Pod Save Williams: Audio Stories about Creating a More Sustainable College

As usual, there are lots of great Winter Study courses to choose from.  So browse around and check out your options.

If you’re interested in campus sustainability and/or podcasts, we recommend that you check out Pod Save Williams: Audio Stories about Creating a More Sustainable College.  Taught by the Zilkha Center’s Mike Evans, this course will explore sustainability challenges, successes, obstacles, and opportunities on the Williams campus.  Students will interview staff, faculty, and peers and will weave those interviews into compelling audio stories that will be shared with the campus community. Students will study interviewing, storytelling, and podcasting best practices and will use what they learn to create interesting podcasts that are both rich in content and in sound.

Guiding questions will include: How is sustainability being integrated – or not – into the operations of campus? What daily activities are most impactful both carbon emissions-wise and ethos-wise?  How do social justice and environmental justice intersect with sustainability on campus and in this region?  Who are the unsung “campus sustainability heroes”?  What opportunities and challenges lay ahead related to these issues?  How does one tell a story in a way that is universal or at least relevant to one’s intended audience?  What are the opportunities to enhance storytelling by using an audio format as the medium?

Students learning sound mixing in last year’s Podcasts from the Farm course

Informative and impressive podcast creations will be used as resources on the Williams sustainability website and will be posted to Stitcher, iTunes, and Soundcloud.

A number of assignments will involve listening to and critically analyzing podcasts. Our time together will be a combination of learning about campus sustainability issues, analyzing content and audio choices, practicing interview techniques, and getting feedback from peers.

The class has wrapped up, so now you can listen to the audio stories that these students created on Soundcloud, Stitcher, Applepodcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

 

You can also listen to other student-created audio stories here:
Podcasts from the Farm” Winter Study course 2017
Small Space Radio” created by Ariella Markovitz, the ZC’s 2018 podcasting summer intern