Project Lead: Prof. Paul Hutchison (Professor of Education)
Vivero Fellow (2025-2026): Nino Kirtava
Link: https://totallybananas.sites.grinnell.edu/
The major assignment for the students in my Tutorial (it’s called Totally Bananas) this semester is to research, write, and produce a podcast episode that focuses on some aspect of bananas of particular interest to them. While it’s not exactly an “academic research paper”, it provides a context for learning about research resources. And we talk about genre – podcast script – and organizing information in sensible and engaging ways.
It is my hope the Vivero Fellow will contribute in a couple of substantial ways to this project. I would welcome a Fellow who brings some familiarity with Audacity and/or a willingness to learn about using it to record and produce a podcast episode. I have not used it before this summer and have only played around with it, so I’ll certainly be in learning mode too. I can imagine the Fellow helping support the students in the class make sense of using Audacity along with me and possibly providing some support outside of class toward the end of the semester as they begin to record their episodes. I anticipate one of the things we’ll do together during the first part of the semester is produce a sample podcast episode.
Another important contribution I hope for is building a website that will allow us to make our podcast episodes available to the general public. I anticipate that work would bridge the fall and spring semesters. In the fall I’d ask the Fellow to do some research into what other similar websites look like, how they’re organized, etc. I anticipate the website would allow the students to make some supplemental resources available for their episodes. Then we’d collaboratively make some website design decisions and the Fellow would start to build the website. Of course these episodes aren’t due until the very end of the semester, so much of the work of assembling and polishing the public-facing website would have to happen at the beginning of the spring semester. At some point in the spring term we’d go live with the website and publicize it. I think the project would probably be done at that point.
