Pedagogue Three Years Later with Shane A. Wood
Shane A. Wood is Director of Composition and Assistant Professor English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He teaches first-year writing, technical writing, digital literacies, sonic rhetoric, and a graduate practicum in composition theory.
I launched Pedagogue in spring 2019, and now here we are in spring 2022. Pedagogue is a weekly podcast about teachers talking writing. Each episode is a conversation with a teacher (or multiple teachers) about classroom pedagogies and practices in higher education. The purpose of the podcast is to amplify teacher-scholar perspectives on teaching writing across contexts and positions and celebrate the labor teachers do inside and outside the classroom. Pedagogue has released over 170 episodes, has 105,000+ streams in 50+ countries, 575+ Apple subscribers, 380+ Spotify subscribers, and has won two national awards—2021 Kairos John Lovas Award and 2019 Computers and Composition Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Production Award.
Sometimes people ask me about what stands out through the hundreds of hours researching, writing questions, interviewing, recording, producing, editing, transcribing, distributing, and promoting each episode. So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a retrospective. Three takeaways from three years.
1. Community
Pedagogue has always been about establishing a community of writing teachers. Really, I see it as more than a podcast. It’s a network of teachers across institutional contexts committed to students. That community has helped sustain Pedagogue. If it wasn’t for teachers being willing to sit down and talk to me—to share their perspectives and experiences in the classroom—Pedagogue wouldn’t exist. Which is why I am so thankful for every contributor and listener. Knowing that people are benefiting from the podcast and listening motivates me to produce and release episodes each week. When I started the podcast in spring 2019, I didn’t know what was possible or how it would be taken up by a larger community of teacher-scholars. I was hoping to facilitate conversations about teaching and meet new friends in the field. I was unsure about what kind of reaction this would receive from rhetoric and composition. I had more questions than answers about where this medium and mode for making meaning and circulating knowledge would fit in scholarship. My questions, uncertainties, and hesitations were null. I received incredible support and enthusiasm. Which says a lot more about the good community in rhetoric and composition than it does the podcast itself. The community embraced Pedagogue. That’s what stands out to me the most after three years: the community. The interviews and interactions with hundreds of teachers, the emails, words of encouragement, and generosity of the community.
2. Accessibility
Pedagogue grew from a desire to make rhetoric and composition scholarship more accessible. As a teacher-scholar committed to multimodality and accessibility, I often think about engagement and learning through a range of possibilities. How can students engage in [fill in the blank] through x, y, and z? How can I create opportunities for learning so that the widest range of students can have access to meaning making? Pedagogue became a way for me to share widely information and knowledge about teaching writing. Through both audio and transcripts. Every episode has a transcript. Offering different ways for folks to engage with Pedagogue has been a priority since the beginning. Podcasting also offered an opportunity to break down the walls between the university and the public. No journal subscriptions. No paywalls. Just open access. Shared knowledge about pedagogies, practices, values, beliefs, and teaching experiences. Podcasts weren’t designed and created for academia. They’re public facing. Pedagogue was a chance to bridge the gap. An opportunity for knowledge about teaching not to just circulate to/for academic audiences, but to move beyond academic contexts. Through the nature of podcasting, and specifically by having more informal conversations with teachers about their experiences in the classroom, Pedagogue offered a unique way to engage in scholarship. You can hear thinking and discovery in real time being articulated through an authentic voice. It demystifies the writers’ attitude and tonality that readers must figure out in alphabetic texts. Conversation is natural, often less theoretically dense. Perhaps more practical, and application based.
3. Personal Pedagogical Growth
These three years have allowed me to grow as a teacher. It’s all because of the Pedagogue community—the teachers who have shared their knowledge and experiences with me. Some of my favorite memories in grad school were the conversations that happened with friends in offices and hallways. You know, these informal, communal spaces where we could just talk about teaching, and we could talk about what was working and what wasn’t in our classes. Pedagogue has become like that for me. It is through these conversations with other teachers where I am continuing to learn and grow as a teacher. I am constantly learning about new practices and ideas, new strategies for teaching writing. Additionally, through the recording, production, and editing process, I’ve become more aware and familiar with sound/audio composing which has informed and influenced my own teaching. For example, I recently taught a class on sonic rhetorics. I often tell folks I’m the luckiest because I get to talk and listen to each Pedagogue guest. I get to have a one-on-one conversation with these brilliant teacher-scholars. And even though episodes are around 25 minutes, we talk for like 40 minutes to an hour. These conversations have led to personal pedagogical growth, and I’m forever thankful.
