How your child’s podcast could win the NPR Student Podcast Challenge

Students in grades 4-12 can submit their stories to NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge through May 2. Illinois Public Media's Kimberly Schofield spoke with Steve Drummond and Janet Woojeong Lee from NPR’s Education Desk about the history of the challenge — and what students and adults need to know before they submit. See a transcript of the interview below.

We also shared these winning podcasts from previous years.

• The Jackson water crisis through a student journalist's eyes
• 'Climate Change Is Racial Injustice': Students Speak Their Truth In Winning Podcast
• All past winners

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

SCHOFIELD: What inspired the two of you to get a podcast challenge going?

DRUMMOND: Back seven, eight years ago, we had that terrible shooting in Parkland Florida, and many of the students there had started becoming activists and were speaking out about the gun violence that had happened in their school. And there was a bit of a national discussion about elevating youth voices. And … for some time, we had been thinking on the education team about some project that would kind of put our money where our mouth is in terms of involving students and involving teachers around the country. That’s what led us to start the podcast challenge.

SCHOFIELD: This one is for students in grades 4-12. What parameters do they have to follow, and what can they submit?

LEE: Every work that students produce must be self-made. You should write your own script. Work on it yourself. And for these young students, you have to work with someone who is 18 years or older to submit it. That can be your teacher, in most cases, or we get a lot of entries from librarians, sometimes parents or other educators. We ask that it is limited between three to eight minutes in length. Over the years, we learned, especially from our younger folks, the shorter, the better. We love listening to every minute of it. And one last thing that I would add is not using any copyrighted audio. So we want to make sure that we can share your work on the radio, and want to make sure that everything you have is original material. But other than that, it’s truly open to any topic you want. It could be something you’re working on in class, a passion project, we get a lot of family stories, also a different form of final assignments made. Yeah, we’re really open to whatever you share with us.

SCHOFIELD: What are some of the favorites that you’ve been getting? I know you said you get a lot of family topics from students. What do you like about this podcast challenge?

DRUMMOND: One of the things I’ve noticed over the years, Kimberly, is so many — as you know, young people at that age, we all probably were too, are very focused on who they are and what their place is in the world. And we’ve had a lot of really moving and compelling stories of students exploring their identity or their racial or gender identity, or just their place in the world through their families or talking to their grandparents. But at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve had students engage in actual journalism. One year, a student from New Orleans bought a water test kit at Home Depot, and he took it into his school and tested the water in his drinking fountain and found unusually high levels of lead in the schools. And that made a big stink in the New Orleans public schools. We’ve had entire classes take on an investigative reporting project all over the map. The one thing that Janet and I notice so much every year is the thing that really makes a podcast stand out, is the students really bringing their own passion and their interest in it and really sort of conveying that. If it’s a story that you really want to tell, and you’re fired up to tell it, that tends to come through the microphone and into our headphones.

SCHOFIELD: For the students, when they’re putting everything together, is there anything they should stay away from? Should they be looking at specific levels or being in a certain room? I know that audio quality can kind of be hard if they’re out in the world, but I imagine that ambient sound is okay in this particular case.

LEE: Oh, we welcome natural sound and ambient sound. I would say the one that I would stay away from … we get a lot of entries recorded in the lunchroom that I’m listening to and I’m like, oh, I want to know what’s happening, but there’s all your friends talking in the background, so we can’t hear you. So I would actually make sure you record yourselves in somewhat of a quiet space where we can hear you. And yeah, we love any types of exploring natural sounds, getting interviews. And we also get a lot of podcasts where it’s just one student telling us a beautiful story, but we would love for you to think about how you can use sound to make that something more special.

DRUMMOND: Janet, talk about pillow forts!

LEE: Yeah, pillow forts. I was actually just gonna throw to that, Steve. We have a resources page called Sound Advice from NPR, and one of them is this sweet little video on our correspondent, Don Gonyea, who travels a lot, building pillow forts in different rooms that he has to stay in. So using a bunch of pillows to make, sort of like your self-made studio that any student can make, so you can sound beautiful and kind of round out that room tone. So yeah, that’s just one of many resources we have. We also have one on how to use music, how to collect sound, all using simple tools like a phone and a laptop, and you can do it all. So I would definitely check that out if you’re wanting to take it to the next level.