Zines, Podcasts, and Pedagogies of Possibility

Research in neuroscience suggests that joyful experiences increase dopamine levels in the brain's reward system, enhancing memory, attention, creativity, and motivation. When students encounter novelty and engage in metacognitive reflection, exactly what happens when they create media to explain complex ideas, they activate brain regions essential to deeper learning. But this isn't just about neurochemistry. It's about recognising that learning is social, embodied, and fundamentally more than cognitive.

What if we stopped asking students to demonstrate what they've learned and started asking them to contribute to what we're all still figuring out together?

The Limits of Academic Writing

Traditional academic writing privileges certain kinds of intelligence whilst often marginalising others. It rewards those who can construct linear arguments in prose, who feel comfortable performing confidence about complex topics through authoritative language, who already possess cultural capital that makes academic conventions feel natural rather than foreign.

This creates significant exclusions. Students who think visually, who understand through stories, who need to speak ideas aloud before writing them, who come from traditions that value collective knowledge-making over individual expertise, all find themselves disadvantaged by formats that treat analytical prose as the only legitimate form of knowledge expression.

More fundamentally, academic writing often forces artificial closure on questions that remain genuinely open. The essay format demands conclusions, definitive arguments, neat resolutions to problems students are still wrestling with. This teaches a particular relationship to knowledge that prizes certainty over inquiry, answers over questions, individual mastery over collaborative exploration.

Media-making offers different possibilities. A podcast conversation can hold contradictions that would read as weakness on the page. A collaboratively-created zine can juxtapose fragments and images without demanding they resolve into a single argument. A video can capture the embodied, relational dimensions of workplace experiences that disappear when translated into academic prose.

Inclusive Learning Through Multiple Modalities

Research on playful learning demonstrates that meaningful engagement happens when students can bring their full selves, their backgrounds, passions, cultural ways of knowing, into dialogue with course content. Media-making creates space for what Django Paris calls "culturally sustaining practices" that support learners in maintaining their cultural competencies whilst accessing dominant academic skills.

Consider the different entry points media offers. Students who feel intimidated by academic writing might discover their voice through podcast conversations. Others who struggle with linear text find zine-making opens pathways to complex ideas that prose obscures. Many who need to externalise their thinking suddenly have access to forms of argumentation that honour how they actually process information.

This is about expanding what counts as rigorous intellectual work. When students create a video explaining workplace ethics concepts to next year's cohort, they're engaged in complex work of translation, audience analysis, and knowledge curation. When they design a zine about sustainable business practices, they're making choices about what to emphasise, how images and text can work together to create meaning, what aesthetic decisions communicate values.

The collaborative nature of much media-making also interrupts the isolation that characterises traditional academic work. Those who struggle with confidence in individual essay-writing often flourish when knowledge construction becomes social. They discover insights through dialogue that they couldn't access alone, develop ideas through the creative friction of working with others who think differently.

Joy as Pedagogical Method

There's something powerful that happens when students laugh together whilst creating media about serious topics like workplace justice or climate change. It's what Immordino-Yang and others have shown to be essential: positive emotional states that enhance motivation, sustained engagement, and long-term memory formation.

The delight of discovering you can actually use technology you thought was beyond you. The satisfaction of crafting a podcast episode that genuinely helps someone understand a complex concept. The surprise of realising that your zine layout choices are actually sophisticated forms of visual argumentation. These joyful moments don't distract from learning; they create the emotional conditions in which transformative learning becomes possible.

Yet creative satisfaction alone doesn't make learning transformative. The most powerful media-making experiences combine delight with a form of what some call productive discomfort, the necessary friction that emerges when familiar ideas encounter new forms of expression. Students often report that attempting to explain their thinking clearly enough for a podcast reveals gaps in their understanding they hadn't noticed. The constraints of zine-making force them to identify what really matters most in complex arguments. Video editing requires decisions about pace and emphasis that make implicit knowledge explicit.

Learning as Legacy-Making

Perhaps most importantly, media-making shifts the fundamental purpose of educational work. Instead of producing assignments that get marked and discarded, students create resources that genuinely serve future learners. This transforms the relationship to audience in meaningful ways.

Traditional assessment creates artificial audiences, students perform their learning for tutors who already know the material. But when students create podcasts for next year's cohort, they're engaging with real knowledge gaps, genuine learning needs, authentic communication challenges. They must translate complexity into accessibility without sacrificing depth. They must anticipate confusion whilst avoiding condescension. They must find ways to share not just what they've learned, but how they learned it.

This positions students as knowledge creators rather than knowledge consumers, a shift that research consistently links to increased engagement, deeper understanding, and stronger sense of agency. When learning becomes contribution rather than performance, students develop anticipatory agency: the recognition that they have a role in actively constructing the knowledge commons rather than simply consuming what others have produced, a mindset essential for navigating uncertainty and shaping alternative futures.

The Embodied Dimension

Creating media requires different forms of attention than writing essays. The pause whilst recording, waiting for the right words. The tactile experience of cutting and arranging materials for zine-making. The iterative process of editing, where you discover what you actually think through the act of revision.

These aren't incidental features, they're educationally essential because they engage learners physically and emotionally, turning reflection into embodied action. Learning is always embodied, even when traditional education pretends otherwise. Media-making makes this visible, creating space for ways of thinking that academic writing typically excludes.

Students report that ideas emerge through the creative process that they couldn't access through writing alone. The collaging student who discovers unexpected connections between images. The podcast creator who realises mid-conversation that they understand something differently than they thought. The video editor who finds that their choice of music changes the meaning of their content.

Questions for Practice

How might we design media-making experiences that serve learning rather than just engagement? What scaffolding do students need to understand editing as thinking, layout as argument, sound design as meaning-making?

How do we help students see that these aren't different ways of presenting the same ideas, but different ways of having ideas altogether? This might begin with explicit reflection on their creative choices, asking podcast creators to notice how speaking aloud generates insights they couldn't access through writing, or having zine-makers articulate how their layout decisions function as arguments about what deserves attention.

What would assessment look like if we took seriously the different forms of intelligence that media-making reveals?

Most fundamentally: What if we treated media-making not as a trendy alternative to "real" academic work, but as a method of developing the collaborative meaning-making capacities our students will need for the kinds of challenges that demand collective imagination rather than individual expertise?

Positive emotional states, social interaction, meaningful purpose, and multiple ways of knowing all enhance learning. Media-making as sense-making brings these elements together in ways that traditional academic formats struggle to achieve. The question isn't whether this approach is rigorous enough for higher education. The question is whether we're brave enough to expand our understanding of what rigorous learning can look like.