Podcasting as Experiential Learning in Classics

Students in pre-modern disciplines face greater challenges in finding productive and engaging avenues for Experiential Learning than students in fields whose connections to current events are more self-evident. Podcasting offers students of ancient Greece and Rome a way to connect with people outside their classrooms, both other students and interested members of the general public. It also requires them to hone their oral presentation skills and to think about how to present the same idea to different audiences, both of which are fundamental to critical thinking. This project is aimed at improving the quality and reach of a podcasting initiative that has been under way in my advanced Greek classes since 2018. Each student in these classes has produced a 12-to 15-minute podcast episode focused on a specific passage of Greek that the individual student has previously prepared and taught to their classmates. A class’ podcast series as a whole begins and ends with episodes created by me. Creating a podcast episode that is part of a larger series both solidifies what students learn from teaching material to their peers, and also requires them to reframe their ideas so that they are integrated within the podcast series as a whole and are accessible to larger and more varied audiences. I am using my PTF project to learn how to create podcasts that are easier for students to produce, of higher quality, and more widely disseminated. In order to accomplish that, the highest priority is to educate myself. This will enable me to provide better guidance to students and to create wider networks for disseminating both podcasting resources and the podcast itself. The resources I hope to develop will both improve the quality of my own students’ podcasting efforts and make podcasting more widely and easily accessible for colleagues who wish to do something similar. Thus, the project creates new forms of expertise and new connections between me and my students; between my students and various audiences for their work; and between various constituencies who are interested in or engaged with podcasting.