students’ voices into account, post-secondary institutions should make a serious effort to seek alternative formats of assignments, beyond the traditional essay. Using alternative approaches, students can learn how to cooperate with their classmates on completing the assignment. While my class may be their only history course in college, the teamwork skills continue to benefit their study in other fields and majors. More importantly, the practice of the podcasting assignment enables students to recognize the interactions between technology and humanities. I once asked my students about what they imagine historians to look like. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the “typical” historian is portrayed as a “bookworm,” who is not data-savvy or skilled in information technology and new media. Through engaging students in the production of podcasts, I expect to expand their stereotypical perception of historians. Besides reading, thinking, and writing, many historians in the digital age can be active and adept in exhibiting their research outcomes in new media, and this assignment helps draw attention to these practices and possibilities, both for consuming and producing historical knowledge.
Particularly for those students who desire to join a new generation of historians, this assignment may further their understanding of how to become humanities scholars. Unlike their antecedents who might merely present research outcomes to peers in the “ivory tower,” humanities scholars in the 2020s can be “geeks” with mastery over delivering their scholarship to a general audience in an efficient manner and with broad appeal. This assignment will hopefully introduce the possibilities of podcast public history to students pursuing history majors, expanding their conception of ways to qualify themselves to be historians in the future.
Furthermore, I do not suggest substituting all writing tasks with non-writing assignments. While most students prefer making podcasts, the voice of the minority (13.3%) should not be ignored, and the importance of writing training is of course still present. Instructors can experiment with choices in assignment formats, hybrid writing-podcast assignments, or they can try scaffolding the same task across different formats, allowing students to see the affordances and limitations of different media for conveying information, and how the technologies used also shape their processes of research and analysis.
Overall, the podcast assignment was successful and welcomed students’ interests into the classroom, and I hope it may encourage more history instructors to integrate non-traditional assignments into their pedagogy. As I have argued elsewhere, “college faculty could take seriously how to teach those Twitter and Tik-Tok natives in a more student-friendly way instead of imposing obsolete values on them.” Podcasts are just one such way forward, and I encourage humanities instructors to imagine others while actively listening to students’ priorities and preferred methods of ingesting and sharing information.
