The changing sound of education: Sound Inquiry unpacks podcasts

Put away your textbooks and grab your headphones: There’s a new way to learn history.

Podcasting is experiencing a boom as everyone from NPR to Trader Joe’s to UWM student Rashaud Foster records and releases their own digital audio stories. Historical podcasts have risen in popularity too, which made Chris Cantwell wonder: Could these podcasts have an actual place in history education?

“For a long time, I have been interested in podcasts just as a consumer and a fan. Then I started thinking about what they could do for academic disciplines in general,” said Cantwell, an assistant professor of history. “And, it seemed like there was a critical mass of people at UWM interested in audio storytelling as well.”

So, two years ago, he gathered a group of them and started Sound Inquiry, a “Collaboratory” supported by UWM’s Center for 21 st Century Studies that brings together scholars across disciplines to focus on a particular area of research. Sound Inquiry members include Cantwell; Digital Humanities librarian Ann Hanlon; associate professor of history Marcus Filippello; senior lecturer in journalism, advertising, and media studies Jane Hampden Daley; and Michelle Maternowski, mananging editor at WUWM Radio.

“Slow Burn” and “Ben Franklin’s World”

They hit a homerun when the group hosted Leon Neyfakh, a Slate journalist and producer of the wildly popular podcast “Slow Burn,” which covers the events surrounding the Watergate scandal.

“That was just a shot in the dark,” Cantwell said with a laugh. “It turns out that Neyfakh loves Milwaukee, and he was excited to come back. That was great as a way to start things off.”

Neyfakh spoke to an audience of more than 200 UWM and Milwaukee community members about his work on “Slow Burn.” The next day, he presented a workshop on the production of the podcast, including his research methods, using archival sound recordings, and how he puts the show together.

This past April, the group hosted Liz Covart, the host of “Ben Franklin’s World” which discusses the early days of the United States. Her workshop focused on building and branding a podcast to take it from a few subscribers to hundreds of thousands of downloads, and campus and community again flocked to learn more.

“It speaks to the ability of the medium to bring together these different communities at once. It has been rewarding to see that diversity,” Cantwell said.

Digital Humanities librarian Ann Hanlon and assistant professor of history Chris Cantwell sit in the recording studio of the Digital Humanities Lab in the UWM Library. Photo by Sarah Vickery.

A beautiful partnership

During each visit, Sound Inquiry partnered with WUWM. Mitch Teich, who was the host of WUWM’s “Lake Effect” show at the time, conducted each interview. Teich recently left WUWM for another NPR affiliate station in New York state. Staff from WUWM also spoke to Cantwell’s public history classes about podcasting, specifically how they produce the radio station’s “Bubbler Talk” series.

“Podcasts are exciting because they provide a space for reporters and producers to experiment (with audio, with content, with style) and reach new audiences,” Maternowski said. “While podcasts can be super niche (Mitch Teich and I host a podcast just about pretzels!), listening to WUWM gives people a wide range of information - latest news, important conversations. The radio does the curation for you, so you can just sit back and listen, learn and be entertained.”

If WUWM gives people a way to listen to podcasts, the UWM Libraries Digital Humanities Lab gives people a way to create them.

Hanlon signed on to Sound Inquiry in part because the Lab was the perfect resource for people exploring what many have termed “audio pedagogy.”

“The Digital Humanities Lab is an interdisciplinary space where we bring together people from all across campus for programming and workshops around integrating technology into the humanities and social sciences for research and teaching,” Hanlon said. “Over time, there has been growing interest in using sound either for teaching or research, so we’ve been especially interested in digital humanities in the things we can do through audio.”

The Libraries opened the DH Lab’s audio recording studio to the campus for that reason; Hanlon said there’s a 75/25 percent split between students using the lab for schoolwork and faculty, staff, and students who are interested in recording their own podcasts in a professional-quality environment.

The pedagogy of a podcast

Cantwell contends that learning history through podcasting is more than just listening to historical podcasts; it’s about making them as well. One of the first classes he taught at UWM was a podcasting class for graduate students in the university’s public history program. Instead of a final research paper, he tasked students with producing a 5-minute piece of audio scholarship for their final project.

“I think we are required as educators to have our classrooms become laboratories to practice the skills students will be doing in the world,” Cantwell said. “If they’re to become consumers and producers of this content, then they need to learn how to critically analyze and make that stuff here.”

Hampden Daley’s students are perfect examples; she created a class called Audio Storytelling where she asks students to “analyze audio stories and podcasts by learning about natural and ambient sound, interviewing, audio transitions and production, then produce 3-4 of their own stories or podcast episodes,” she said.

“Students love podcasts,” she added, “and there’s a podcast for every interest. They’re fascinated by sound and eager to learn how producers create audio stories. Some of my favorite teaching moments have been listening to audio pieces together as a class, sharing laughs or tears, and discussing them afterwards.”

And, Hanlon added, understanding digital storytelling is a necessity for the digital age.

“You get this finished product that you listen to, but understanding how that’s put together, what it means to edit sound, to edit in different historical pieces, is an important part of understanding what it means to be both a creator and user of knowledge,” she said.

Sound Inquiry is currently on hiatus, but the audio studio in the Digital Humanities Lab remains open to all interested in podcasting.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science