Over five days, young people working with News Decoder mastered the art of interviewing and learned what it takes to turn audio into a podcast.
Two teens create cover artwork for their podcasts at a News Decoder camp on audio storytelling at the American School of Paris, 27 June 2024.
A teen from Saudi Arabia talked with an Iraqi refugee in London who fought in the first Gulf War. A high schooler from the United States living in Paris interviewed his mom about how she stole a car at age 15. A Taiwanese teen interviewed his parent about why she took her family on a 7,000 mile (11,265 km) trip. These were some of the podcasts that came out of News Decoder’s Audio Storytelling camp at the American School of Paris (ASP) in June.
It was the third time a team from News Decoder came to ASP for a week-long workshop for teens on podcasting and storytelling, intended to help young people across borders tell other people’s stories.
“Each time we do this we are astounded by the ability of young people to ask questions and find compelling stories to tell,” said News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner. “Children are taught to mind their own business. But we say: ask questions, be curious. And they respond. Teens have so many questions. They are so curious.”
Over the course of five mornings, Burstiner, an experienced journalist, gave the teens tips on interviewing and storytelling. Cathal O’Luanaigh, News Decoder’s program and communications manager who has a diploma in commercial music production, gave them a rundown on using audio editing software and gave them tips on getting quality recordings with a smartphone. Most of the teens had no previous experience editing sound.
The teens decided who they would interview and set up those interviews themselves. Once they had recorded the interviews at home, they edited them in the camp. They also brainstormed names for the podcasts and produced cover artwork and trailers. This all culminated in a listening party on the fifth day in which the teens heard, and gave feedback on, each other’s podcasts.
Language as a powerful tool for communication
O’Luanaigh, who teaches classes on English as a foreign language, said that the experience of mastering audio storytelling opened up language learning opportunities and built confidence in their language skills and overall abilities.
“The stories the students produced were impressive,” O’Luanaigh said. “All the more impressive when you take into account that many of the participants were non-native English speakers.”
Daniela Bruneau, assistant director of the Extension Program at ASP, said that she is struck by the growing understanding and appreciation of interrelatedness students get from the interview and the actual story as it begins to take shape through the individual narrative, discovering connections to one’s close and wider communities and how an individual truth often depicts a truth about society.
“They learn to listen and become interested in others,” she said.
The other achievement, she said, is how well students learn to articulate their thoughts and the account through the scriptwriting process aiming for clarity yet with room for creativity. ”I think students are taken by surprise at what they can accomplish and come out understanding that the world can be viewed from other perspectives,” she said.
Maria Krasinski, News Decoder’s managing director, came to the listening party on the last day of camp and noted how well the students conducted their interviews.
“One student I spoke to told me that, while the experience of interviewing was ‘stressful’ at first, it was ‘very cool’ to talk about the lives of others and discover something new,” she said. “And you could hear that thrill of discovery in their final podcasts. They found connections between themselves, with family members and friends, and were able to unearth these really interesting stories on pretty universal themes — and seemed to have fun doing it.”
Breaking out of bubbles
To Burstiner, the most valuable lesson the teens got was the experience of interviewing a human being one-to-one and not through social media.
“It is a powerful thing when you learn that you can talk to someone directly that you don’t know very well,” she said. “That you can ask them all kinds of questions and that they not only are willing to answer your questions, but appreciate your asking them. In a time where no one really talks to each other, the ability to do so is like a super power.”
The podcast camp was just one example of the partnerships News Decoder has with schools around the world. It has guided students to tell audio stories in Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa and the United States.
Elsewhere, News Decoder works with partner schools in the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Italy, Rwanda, Ghana and Colombia to foster global perspectives through journalism and cross-border dialogues through live zoom sessions and one-on-one mentorships with students.The goal is not to teach journalism, but to help students find their own stories and tell those stories through various media they produce – written articles, podcasts, videos and webinars.
These stories focus on problems they see as important: climate change, human rights, conservation, mental health, housing.
News Decoder is the educational services unit of the French nonprofit Nouvelles-Découvertes, whose mission is to foster global awareness in young people through the tools of journalism and media literacy.
Students in News Decoder workshops and mentoring programs are encouraged to connect the problems they see in their community with similar problems elsewhere in the world. One student in the U.S. state of Delaware, for example, for a story on food deserts in his community, found a study that documented similar inequities in the African countries of Namibia, Ghana, South Africa and Tanzania.
“Ultimately we want students to realize that they are part of a larger world,” Burstiner said. “We want to get them out of their social media bubbles. They need to know that they are an important part of their communities and what it means to be a global citizen.”