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I What I found was that by creating podcasts we were able to engage in multimodal and multispatial literacies that transformed the teaching and learning geography of our educational setting (Vasudevan 355). Podcasts provide a unique opportunity for stu-dents to embrace experimentation and to take risks with their own voices, explore the school building and community, and become well- known by their teachers and peers. The process of creating the pod-casts was one in which the out- of- school literacies of both teacher and students interacted in what Ali-son Skerrett and Randy Bomer conceptualize as a “borderzone”— a curriculum- making process that is “hybrid, liminal, and improvised” (1258). The proj-ect involved constant negotiation between students, teacher, and the text, and the end result showed a level of engagement and critical thinking I had not seen from the students that year.

EXPLAINING THE BACKSTORYIn this article I share the story of this experimental classroom project that I developed with a diverse group of students in three ninth- grade ELA classes in the spring of 2018. Two of the classes involved in the podcasting project were considered “blended.” During Period 1, I co- taught with an English as a New Language (ENL) teacher, and during Period 2, I co- taught with a special education teacher. With this project, I aimed to promote critical thinking, speaking, and listening skills with students who are often seen through a deficit lens— referred to as a

t is Thursday morning in my non- honors ninth- grade English classroom and students are scattered everywhere. Tables are turned to form misshapen circles, students are sitting

on desktops or the floor, phones are out— as well as earbuds— and the iPad cart is unlocked and open. Without changing much about the physical space, we transformed it into a twenty- first- century learn-ing environment by drawing on all of the tools at our disposal. As a result, the students, who are often per-ceived by themselves and others to be “struggling,” have found opportunities to shine.

A few days earlier, I had introduced podcasts as part of our culminating project for a unit on Romeo and Juliet. This project involves the students in thinking about what they found most interest-ing about the play and creating a podcast to share their thinking. Since I had discovered a plethora of literature- related podcasts in which the hosts are often having casual conversations about literature— such as Backlisted, Recommended, Overdue, The New York Times Book Review, and The Librarian Is In— I began to wonder if my students would benefit from an in- class experiment with the genre. Forty percent of Americans over the age of twelve listen to podcasts, and that number is increasing each year (Edison Research). Podcasts can elevate the status of informal conversation as the format often involves spontaneous interaction and prioritizes responsive-ness. If we experimented with podcasts, I wondered, how would students react?

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“Can We Do This?”: Cocreating Curriculum with a Twenty-First-Century Mindset

Ninth graders in a “blended” classroom

experimented with short podcast projects

about Romeo and Juliet, highlighting in-school

and out-of-school literacies.

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“rough crowd” or “difficult to teach.” Many of the students told me frequently that they “hate read-ing.” They shared that they had difficulty concen-trating or that they found it hard to find books that were interesting to them. Several were multilingual learners— newcomers to our district who were in the process of learning English. While we had access to some new technology— a computer, an interactive whiteboard, and a laptop or iPad cart— the classroom had not changed much in ninety years. (I call atten-tion to this fact to highlight that the classroom and school environment in which this project was carried out were not exceptional.) Much of the literature on multimodal literacy shares the benefits of redesigned school spaces, innovative curriculum, and alterna-tive classroom designs; with this project, however, I offer an example of successful multimodal, student- centered learning in a traditional school space.

The project draws on the work of scholars who have shown the benefits of linking in- and out- of- school literacy practices (Moje et al. 67; Morrell 76), multimodal composing (Cercone 26; Vasudevan 357), and digital and media literacy (Hobbs 16). Along with other multimodal texts, such as digital video (Miller and Bruce 15), podcasts are examples of the type of composition that involves students in complex literacy skills (Rozema 31). To create pod-casts, the students had to be aware of their audience, develop a structure for their content, and create a plan for producing it. They also had to be familiar with their topic, the play, Romeo and Juliet. The proj-ect also drew from the work of scholars who have argued for a new culture of learning, in which teach-ers collaborate with students and intentionally pro-mote student- centered learning (Thomas and Brown 17). To foster such creativity, teachers need to impro-vise and take strategic risks to build learning expe-riences from unpredictable situations (Hobbs 6). Within the unpredictable, we can promote positive interactions “even when students hesitate or resist belonging” (Learned 673).

INTRODUCING THE PODCAST PROJECTI introduced the podcast project to the students after we read and watched Romeo and Juliet. The students

engaged in a variety of activities, including compar-ing scenes from the Zeffirelli and Luhrmann films and analyzing literary elements and concepts such as dramatic irony and subtext. We spent a lesson exam-ining the ways in which the filmmakers reimagined the famous balcony scene— looking at clips from West Side Story, Warm Bodies, Gnomeo and Juliet, and even a performance of the ballet, as performed by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. The students seemed to be enjoying the unit, and they also seemed to have strong opinions about the events and the characters in the story. Therefore, I began to rethink the final writing assignment I had planned for them, which was another traditional essay I feared the students would have a half- hearted approach to writing. The students had already written a number of traditional essays that year (including a mid- unit essay in which they selected one character to analyze), and I wanted to find a new way to engage them in literary analysis.

I reserved our English department’s iPad cart and submitted a request to our technology depart-ment for a recording app, Ferrite, to be downloaded onto the iPads. I began by sharing an example of the type of episode that inspired me to bring podcasts into the classroom. On Overdue, two British hosts discuss “the books you’ve been meaning to read.” The podcast focuses on books, so I thought it could be an example of the form, which the students could emulate and personalize. I played the beginning of an episode and then paused so the students could identify key characteristics of the podcast: it began with an introduction; there was music in the back-ground; and the hosts were laughing and having a casual but focused conversation.

Next, I shared a list of podcasts that I had col-lected (see Figure 1). Through conferencing, I knew that Twenty One Pilots was a favorite band and Fort-nite was a favorite video game. I was able to find pod-casts that focused on these topics, as well as one in Spanish about a die- hard music fan, and a few others I thought students might enjoy. I posted links to these podcasts on Google Classroom, booked the com-puter lab, and handed out sets of earbuds I ordered online. Students listened to the podcasts and wrote one or two sentences about their observations in the public comment section on Google Classroom. These

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the classroom, like Thomas, also liked Twenty One Pilots. A week or two earlier, Roger told me that he loved the group and when he saw that one of the pod-casts was dedicated to a discussion of their music, his face lit up. Roger was able to find a connection with many of the native English speakers. Therefore, the “borderzone” was growing because student interests were brought into the classroom as valuable content, and students were able to share their interests with each other. The activity created an informal inter-section that valued the outside- of- school literacy of these racially and linguistically diverse students.

My next step was to model the recording pro-cess for the students. Earlier in the year, the English department director and I had produced the school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. I asked the direc-tor to join us in the classroom so that the students could observe me as I recorded a brief interview in which I asked him to reflect on his experience of directing the play. I moved two desks to the front of the room and placed my phone on the tabletop so that the Ferrite app could record our conversation. I asked why he selected Romeo and Juliet for the pro-duction and what he found interesting about it. He shared his memory of being a teenager himself and having strong feelings that the adults around him didn’t value or understand. Afterward, I recorded a brief introduction and uploaded a clip of music from a song that I had downloaded on my phone. I also used Canva, a simple graphic design application, to create a cover image. Modeling the process allowed me to provide the students with an example of what would be expected of them.

Next, I shared a podcast planning sheet, which included questions to help the students consider what they found interesting about the play— questions that were based on prior learning from our unit (see Figure 2). I allowed students to form groups or to work individually, and I identified roles that students would need to play to help facilitate their success (see Figure 3). I suggested that the podcast be three to five minutes long. I also shared a simple rubric based on elements the students identified as essential in a podcast, and which I later used to assess their projects (see Figure 4).

comments showed that they were able to identify key elements of the genre on their own. For example, Suzanne (student names are pseudonyms) observed that the hosts spoke in a casual tone “even though they had an idea of what they were going to teach the listener.” Derek identified the host’s intention to have a specific impact on his audience. In other comments, I began to see increased enthusiasm for podcasts as they discovered ones that were dedicated to topics they were personally interested in:

n I liked the twenty øne piløts podcast because is also my favorite band and also i liked what he said about the band. (Roger)

n I liked the twenty one pilots podcast the best because I like there song migraine and the guy did a good job telling us some of his favorite work that they did. (Thomas)

n I liked the fortnite podcast because they talked about the twitch streamers and youtubers I watch all the time. (John)

Since these comments were visible to the stu-dents on our Google Classroom site, Roger, a multi-lingual student, was able to see that other students in

FIGURE 1.

Student interests guided the selection of podcasts.

Podcasts Shared with Students

Podcast URL

The Twenty One Pilots Podcast

soundcloud.com/21pilots podcast/e01

The Fortnite Podcast

fortnitepodcast.podbean .com/

Radio Ambulante: “Welcome to the Jungle” (in Spanish)

radioambulante.org/audio /welcome-to-the-jungle

Stuff You Should Know: “What Makes a One-Hit Wonder?”

www.stuffyoushouldknow .com/podcasts/sysk-selects-what-makes-one-hit-wonder.htm

Stuff You Missed in History Class: “Sadako Sasaki’s 1000 Cranes, pt. 1”

www.missedinhistory.com /podcasts/sadako-sasaki-cranes-part-1.htm

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FIGURE 2.

The podcast planning sheet provided a list of questions about the play to help students consider topic ideas for their podcast projects.

What is interesting about Romeo and Juliet?

The history

• What was life like for Romeo and Juliet?

• Why did Juliet’s parents want her to marry so young?

• Why did the Prince yell at the Montagues and Capulets to stop fighting? Why weren’t there police?

• How are teenagers today different from teenagers back then?

The story

• Why do people keep telling this story?

• Why do people enjoy this story?

• How is this story relevant today?

• What questions do you have about the plot?

• Why do you think Shakespeare wanted the audience to know things that the characters did not (dramatic irony)?

The characters: Juliet

• What do you like about Juliet?

• Would you like to be her friend? Do you think she has any friends?

• Why do you think Juliet falls in love with Romeo so quickly?

• Do you think Romeo is good for Juliet?

• Do you think it’s weird that Juliet tells her parents she will “obey” them, when she doesn’t really mean it (subtext)?

The characters: Romeo

• What do you like about Romeo?

• Would you like to be his friend?

• Why do you think Mercutio and Romeo are friends?

• Do you think it’s weird that Romeo goes from loving Tybalt to hating him so quickly?

• Do you think it’s odd that Romeo goes from loving Rosamund to loving Juliet so quickly?

Podcast Planning Sheet

Are there other things about this play that you find interesting? If so, what?

FIGURE 3.

Podcast tasks were identified as “jobs” that could be assigned to group members.

Jobs

Technology Expert Musical Director Artist Scriptwriter Speaker/Performer

This person is in charge of creating the podcast on the iPad.

This person selects the music that should be included in the podcast.

This person creates the cover art to go with the podcast.

This person creates the outline for the conversation or interview.

This person serves as one of the speakers, sharing the podcast with the audience.

FIGURE 4.

Students identified elements they thought of as essential to the genre, and the evaluation rubric reflected their ideas.

Not Ready Yet (15 points)

Meets Expectations (18 points)

Wow! (20 points)

Engineering The podcast is clear and easy to hear.

Artwork The artwork is visually appealing and relates to the podcast topic.

Musical Introduction The music relates to the tone and topic.

Ideas The topic reveals what this group finds interesting about the play.

Engagement The podcast is interesting and entertaining!

Group Score:

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the hallway between classes. Then, Jessica added to the plan. Together, they created a podcast in which they shared their thoughts on why the story of Romeo and Juliet has been retold so many times and how each time it is retold, it reflects the values of the time period. They asked if they could sit in the quiet hall-way to create their recording (see Figure 5). Their final podcast showed insightful critiques of several film versions of the play, but it also showed a playful side of Suzanne that had not come out during class discussions.

JESSICA: Hello everyone and welcome to our podcast. I’m Jessica—

SuZANNE: And I’m Suzanne, last time I checked.

JESSICA: Our podcast today is about Romeo and Juliet and different versions of the play throughout the media. And then we will be comparing and contrasting those versions and maybe including some opinions on the characters. Hope you enjoy!

Intro music: a clip from the song “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

JESSICA: So, we’re gonna be talking about four different adaptions of the play, which are the original play, the ’60s version, the ’90s version,

DEVELOPING THE PODCASTSOnce they had arranged themselves into groups, the students began to think about how to accomplish their goals. Building on my model podcast, some groups generated ideas that involved interaction with the broader school community. For example, one group of girls requested to interview teachers. This group usually formed a chatty coalition in the back corner, and they struggled with frequent absences and low academic performance. Now, they were asking if they could create a podcast that showed how Romeo’s and Juliet’s teenage years differed from those of teenagers today, an idea that emerged

from their interest in Juliet’s father’s strong response when she said she would not marry Paris. One of the girls, Amber, explained that they wanted to inter-view teachers and stu-dents to hear about their relationships with their parents and then

juxtapose the interviews to highlight similarities and differences. Their final product was a four- minute podcast that began with the introduction, “Romeo and Juliet’s teenage years were very different from ours . . . .” The podcast included interviews with two teachers and two students, conducted dur-ing the group’s free periods, which showed a level of commitment that these students had not previ-ously exhibited in class. Their podcast showed me that they appreciated an opportunity to make their learning more social and that they desired to cross some of the borders that so often define our learning experiences.

In another example, two students from different class periods devised a plan for working with each other to create their podcast. Suzanne often sat alone in Period 2, but when she hatched a plan to work with Jessica, in my Period 8 class, she became ani-mated. Suzanne wrote a “rough draft” plan for the podcast during Period 2, and when Jessica arrived in Period 8, she showed me Suzanne’s classwork, a folded piece of paper that Suzanne had slipped her in

Their final podcast showed insightful

critiques of several film versions of

the play, but it also showed a playful side

of Suzanne that had not come out during

class discussions.

FIGURE 5.

Suzanne and Jessica recorded their podcast in the hallway.

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bottle and sword, but she reconfigured these images so that they looked as though they were intertwined (see Figure 7). Meanwhile, Roger used his phone to conduct a Google search for a symbol associated with the band he loves, Twenty One Pilots, and which he understood to be a symbol for neutrality (ø). “Can I use this?” he asked, showing me his phone. These examples show students learning that they could use their outside skills and interests to create images that relied on connections they were drawing between their in- and out- of- school literacies.

A colleague who happened to be in the library when one group was recording their conversation for the podcast remarked that she was shocked to learn

the 2011s version [Gnomeo and Juliet], which is the most amazing version—

SuZANNE: The best version. And the last three are obviously films, while the original is the play—

JESSICA: All of these versions show a timeline, in my opinion, of how outlandish our culture has gotten—

SuZANNE: It’s gotten really bad.

In their discussion, the students discuss Romeo and Juliet and speculate on the characters’ thoughts and motivations (“OK, can you imagine the thought process? Let’s address a letter to someone who was just banished for murdering someone and then hand it to a stranger to deliver it.”); they complain about the Los Angeles setting and the use of guns instead of swords in the Lurhmann film version; and they con-nect characters across versions (“I think the frog plays the nurse character in Gnomeo and Juliet”). Jessica and Suzanne’s podcast discussion showed that they were able to analyze a subject presented in multiple formats and integrate multiple sources of informa-tion, skills they can apply to other ELA assignments and throughout their academic lives.

Some students also asked if they could use other recording apps, such as Anchor, iMovie, or Garage-Band. They also asked to create the podcast using their phones, instead of the school iPads. On their phones they had access to all of their downloaded music, and they could download images from the Internet; on the school iPads, the students were not allowed to download media. While the benefit to using technology I was familiar with was that I could support them when they ran into technical difficul-ties, the more tech- savvy students enjoyed having freedom to make their own decisions about tools.

Similarly, while I had provided students with an example using Canva to create artwork for their podcasts, they also approached this task in a variety of ways. For example, Suzanne used a stylus to draw directly onto her phone screen (see Figure 6). Denise used her phone to conduct a Google Image search and found a picture of a drawing someone had made of the potion bottle and a sword. Denise used her own set of colored pencils to draw a similar potion

FIGURE 6.

Suzanne used a stylus to draw directly onto her smartphone screen.

FIGURE 7.

Denise’s inspiration for artwork came from an image she found online.

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that these students were in the ninth grade and not in the honors class. I shared with her that the stu-dents she overheard were in the co- taught inclusive classroom. Yet, when the students were invited to talk about something that they found interesting, and when their voices were recognized as valuable, they were more articulate and animated than we sometimes see in a traditional English classroom. As Julie E. Learned suggests, “too often struggling read-ers are assumed to be work avoidant or uninterested” (673); the podcast project not only engaged students in learning but also helped to cultivate positive aca-demic identities.

This was also true for a group of students who initially said that they were “getting nowhere.” They were thinking about focusing on which character could be blamed for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but they had different opinions. They dove into a lively debate on this topic, and I interrupted them to point out that this discussion could be the pod-cast. “It could?” they asked. Off they went to record their debate. My familiarity with the podcast genre allowed me to recognize the value of this discussion, as it was just the kind of discussion I had been listen-ing to on the book- related podcasts I enjoyed. Fur-ther, my interaction with the students was nudging them away from thinking of their discussion as evi-dence of their perceived academic deficiencies. The group went on to create a four- minute podcast that captured their debate:

DENNIS: Who do you think is to blame for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet?

SEAN: I’d say the messenger is to blame.

DENNIS: The one that went and told Romeo that Juliet had died?

SEAN: Yeah, I’d say it was his fault because if he wasn’t to tell Romeo that Juliet died then he would have gotten the message saying that Juliet didn’t die.

DENNIS: But couldn’t you blame Juliet for faking her death? Or, the person who gave Juliet the poison to put her to sleep for forty- eight hours?

SEAN: It could have been either of their faults—

DENNIS: Or, it could have been Romeo’s fault, if he just wouldn’t have killed Tybalt and he could have stayed and figured things out with Juliet—

In this recording, Dennis surprised me. He fre-quently told me that he “hated school” and that he “hated teachers.” Yet, toward the end of the project, he shared with me that he was not initially interested in the idea of creating a podcast, but after doing it he found that he loved it. And, I found that Dennis was much more thoughtful in his analysis of the charac-ters than I had previously realized. In the podcast, he and Sean demonstrated that they could analyze how the characters developed over the course of the play, and they could adapt their speech to a variety of con-texts and tasks— skills that they could apply across the curriculum.

REFLECTING ON THE OUTCOMEThe podcast project shows that by bringing in out- of- school literacy practices, the students and I engaged in a process of negotiation that comprised the “borderzone” Skerrett and Bomer identify. I share these stories from my classroom to provide an example of how multimodal projects, like podcasts, can help students to develop twenty- first- century composing skills; more important, however, they show how such a project can be codeveloped with students who already have many of these skills, but are seldom required to use them in classroom set-tings. While examples of similar projects can be found in other articles (see Cercone’s “‘Standing at the Crossroads’: Content Creation in the 21st- Century English Classroom” in the January 2017 issue of English Journal), these examples tend to explore “exceptional” spaces, such as classrooms that have been “redesigned” to include new forms of tech-nology, elective classes, or after- school programs. In this case, the difference had less to do with access to technology than the value placed on student input, the incorporation of tools students are familiar with, and the high expectations for student thinking and learning in a non- honors classroom. Therefore,

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Digital Video Composing.” English Journal, vol. 106, no. 3, 2017, pp. 14– 18.

Moje, Elizabeth B., et al. “Working toward Third Space in Content Area Literacy: An Examination of Everyday Funds of Knowledge and Discourse.” Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004, pp. 38– 70.

Morrell, Ernest. “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development among Urban Youth.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 72– 77.

“Nureyev & Fonteyn Romeo & Juliet.” YouTube, uploaded by plumbago, 25 May 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=- oc_ GvdFen0.

Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Paramount, 1968.Romeo + Juliet. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, 21st Century Fox,

1996.Rozema, Robert. “The Book Report, Version 2.0: Podcasting on

Young Adult Novels.” English Journal, vol. 97, no. 1, 2007, pp. 31– 36.

Skerrett, Alison, and Randy Bomer. “Borderzones in Adolescents’ Literacy Practices: Connecting Out- of- School Literacies to the Reading Curriculum.” Urban Education, vol. 46, no. 6, 2011, pp. 1256– 79.

Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.

Vasudevan, Lalitha. “Performing New Geographies of Literacy Teaching and Learning.” English Education, vol. 41, no. 4, 2009, pp. 356– 74.

Warm Bodies. Directed by Jonathan Levine, Mandeville Film, 2013.West Side Story. Directed by Jerome Robbins, MGM, 1961.

instead of twenty- first- century content knowledge, it can be more valuable for teachers to develop twenty- first- century pedagogical content knowledge— a framework that embraces “borderzones” and a diver-sity of student dispositions (Thomas and Brown 88) and that encourages teachers to view ourselves as learners, collaborators, and experimenters in the classroom.

WORKS CITED

Cercone, James. “‘Standing at the Crossroads’: Content Creation in the 21st- Century English Classroom.” English Journal, vol. 106, no. 3, 2017, pp. 25– 31.

Edison Research. “The Infinite Dial 2019.” 6 Mar. 2019, www.edison research.com/infinite-dial-2019/.

Gnomeo and Juliet. Directed by Kelly Asbury, Walt Disney Studios, 2011.

Hobbs, Renee. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action. The Aspen Institute, 2010, www.knightfoundation.org/media /uploads/publication_pdfs/Digital_and_Media_Literacy_A_Plan_of_Action.pdf.

Learned, Julie E. “Becoming ‘Eligible to Matter’: How Teachers’ Interpretations of Struggling Readers’ Stress Can Disrupt Deficit Positioning.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, vol. 59, no. 6, 2016, pp. 665– 74.

Miller, Suzanne, and David Bruce. “Welcome to the 21st- Century: New Literacies Stances to Support Student Learning with

DEIRDRE FAugHEy is an English teacher at Oyster Bay High School in New York and has been a member of NCTE since 2005. She can be reached at dfaughey@gmail.com.

READWRITETHINKCONNECTION Lisa Storm Fink, RWT

This lesson is intended to expand on students’ basic persuasive speaking and research skills. First, students research a local, state, national, or international issue of personal interest. Over class sessions, students use multiple online news sources to research up- to- date information that helps them form and communicate their opinions about the issue; practice working with podcasting tools; and create and share a two- minute persuasive podcast in class. http://bit.ly/1MmcclA

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