April 12, 2019
Room 9204
The Graduate Center
11:00am – 1:00pm

Presenter: Elena Foulis, The Ohio State University

Lecture Description:

Podcasts are an increasingly popular way to learn about an issue or a community through an intimate form of storytelling, and they present an innovative avenue for language pedagogy.
The university-based podcast Ohio Habla is produced with students in Advanced Spanish Heritage Language and Latina/o/x Studies courses. Each student does all the necessary planning and researching, secures a podcast guest, and carries out an interview. In the process of producing an entire 30-45-minute episode from start to finish, students develop reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. This presentation explains the podcast’s background as a project that is born out of an oral history collection that emphasizes storytelling as a venue to learn and inform those who listen, and outlines how it works as a pedagogical tool for developing creativity and socially-engaged writing, interviewing, and listening skills.

Elena Foulis is a Senior Lecturer of Spanish, Service-Learning and Heritage Language at Ohio State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. Her research and publications explore U.S. Latina/o literature, Latin@ voices in oral history, and oral history as participatory pedagogy in service-learning classrooms. She currently teaches courses in service-learning and Spanish for Heritage Speakers. She is also working on a digital oral history project about Latin@s in Ohio, which is being archived at the Center for Folkore Studies’ internet collection.