Helping Students Explore Culture, Effect Policy, and Find Their Voice

By Anne Sands

Erin Johnson is an associate professor of instruction in Management and Entrepreneurship in the Tippie College of Business. She is the recipient of multiple teaching awards and honors including the Collegiate Teaching Award and the Innovations in Teaching grant. She is particularly interested in international business, leadership, and how identity functions in the workplace.

Before Erin Johnson started using a podcast project in her International Business Environment class, she was never quite satisfied with the conclusion of the course. “I felt like I was always circling between various end of semester assignments,” she said. She would try an analysis paper one semester, a business case study another, sometimes adding a class presentation to the project, sometimes not. “I kept thinking about how hard my students were working,” she said. “They’re putting in all this time and effort and I’m giving them feedback that perhaps they’re reading and perhaps they’re not, but no one ever saw [the projects] again.” Then podcasts started to gain popularity, and Erin started listening to them in her free time. “I thought, ‘Oh, this would be a really great way for students to demonstrate that they’re doing all these things—they’re collecting data, they’re talking to people, they’re synthesizing, they’re analyzing—but what they’re producing is something really tangible.”

So, she contacted a center on campus that specializes in teaching digital projects, Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning (IDEAL), for tech support and help designing and leading a new final podcast assignment project. She recognized that helping students showcase their skills and knowledge in this more accessible format gave them a tool they didn’t have before. They could talk about a paper or case study in a job interview, but they could include a link to a podcast on their resume or play it for curious family members who wanted to know what their child or grandchild was doing in school. “Some of them post it on their LinkedIn page,” she said. The project not only helped students learn, practice skills, and showcase their new expertise, but it would also have meaning and usefulness beyond the confines of the course.

Erin took things a step further and made sure that her students’ projects found an audience on campus as well. Because her course prepares students to navigate the cultural, legal, and political aspects of international business, she became curious about how they could gain experience with other cultures if they couldn’t afford to study abroad. She spoke to her students and realized many of them worried about the same thing. She started to ask them questions like, “What are other ways you could get this experience?” or “How could the university help you gain these skills?” These questions would eventually grow into a final course project where students conducted research and interviewed people to figure out how to acquire the skills they needed. They then fashioned their ideas into a podcast that proposed a way that students could gain intercultural competency. “I had a group of students who was really interested in proposing a course on the intersection of food and culture,” she said. “And they actually interviewed someone at the University of Oregon who taught a similar course there.” Other students spoke about longstanding friendships with international students. Still others interviewed faculty, advisors, and family members about their intercultural experiences.

The first semester she taught the project, Erin invited people interested in international business and study abroad to class: faculty, advisors, program directors, librarians. “I said to my students, ‘This is a topic that people on this campus care about,’ and this was even before Covid, right? People want to know how to get students these skills because not everybody can study abroad.” Each team of students played their podcast for an invited faculty or staff member and then had a conversation about their ideas. They discussed the pros and cons of the various proposals, how the students’ ideas could fit into existing college policies and programs. “I think the students really felt heard,” Erin said. “I think it was really rewarding for them.”

Other times students found audiences for their work on their own. The group who had interviewed a friend who was an international student realized how siloed and isolated students from other countries often feel. They took these concerns to the Undergraduate Senate in the College of Business, and the Senate began drafting a survey to better understand the experiences and struggles of international students in Tippie. “They did this project and through doing it, they saw a need for something within the college,” Erin said. “And people listened to them and said, ‘Yeah, let’s investigate this.’” The students’ podcast helped spark a college-wide discussion about how to better serve their international student population.

I asked Erin what she found challenging about teaching the project. “I always worry I’m going to get pushback from students,” she said, and sometimes at the beginning they were a little resistant, or in the middle of editing their audio they felt stressed, she admitted. But by the end it was clear that they were proud; they had something to hang their hat on. “They think, ‘I’ve produced something here that other people find engaging,’” she said, “something that other people find compelling and interesting.”