Breaking Silos Podcast

Welcome to the Breaking Silos podcast page! You can also view our Soundcloud page or Apple podcast page or our Spotify page. 

Breaking Silos is a podcast that engages in deep discussions about guests’ scholarship and the ways that scholarship may help teach or assess language and communication in college classrooms. Our guests come from a wide range of disciplines and research areas, many not directly about the teaching of writing. The hope is to engage in conversations that break the academic and teaching silos we often work in in the academy. And in the process, we hope that writing teachers and other listeners will find our conversations fun, engaging, and meaningful to their classrooms and students. 

The Hosts

Shane Wood is Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of Central Florida. His research interests include writing assessment, multimodality, and writing program administration. His book, Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs, is a collection of conversations about the theory and teaching of writing in postsecondary contexts in the 21st century. 

Asao B. Inoue is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. His research interests and many publications focus on antiracist writing assessment and pedagogy. A list of his books can be found on this site, as well as a selection of his articles and book chapters. 

The Episodes

• Episode 4: Henry A. Giroux (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) discusses his essay, “Youth and Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability: Connecting the Personal and the Political.” The conversation focuses on personal, political, and historical elements shaping identities, empowering young people, corporate power and greed, bearing witness, and more just and sustainable educational futures. 
• Episode 3: Frank B. Wilderson III (University of California, Irvine) discussing his book Afropessimism (2020). The conversation moves from considering the social death and negation of Black people in the world, Blackness as social death and what it may mean for the writing classroom, and the role of education in Wilderson's life. 
• Episode 2: Michael Russell (Boston University) discussing his book, Systemic Racism and Educational Measurement: Confronting Injustice in Testing, Assessment, and Beyond (2023). The conversation focuses on ways the field of educational measurement has historically been an "apparatus of oppression" through its use of white racial framing, and what writing teachers might learn from this for their own teaching. 
• Episode 1: Jennifer Randall (University of Michigan) discussing her article, "Color-Neutral is Not A Thing: Redefining Construct Definition and Representation through a Justice-Oriented Critical Antiracist Lens" (2021). The conversation focuses on culturally and socially situated assessment practices, antiracist frameworks for assessment design, decentering whiteness, rubrics, and myths about language and writing.

A Note About the Podcast

The discussions and ideas offered on this podcast are not intended to represent the positions of either the University of Central Florida or Arizona State University. They are the sole opinions of its hosts and guests.