 As an elementary education teacher who is focused on multicultural education, I recognize the need to help future teachers engage in these difficult moments that happen in their classroom, right? And what I was noticing when I was using textbooks is that students weren't really coming to class ready to talk about anything. They were showing up as your regular student, sitting in the back of the room casually saying, Teacher, it's your job. Tell me what was important about this reading. And I tried strategies like finding ways for them to ask questions and stuff, and they just seemed to be hesitant about engaging in dialogue. And I wasn't sure what was causing this, but I noticed myself listening to podcasts and sharing it with friends. And I thought maybe, just maybe what's causing or contributing to the problem is the fact that I'm asking students to engage in something that's difficult to talk about. And they're reading about it by themselves, maybe in their room, in the library. And then I'm asking them to get really public with something that's hard to talk about. And so as a teacher, I know that one of my tasks is to scaffold the tasks that I'm asking them to do. And so I asked myself, how can I find a way to make the dialogue more comfortable for my students? And so one day I just stumbled upon the idea of podcasts. And I thought, that is leading them and it's a stepping stone towards engaging in dialogue themselves. And so what would it look like in my classroom if I replaced the traditional readings that are locked behind firewalls that are costly, that were made for academia and not for the general public. What would it look like if instead I inserted podcasts that were readily available on the internet that were created for the average person, not for academia? And as a teacher, I'll admit I was a little hesitant because it wasn't as technical as the textbook, but I thought I would give it a shot. And what I noticed was there's always this awkward five minutes before class where as a professor you're logging on to the computer and students are quietly sitting there waiting for class to begin, waiting for you as a professor to formally begin class. And that five minutes started to change in my classroom when I started to do podcasts. And instead students were talking to each other about the podcast before I even logged on to the computer. And on occasion the discussion got so good that I would pause before beginning my class. I thought, why should I interrupt? What good instruction is already happening? Even without my opinion I would sit back and I would listen, listen in on them. And it was so interesting to hear their dialogue. Because what I found out was that oftentimes they had listened to this in the car as they drove somewhere and their peers that were not enrolled in the class happened to be in the car. And so they had already had a space to hear somebody else's opinion on the readings. And so I found that interesting because never before had I had someone say, well I was driving down to Seattle and I had to do this reading so I decided to read it out loud to everybody in the car. If they read it on the way they would read it by themselves. And so they started to have their own co-conversations prior to the start of class which I think prepared them for the dialogues that we were going to have in class. I've also created the read analysis guide for students to be able to synthesize their learning and be prepared because one of the challenges of a podcast is that there's not a hard copy that you've highlighted and taken notes in the margins for class and so how do you come ready to engage in dialogue in class? And so that's a really good starting point and one of the neat things to do with the students is to ask them well what were your three big takeaways? And you can see patterns being established across the room and so the natural inclination is to have dialogue about the patterns because those probably were more important since most people wrote those down but instead I find it quite interesting to have dialogue around things that they differ on especially given the content of the course in order to become more comfortable with areas where we might disagree with one another and having those dialogues about areas where we disagree I found that students are more comfortable having those dialogues in part because I think that sometimes the podcast, the people who are creating the podcast sometimes they disagree and you can hear their disagreements coming out and you're listening in on a conversation and so it's easier to envision how you yourself can insert yourself into a conversation that's similar to the one that you're listening in on and so what happened when I started to implement podcasts is that students felt much more comfortable, were much more willing to engage in dialogue and felt like it was a practice that they could continue to do after leaving the university because it was something they could find on their own for free