Behind the Mic: Planning the Podcast's Future

An update on forthcoming podcast episodes and series, including three planned series for the next academic year. This summer has been spent editing live recordings and planning new content that bridges academic research with classroom practice.

• Archive episodes are currently being released during the summer break
• The Big D&T meet recording about demonstrations is being edited despite technical issues with audience microphones
• A new pedagogy series features academics (the host, Alice Hellard, Matt McLain, and Sarah Davis) discussing strategies from a research perspective
• Topics for the pedagogy series include demonstrations, product analysis, mood boards, and WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like)
• A series on supporting children with special educational needs and mental health in D&T is being developed
• Looking for teachers to interview about their experiences with SEN and mental health support
• Planning a primary D&T series with Janine Pavlis aimed at primary teachers
• Additional episodes planned featuring contributors to a new book on D&T from Australian colleagues

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Chapters

• 0:06 Podcast update and future plans
• 0:33 Big D&T meet recording challenges
• 1:50 Pedagogy series with academic team
• 4:29 SEN and mental health series
• 6:23 Upcoming books and primary D&T focus
• 7:56 Thank you message to subscribers

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 0:06

Hi everybody. Thanks again for subscribing and supporting the podcast. I realise it's been a long time since you've had your own special episode, so I thought I'd give you an update on where I am with the podcast. At the moment it's the middle of summer and there's archive episodes coming out and I'm also planning three further episodes more series, I think is more what I mean for the next academic year starting in September. I'm just editing today the live recording from the big D&T meet that I did with Alice Hellard and Matt McLean. I've discovered we had some technical issues, so it's going to have to be some rather more editing than I expected, but that was a really good fun to record and we did that about demonstrations and I know some of you were present for that and made a fab contribution, but unfortunately the microphone that we used for the questions from the audience didn't work, so I'm going to have to do some judicious editing for that one and then on Monday that's Monday, the 11th of August, so that'll be the day before you get this episode um, we're recording three more live episodes because we decided that one worked so well that we actually needed to be together for the next three, for this series about pedagogy and so myself, alice, matt and now joined by Sarah Davis, sarah couldn't make it to the big D&T meet. We're going to get together and record three episodes now.

Alison Hardy: 1:34

This pedagogy podcast series if I've not talked to you about this before has been something that has been in the pipeline since early 2020, and I'd hoped to get it all done and recorded before the PAP40 conference in Liverpool in October 2020. Anyway, live events happened and, as usual, I had more projects than I had time. But we've now got on with this one, and this Pedagogy podcast series is based on a style of podcast that Inga Mewburn, the thesis whisperer. You can look her up. She's very academic, so if you're not interested in academia, then might not be the podcast for you, but anyway, it's one that she did about an apple series. No, it wasn't, it was a Netflix series, that was. It called the Chair, and I really liked the style. I really like the fact that it was a contained series from Inga.

Alison Hardy: 2:26

So I mooted the idea with Matt and Sarah a few years ago and now we've got Alice on board and possibly Matt might not be around for so many of them because now he's doing lots of international travel, but the idea behind the series is to be up front and say look, we're academics, we don't teach design and technology anymore. We haven't taught design and technology in schools for quite a while. In fact I might put that in the podcast that we do on Monday about how many years it is collectively, since we were last in the classroom teaching ourselves. But we do have strong opinions about how the subject should be taught and different pedagogical strategies that are used. So this pedagogy series is a little bit more tongue in cheek because we're accepting that you know we're out of touch with the classroom and are much more theory based and research based than we were, but to really use some of the research to unpick some of the things we see going on in classrooms. So, as I said, we did one about demonstrations and we drew on Matt's work, his research about demonstrations the ones we're recording on Monday are critiquing product analysis and Alice is leading on that one and the use of mood boards in design and technology, and Sarah's found some fab research on that. And then Matt, who has yet to get his research papers to me so I can create a script is talking about waggle. What a good one looks like. Now you can hear that I'm sort of laughing about these. We're not saying that these strategies are not great strategies or that they shouldn't be used. We're more using it from a perspective of what have we seen that works well, that doesn't work well and where teachers haven't had that thinking, that underpinning of why these strategies are used in design and technology and how that fits with the whole intention of D&T. So it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek. There may well be some swearing I think there was on the demonstration one and you'll hear more of our personalities because I think the four of us work really well together. So that's going to be a really fun episode to do.

Alison Hardy: 4:29

So I've just done some prep work, as I said, for the scripts for Monday this morning, and then I'm also planning a series about teachers in design and technology supporting children with special educational needs and mental health, and this came from an event I did in Leeds with some D&T teachers back in April, I think it is. I went up there for the day and did a, did a, talk. Some great D&T teachers a whole range from different settings, but two were from schools that had children there had social, emotional and mental health challenges and I'm really conscious from some of the other work that I've done, that there is a dearth of research and even just writing about different strategies to support teachers who have either pupils in their class with different difficulties and disabilities and or disabilities, or also people like the teachers that I've met there who that is, that is, their class. Louise Davis did a book quite a while ago now about this area, but even then I noticed that she didn't have a lot of research that she could draw on, but it was a great book. It's not been updated in a while. I'm not sure if it will be, so this podcast series is sort of a an entry into that and to raise the profile, I've got a few people in the bag ready to be interviewed.

Alison Hardy: 5:55

I don't know whether people are nervous about coming on the podcast because I think, well, I don't know anything, but I think that's a great place to start. So if you, or any of the people that you know, would happily have a conversation with me as we explore some of the challenges and we start maybe from a place of ignorance or maybe from some ideas that people have tried that other people might listen to and think they could try, then do let me know because in all seriousness I want to, you know, get this conversation started and do it over a series. So that'd be great if you could let me know of anybody that you have contact with who could give me, who put me willing to come on the podcast, shall we say. I've got some other bits and pieces on the way. I'm hopefully going to get a recording uh scheduled to do with, um, a new book that's come out, mainly written by colleagues in australia. I was involved in reviewing the book, so I think that's going to be uh, really interesting to get some of the contributors and the authors on from that one. And then I'm also starting to think ahead about other episodes that I might do. Um, so again, if you've got any ideas, um, about what I could be recording on the podcast, that would be fabulous. Um, yeah, I'm kind of on primary.

Alison Hardy: 7:19

That was the other one I was trying to scrabble through my notes. I've got so many different episodes chuntering around in my brain that, janine Pavlis, if you came to the Design and Technology Teacher Education Research meeting in Birmingham, you'll have heard Janine give a fantastic keynote about primary D&T. Janine and I are planning a series aimed at primary teachers teaching D&T and she's got a group of teachers who've given us some excellent feedback and we're going to start trying to get those recorded as well. So if you've got ideas for that, I'll share in a future episode with you where we're up to with that and what the topics are. So I just wanted to give you that kind of background information about what's happening with the podcast and to say once again thank you for your support.