On 27th April 2023, the South African Modernism team had the great pleasure of collaborating with Burnley College in Lancashire to create an episode of National College Podcast.
National College Podcast is created in a ‘pop-up’ radio station that travels to colleges and sixth forms around the UK to give students a chance to get involved with creating and presenting a podcast. It is the only podcast dedicated to people studying at colleges and sixth forms in the UK.
The podcast is organised and led by Jimmy Ewing (Lecturer in Radio, University of Salford) with the support of students on the BA Hons Television and Radio Production degree at the University of Salford. South African Modernism team members Jade, Katie, and Hannah came along for the ride, with University of Salford BA Hons English Literature students Aiden Simpson and Megan Hoy, and BA Hons Television and Radio Production students Max Day and Matthew Green.
Burnley College student Josh did a stellar job co-presenting the podcast with Megan, whilst other English Literature students worked with Hannah and Katie on a close reading task in the background. Together they examined intersecting themes of race and gender in Olive Schreiner’s allegory ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, presenting their findings at various points during the episode.
The podcast also included an interview with Aiden, who discussed the best things about studying at the University of Salford, as well as the student experience more broadly; Jade, who gave an overview of the South African Modernism 1880-2020 project and her own experiences of working as a university lecturer; and Dr Emma Barnes (Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century and World Literatures), who spoke to us about the different English courses on offer at the university. In-between interviews, we shared various ‘shout-outs’ from the college students to their friends. We also really enjoyed listening to the songs they selected, as well as soundbites from current students at the University of Salford.
Hannah and Katie were really impressed by the students’ perceptive and thoughtful analytical skills, especially when encountering unseen text under pressure. The close reading task proved timely and useful for the students given their forthcoming summer assessments, with one student informing us that the task ‘developed my skills at close analysis since I had to contend with an extract I had never encountered before’, whilst another student commented that the session ‘was good practice for analysing unseen extracts in our exam’.
You can listen to our episode,
‘Burnley College’, on mixcloud here
If you are interested in National College Podcast, then you can read more and listen to previous episodes here. If you are a teacher and would like to organise a National College Podcast x South African Modernism visit for your own students, then you can contact the team here: southafricanmodernism@salford.ac.uk.