Podfest is an annual event where MASCLab is able to showcase the amazing podcasting and media-making that we do all year. This year, it was hosted on May 3rd in the Teachers College Smith Learning Theater, and was attended by students, faculty, staff and administration. However, if you couldn’t make it, this post is for you! Here’s a full recap of our celebration of all things multimodality. Subscribe to our podcast to listen to all of the episodes featured in this post!
Craftivism Tent
The Craftivism Tent was an interactive exhibit related to our podcast episode about craftivism – the creation of crafts as a form of activism. The episode centers one of the most well-known examples of craftivism: the pussy hat. During the festival, participants engaged in craftivism by illustrating social issues that are meaningful to them on individual quilt squares. The resulting squares illustrated trans rights, black lives matter, stereotyping, homelessness, educational equity, and so much more. These squares will later be sewn together to create a MASCLab quilt!
Student Work Showcase
Students around Teachers College have been working on podcasts and other forms of multimodal learning in classes affiliated with MASCLab!
Where I’m From Wall: Students in Emily Bailin-Wells’s Culture, Media & Education class created podcasts about their “Where I’m From” poems based on the famous George Ella Lyon work of the same name, and created media artifacts to compliment them. Surrounding the samples of their work, we asked everyone to write what “from” means to them.
Dispatches from a Dissertation
This section featured the first “crossover” episode with StoryCenter, featuring MASCLab member Kyle Oliver’s ethnographic research on digital storytelling in faith and faith-adjacent settings. Kyle is pioneering multimodal research methods, including podcasting, in his dissertation process!
Math Histories Podcast
A team of Teachers College students and researchers visited the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore, MD to document the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) and created the Math Histories podcast episode. The historical photos and tessellations featured in this section of Podfest were an invitation to interact and play with the contributions of these Black mathematicians.
Preventing Gun Violence Podcast
A visual representation accompanied a wide-ranging conversation on the phenomenon of firearm use and gun reform legislation, recommendations on policy and areas in need of further research with Sonali Rajan, Louis Klarevas, and Lalitha Vasudevan. Lots of interesting political conversation arose in this section as people reflected on their ideas about gun violence prevention.
Fake News Game
A team of MASCLab members have been working on developing an educational game about fake news this year, targeted towards middle school students and adopting a playful approach towards media literacy. During Podfest, we got to playtest it! We love a little friendly competition 😉
MASCLab Partnerships
The MASCLab Partnerships section showcased the various relationships that the MASCLab has built within Teachers College, our local community, and in our broader scholarly community. The images below include visual representations of the various partnerships that MASCLab has formed!
Take Action Tuesdays: This podcast episode is a talk with Matthew Camp, Director of Government Relations and a PhD student at TC about the college’s #TakeActionTuesday initiative and related civic engagement activities going on across campus.
All in all, it was a great time. It was my first Podfest, so it was awesome to be a part of putting on the event and seeing it all come together! Having a space to showcase and discuss my work, and learn more about that of my peers, was a unique and exciting opportunity. Stay tuned for more MASCLab events, and hopefully we’ll see you at Podfest next year!
Media and Social Change Lab 