 overwhelmingly the students said that it was so interesting to actually hear the voice of the person that they had read the work from. Being able to actually hear the person really matters. Another part that's really interesting when I implemented podcasts is that when they found a podcast that they personally connected to and they thought was really exciting, they shared that link with others. They shared it with their peers, they shared it sometimes with their parents, but then they would choose to bring it up and they go remember when we read that podcast, well now I had a chance to hear somebody else's perspective on it and that makes a connection to the current topic that we're talking about because and so when students can connect different readings and can remember different readings and build those connections in the classroom, that's demonstrating not only to me but also to their peers the underlying content and having to make those connections then demonstrates your ability to find those connections outside of the classroom and really take your learning beyond the confines of the classroom. So in fifth grade I distinctly remember wearing a shirt that had been actually made by a friend that had said a hundred percent Cuban and it had the Cuban flag on it and a classmate called me out on it and said you can't be a hundred percent anything and I remember disputing that I was a hundred percent Cuban with him and and then he said but why would you want to be a hundred percent Cuban of all things and at that point I became angry and said well you can't be a hundred percent something because you could be a hundred percent stupid and that's what you are at which point he goes running and tells the teacher of course and the teacher comes running over and tells me that I can't call someone stupid and of course I take my consequence I agree that I deserve a consequence but what's problematic is that I tried to explain to the teacher why it was that I had said that to my classmate and my teacher was either disinterested or unwilling to engage in that conversation and as a fifth grader I wasn't able to have dialogue with her to really encourage her to address that issue and I find that problematic because now as a researcher I know that that story is not the exception but instead the norm and so part of my journey as an elementary education teacher with a focus on multicultural education is to engage in meaningful dialogue with my teachers and in dialogue that sometimes we differ right so that they can become more comfortable in the uncomfortable so that their students that come from marginalized communities can engage in those dialogues and so that the problem doesn't perpetuate itself so at the second grade my teacher asked me to draw my family and I drew lots of people because I have a big familia you know and so I drew all my people there and she told and she came over she said no Jessica just your nuclear family I thought that was a really weird word to associate with family and so I must have given her a puzzled look because then she explained that a nuclear family are the people that live with you and well all of those people didn't live with me a lot of them actually did because I lived in a multi-generational home and so I thought well if you insist I guess I have to erase a couple of these people but by and large they're they're all gonna stay on the paper and I and I remember her shaking her head and taking a deep sigh and walking away and although she never said that I got the problem wrong I remember really feeling like I hadn't understood a concept and I don't think that's an answer that teachers get to decide and so I want my students to notice those moments and I'm not saying they're gonna not have those moments but if they can notice it they can go back and say wait a minute that's not what I meant by that tell me about your family and why you're choosing to include them in your nuclear family that's a very different idea than sighing and walking away so for example when I was told that my family picture was wrong or that I couldn't say if somebody was a hundred percent stupid hopefully the ability for them to see those patterns in the podcast will also allow them to see those patterns as they emerge in their classrooms and that they will be able to engage in those dialogues with their students as a result the way that Jessica uses podcasts in her classroom are to it creates a really rich and engaging content by having different mediums of information brought into the classroom and I haven't specifically used podcasts with my students partially due to the fact that I work with pretty young students and they don't have quite the attention to listen to the podcast that we listen to in our college level class so I haven't used podcasts in the same way that Jessica does but I have tried to model her use of bringing engaging materials into the classroom to create a really authentic experience with whatever content I'm using for my kids which is something that I model after her use of materials such as so it you can tell that it sparks interest in whatever topic in a way that I think is really unique to the format of podcasts because you're actually hearing stories from the voices impacted by those stories I think just having an audio version of content makes everything more palpable and it feels more authentic and real to listen to someone tell their story or to listen to someone talk about something is just more engaging and more authentic