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Podcasting in social justice and sustainability education: A reflective dialogue

In this dynamic post, Dr. Kristina Auxtova, a Lecturer in Marketing at The University of Edinburgh Business School, and Dr. Callum McGregor, a Lecturer in Education at The University of Edinburgh, engage in a reflective conversation about leveraging podcasts to enhance learning within the realms of social justice and sustainability. Since integrating this innovative medium into their teaching, they’ve seen firsthand how podcasts can transform the educational experience, particularly for part-time, online students. This dialogic approach not only enriches students’ understanding but also personalises their learning journey, showcasing the real-world application of academic theories. This post is a part of the “Engaging and Empowering Learners” series, highlighting novel educational practices that foster inclusive and participatory learning environments at The University of Edinburgh. This post belongs to the Jan-March Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Engaging and Empowering Learning Engaging and Empowering Learning with Technology.


Dr Kristina Auxtova, Lecturer in Marketing, and Dr Callum McGregor, Lecturer in Education, get into a conversation reflecting about their innovative uses of podcasts for engaging and empowering learners in the context of their teaching in areas of social justice and sustainability.

Kristina: Callum, how do you use podcasts and what has been your experience?

Callum: I’ve been using podcasts for three years now in my teaching on the fully online and part-time MSc Social Justice and Community Action. I bring podcasting into my teaching on two courses: Learning for Democracy and Theories and Politics of Social Justice. Personally, I find podcasting energising and dynamic. On one level, the impetus came from my own reflections on the learning benefits of podcasts for me, as a busy professional with young children. The more I thought about our global community of students, who are also busy mid-career professionals, the more I was struck by the pedagogical potential. Deeper than that, I was drawn to the idea through a desire for more opportunities to teach through dialogue. Originally, my ‘podcasts’ consisted of Dr Andie Reynolds and I huddled round a laptop in my office. Although we made it work, having the use of a custom-built podcasting space in Moray House School of Education and Sport has stepped our game up in terms of professional quality! What is most important is the pedagogical rationale for using podcasting on these specific courses. I was inspired by dialogical approaches to knowledge creation that addressed social change and education, such as Paulo Freire and Myles Horton’s ‘We Make the Road by Walking’ and bell hooks and Cornel West’s ‘Breaking Bread’. The approach is disciplined yet convivial. It involves negotiating a clear structure of questions/talking points that allow my interlocutor and I to unpack key theoretical and political concepts and debates together. It requires both discipline and reflexive agility. In a sense, we model the processes of dialogue and close reading that we ask of the students. It is humanising in the sense that we are seen as fallible people struggling with the same ideas they are! Lastly, you have to throw your assumptions out the window when it comes to creating an online learning community. I’ve been working with this idea that I call intimate distance based on my sense that synchronicity isn’t the gold standard of an authentic experience!

Kristina: Fascinating! How thoughtful in terms of thinking about how your part-time, online students might be learning and how podcasts may allow them to learn more on-the-go. I can imagine this being really valuable for this group of students, but also more broadly. I also feel inspired by your point on the podcast humanising you and your colleague in the eyes of the students, showing them that we are all learning and what that learning entails. You gave me a lot to think about in terms of using podcasts as an alternative to lectures while having the ability to connect with students at a distance. I can also see there will be challenges in setting this up and getting the production right. It’s great to hear there is a podcasting space in Moray House though!

Callum: Kristina, how do you make use of podcasts in your own teaching practice? I know that Learning for Sustainability is a core part of your work.

Kristina: I use podcasts quite differently, as a format for assessment for my students, and I found that students genuinely enjoy the different creative format of presenting their learning and are often inspired to enact change. I’ve developed the idea when I was teaching a Marketing Communications class, focusing on ethical issues in marketing communications, and have since adopted it in my new courses on sustainability in marketing and consumption – Marketing & Climate Change (UG) and Marketing for Net Zero (PGT) – which I run with Dr Pauline Ferguson. I was searching for a way to truly engage my students with their learning and help them develop an ethical and sustainable mindset that would empower them to take positive and responsible actions – as consumers and as future marketers. Key to developing a sustainability mindset is deep learning and student-produced podcasts are argued to encourage deep learning. Not only that, research shows that student podcasting is very successful at encouraging active learning and knowledge creation, enhancing student engagement, and developing transferrable skills.

I’ve now been using podcasts for 4 years, as an individual assignment where students explore a particular topic in depth, and as a group assignment where students create a formal debate on a topic. I provide a lot of scaffolding to support their process, as they can feel a little apprehensive about the new format. What I’ve observed is that the format of actively educating a lay audience results in students taking ownership of their learning and deeply engaging with their topic. They recognise that it allows them to develop employability skills, including communication to varied audiences, use of digital technologies, storytelling, and creativity, while also resulting in a product of their work that is shareable with the public and employers. And given the topics they research, they often reflect on the activity as “a wake-up call”, highlighting their own intentions to change their behaviours and think more critically about the world they live in, as well as their hope for their episode to impact its listeners, and trigger change in the marketing industry. It’s inspiring to see the students so empowered – and we run a class podcast to help spread the word: Debating Marketing & Climate Change. Check it out!

Callum: That sounds fantastic! I can imagine using that on courses that involve digital group work. For example, on Policy Analysis for Social Justice students learn not only about frameworks for critical policy analysis, but strategies and approaches for policy advocacy. Students are asked to develop campaigns, which invariably involve the skills you describe, including storytelling, creativity, public education and especially communicating to different audiences. There will be some logistical challenges that I’d need to reflect more on. Not least the challenges of synchronicity for global students. I’d love to share some examples of practice from across our courses.

Perhaps to conclude, we’ve found podcasts to be very powerful when it comes to both engaging and empowering learners – what this blog series focuses on. When students can connect with their lecturers, especially at a distance, and see them learning too and struggle with the same complex ideas, it creates a positive and effective learning environment. And when students get the opportunity to take control of their learning and develop something creative, that can further engage others, it motivates them to learn and inspires them to take action themselves in the important areas of sustainability or social justice. We therefore see podcasts as a fantastic way of using technology to empower our students – try it with us!


photograph of the authorKristina Auxtova

Dr Kristina Auxtova is a Lecturer in Marketing at The University of Edinburgh Business School, where she also champions her passion for ethics and sustainability as the Academic Director of Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability. She is interested in studying approaches that help universities integrate these topics into their curricula, and beyond; her recent pedagogical projects explore drawing and student-produced podcasting in particular. Kristina’s research revolves around two key areas: advertising ethics and regulation, and sustainable consumption particularly in the context of charity shops.

Twitter: @KristinaAuxtova

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinaauxtova


photograph of the authorCallum McGregor

Dr Callum McGregor is a Lecturer in Education at The University of Edinburgh, where he teaches on the MSc Social Justice and Community Action and the MA Learning in Communities. His research addresses the relationship between education and democratic citizenship across a range of contexts but with particular interests in education and action for climate justice and the challenges of populist politics. Recent publications include Data Justice and the Right to the City (2022, University of Edinburgh Press) and his latest book, Ambivalent Activism: Working with Contradiction, Hesitation and Doubt for Social Change (Emejulu, Kustatscher and McGregor Eds) will be published by Policy Press in 2025.

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