Conversations on Demand: Podcasting for Outreach, Preservation, and Professional Development
By: Darren Kinsman
The Questions
Within the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) there is a special interest group that advocates the use of performative activities like speech, drama, and debate in the classroom. Performance in Education (PIE SIG), disseminates its approaches and activities in peer reviewed articles, forums, presentations, and workshops. When I served as the group’s Vice President, I repeatedly found myself faced with the same questions. How can we make our group more visible online to attract new members? How can we spread and preserve our message more effectively? And how can we reduce the friction of initial engagement with our group?
Membership and Workload
When I became the PIE SIG President in 2025, I wanted to increase our online presence by having officers create original content related to our publications, conferences, and classroom techniques to boost engagement. However, the increasing professional and personal responsibilities of our SIG officers left them with little time for new initiatives. As a result, I sought a highly impactful yet sustainable alternative.
Conferences, Publications and the Issue of Outreach
For years, our active members spent much of their energy on conferences and publications. We were presenting at PanSIG, the JALT International Conference, and SIG conferences in Sapporo and Okinawa, while also organizing our own independent events.
Conferences are effective for teambuilding, networking, and engagement. However, they require time and financial commitment, and their impact is often limited to those who attend. Unless recorded and made available online, they are also ephemeral, which limits opportunities to revisit and build on their content over time.
We were also publishing articles in our peer-reviewed journal, Mask & Gavel, and in our practice-oriented, Classroom Resources. Some members were also contributing to the popular and well-crafted MindBrainEd Think Tank magazine.
Academic journals like ours contribute to the knowledge base of our field and increase our academic credentials. However, they are not intended for broad outreach. Educators work under competing demands on their time and attention, and reading a lot of academic articles outside of a research context can add to this cognitive load. Thus, many of us gravitate toward less demanding mediums of engagement.
Our group therefore needed to lower the barrier to entry, sustain interest through regular dissemination, preserve ideas, and extend the reach of the SIG over time.
How about a Podcast?
One warm evening in 2025, after a JALT executive board meeting in Tokyo, I mentioned the idea of launching a podcast to Steve Bretherick, President of the JALT Sendai Chapter. He immediately saw its potential to generate greater interest in PIE.
I believed a podcast would boost our online presence, create a lasting repository of knowledge and personal life stories, and offer a nearly frictionless entry point into our SIG. Because podcasts are so easy to access on smartphones, especially when listed on major platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, they make it easy for new people to discover and engage with us.
As long as I had willing guests, I was confident that I could create and sustain the educational podcast entirely on my own. In return for sixty to ninety minutes of their time, they would reach an international audience, preserve their personal stories and educational approaches for posterity, and add a compelling credential to their professional portfolios. In turn, PIE would gain visibility within their networks, thereby expanding our audience and strengthening our credibility.
I wanted to treat the guest as the true expert while positioning myself as a curious guide who gently weaves performance concepts into their personal stories. This approach would render their ideas easier to follow, more memorable, and above all, deeply human.
When networking with fellow educators, the podcast becomes a natural conversation starter. A brief exchange is often all it takes to recommend a specific episode tailored to their interests. Because most already have a podcast app on their phones, subscribing is effortless. Later, they can listen while walking, exercising, or moving through the routines of daily life. Many people, in fact, prefer listening to reading. Moreover, EEG studies show that, contrary to common worries, listening to podcasts during physical activity can sustain strong attention and support effective knowledge acquisition. When an episode resonates, listeners can easily explore others, turn to our articles, or even join us at a conference.
Above all, I hoped the podcast would strengthen the SIG’s overall media ecosystem. Academic publications offer depth and academic credibility, conferences deliver visibility and networking opportunities, the website and social media provide ongoing interaction, and the podcast serves as a smooth, low-barrier entry point with sustained engagement. Together, these channels create a powerful, self-reinforcing system.
What Drew Me to Podcasting?
As a boy, I was an avid listener of both local and shortwave radio stations and was drawn to the voices introducing music, news, and opinion. I remember a red plastic radio attached to the handlebars of my bicycle so I could listen while on the move. I also used a cassette recorder to capture radio and television programs, sometimes pretending to be a disk jockey. Even then, I was not only listening but trying to preserve and replay what I heard.
I was also fascinated by our family’s photo albums. They allowed me to look into the past and see my mother as a child or my grandfather as a baby. Decades later, I pursued a master’s degree in photographic preservation, a field concerned with identifying, preserving, and making accessible our photographic heritage. During this time, I videotaped my parents as they looked through these albums and spoke about the people and places captured in the images. I wanted younger members of my family to hear these stories and connect the photographs with voices.
Looking back, these interests share a common thread: preserving experience and making it accessible across time. Podcasting continues that very impulse, allowing ideas and voices to be recorded, shared, and revisited.
Research, Planning, Decisions, and Equipment
Educator Gregory Lewis, a PIE member based in Korea, helped me choose a quality microphone and audio interface for my original plan of making field recordings and audiobooks. I later set those projects aside to focus on the PIE SIG Podcast. Fortunately, this meant I already had most of the equipment I needed. I also had experience with Apple’s GarageBand, so I continued using it. My experience with public speaking and both analog and digital recording helped make the podcast learning curve less steep.
I was already a podcast listener, but creating, producing, and hosting one required a new skill set. I spent countless hours learning about the medium before releasing our first episode featuring our founder, David Kluge. JALTCALL SIG President and podcast host Brian Gallagher provided invaluable advice and guidance during my learning process.
As with any worthwhile endeavour, the returns in podcasting are proportional to the effort invested. One could simply chat with a guest on Zoom and upload the raw file, just as one could speak entirely off the cuff at an international conference. Yet the more care one devotes to preparation, recording, editing, and promotion, the greater the value the podcast delivers to listeners, guests, and oneself.
A single episode can easily demand more than ten hours of solitary work, most of it devoted to research, editing, audio enhancement, and promotion. Compressing a two-hour conversation down to roughly thirty-five minutes requires cutting eighty-five minutes of material or splitting the discussion into two episodes and editing both. For busy people, this reality makes a monthly release schedule far more sustainable in the long run than the twice-monthly cadence often recommended. Recording two additional episodes before launch creates a two-month buffer, an approach that has allowed me to maintain both the buffer and a consistent monthly rhythm.
The good news for anyone thinking of starting a podcast is that it is genuinely achievable with surprisingly little: a decent microphone, basic technical knowledge, and a reliable hosting platform. A working understanding of interviewing and podcasting practices certainly helps, yet these skills sharpen with experience. Once your audio quality feels acceptable, release the first episode. Then keep releasing. With consistent effort, your own distinctive voice and style will gradually emerge.
Workflow
Where does an episode begin and end?
A week before recording, I send the guest a simple outline. I also let them know that to keep the conversation feeling organic and authentic, the conversation may occasionally move beyond the outline. At the same time, a careful balance must be struck between authenticity and a professionally produced episode.
Most guests are people I already know or have met previously. A short informal chat before recording helps them relax. During Zoom interviews, I keep the cameras on to maintain natural interaction, even though the final podcast uses only audio.
After the recording, I edit the audio and share the file with the guest for review. I will not release any episode that a guest is unsatisfied with. I then create the episode description and promotional materials, and release the episode on the fourth Tuesday of each month.
Podcasting and Professional Development
When I first envisioned the podcast, I gave little thought to professional development beyond the perspective of the listener. I now see that the PIE SIG Podcast supports professional growth from three distinct angles.
For listeners, it offers on-demand access to innovative teaching ideas in a globally accessible, engaging, and surprisingly personal format.
From the guest’s perspective, preparing for a podcast resembles preparing for a conference presentation. Yet the experience differs in a crucial way: a recorded conversation demands that they articulate their ideas in real time, inside a dialogue they only partially control. The medium itself shapes the message. Unlike a carefully edited article or a polished, well-rehearsed talk, the podcast introduces a productive degree of vulnerability. However, that vulnerability is tempered by the opportunity to review the audio after editing and offer feedback before the final episode is released.
As host and producer, I experience the deepest professional growth of all. By carefully reading the guest’s articles in advance, crafting questions that connect their work to their life story, conducting the interview, and then editing the conversation multiple times, I engage with their ideas far more intensively than any listener. Repeated passes through the audio often reveal nuances and insights that only surface with time and distance.
Several episodes have offered especially valuable insights. David Kluge underscored the importance of clearly explaining the value of PIE activities to students before introducing them and of designing lessons that thoughtfully balance student agency with responsibility. University educator Ashley Ford-Mihashi reinforced the central role of audience in building confidence and encouraging genuine reflection. Juilliard-trained actor and educator Kevin Bergman highlighted that cinema and the stage achieve their effects through fundamentally different means, requiring careful compromises when adapting a film for theatrical performance. Dr. Dawn Kobayashi emphasized that while creativity can be taught and developed, only a select few will attain Big-C creativity. Dr. Kim Rockell deepened my understanding of embodied language learning through his work with body percussion. Heather Kretschmer demonstrated that it is sometimes wiser to remove barriers for students rather than force them to confront every obstacle. And retired professor Saiki Yukari introduced a creative classroom application of kamishibai—traditional Japanese paper theater—that places students in the spotlight as creators of their own stories.
A recurring theme across these conversations is the question of what we should be teaching students as artificial intelligence assumes an increasingly central role in society. Although each guest brings a distinct perspective, many converge on a single, essential idea—captured most memorably by Dr. Dawn Kobayashi: “We’re teaching them to be better people.”
Looking Ahead
The podcast is now in its second season. We have released more than fifteen episodes and we are now at 1000 lifetime downloads. In a world where countless podcasts disappear after only a few episodes, simply surviving this long with a consistent release schedule is itself a meaningful achievement. Future growth will depend on steadily building and retaining an engaged audience.
Most importantly, the podcast has answered the central questions I set out to solve when I first launched it: how to increase the Performance in Education SIG’s online visibility, spread our ideas more effectively, and lower the barrier for initial engagement with the group. Today, a Google search for “PIE SIG” returns many relevant results, the majority of them linked directly to the podcast. Each episode is promoted across the PIE SIG newsletter, the JALT Sendai Chapter newsletter, the JALT National newsletter, JALT publications, our website, and social media. Guests now come from both inside and outside the SIG, steadily widening our network, while the episodes regularly highlight our articles and presentations. A growing number of listeners tune in regularly from six countries.
In a remarkably short time, the podcast has done exactly what we hoped it would: it has recorded, preserved, and made accessible the voices, ideas, and lived humanity of the leaders in our field—both for those with us today and for those who will come after.
Darren Kinsman, MA, is a university language educator in Sendai, Japan. He serves as President of the Performance in Education Special Interest Group (PIE SIG) at JALT. He also produces and hosts the PIE SIG Podcast, where he captures the ephemeral and preserves it for current and future listeners.