Podcast Response Assignment for the US History Survey

What skills should an “introductory” college history course teach?

The survey course is just that – a survey. So many of us in the college teaching profession stress about fitting everything in to this short class that we sometimes forget to see the beauty in its flexibility. When it comes to skills, I like to focus on three key things that students can build upon and refine in other courses:

• Asking historical questions
• Building historical arguments/reasoning
• Using historical evidence

Educators can scaffold the skills listed above using any number of teaching and assessment methods, from informal Q&A to a research paper. It all depends on their students’ and school’s needs. In my own class, I work on building a series of activities that 1) gives students the flexibility to choose topics that interest them, 2) gives additional content and context to what we learned in class, and 3) is short enough that allows for personal and valuable feedback.

The Podcast Assignment

The podcast response assignment is a great way to approach scaffolding historical skills. It asks students to choose from the U.S History podcast list, (organized for instructors’ ease by unit and topic), and follow two basic steps outlined below.

Instructions:

For each podcast:

1. Students will identify three (3) specific things that they learned, thought was stupid (respectfully), found interesting, or that contradicted previously held knowledge/beliefs. These should be explained in no less than 3 sentences each. This is NOT simply an account of what the podcast says – do not plagiarize the podcast.
2. Students will ask two (2) questions that they either thought while listening to the podcast, or wish they could ask the individual(s) recording the podcast. The purpose of these questions is to think like a social scientist; therefore, questions must be complex in nature. Questions should be those that require a complex understanding of the topic at hand to answer. Questions that could be answered by Google will not count!

Students complete this as a written assignment. Each section is broken apart and students are encouraged to write out each part in bullet points or numbered sections to separate and organize their thoughts.

Outcomes

The two skills highlighted in this assignment are historical questioning and historical reasoning. After several semesters of using this assignment in the classroom, I’ve noticed some trends in their responses.

First, students are invited to be honest about their thoughts, so they are. For example, several of my students are veterans of the War in Afghanistan and have a lot of thoughts and feelings about “Afghanistan and American Styles of War.” The assignment gives them a space to process their lived reality and historical thinking. The benefit of this honesty is that students learn to separate their lived reality and feelings from historical thinking about the past. Engaging with podcasts about events that students have lived through also helps them to engage with historical actors as people with human motivations and complexity.

Second, the informal nature of the podcast assignment allows students to engage in complex thinking without requiring complex writing. These are ideas about historical reasoning that are often messy for students. They don’t need to worry about saying it all and saying it properly. Students are expected to make complete thoughts and have essentially correct grammar, but they can take as long as they need to get there.

Finally, the assignment teaches students the fundamental first step of research – asking a good question. Some of these, shared with permission, look like:

• “When we look at the amount of AAPI hate in the United States, how is it possible for there to be two realities – one where people love to take pictures of and commercialize Asian art and food, but then another where they beat up the people who make it? And who else has this happened to?”
• “When we look at the women who had so much more control than we thought in the South (especially over Black people) – why was it so advantageous for them to hide that when fighting for things like suffrage? It’s not like they didn’t know they had this certain kind of power?”
• “I really want to ask the podcast hosts how they think wars before the war on terror would have been different if there were women in higher ranks of the military before the 90s. Like, would it have mattered at all because they would have also just fit in with the system? Or would we be living in a whole different world?”

No one has the time to scour the internet for podcasts. For that reason, this spreadsheet has a list that educators can use as a starting point. And this rubric can be used as a guide for assessment.