A scoping review of podcasting in social work education: a loose continuum from communication platform to critical pedagogy

With over eight million series available on the two major platforms alone, podcasts are an important contemporary communication medium with a growing popularity in social work education. As social work continues to grapple with contemporary industry needs, student engagement, and the grand challenge of making the most of contemporary technology, podcasting offers one potential method to meet these challenges. This paper utilizes a scoping review method to investigate how podcasts are used in social work education and the evidence for their impact on student learning outcomes. Furthermore, this paper considers the alignment between social work values and the affordances podcasts offer. Following a narrative summary of the current state of the peer-reviewed literature, we argue that the current use and evaluation of podcasting in social work education can be usefully organized in a continuum that can support future attempts to integrate podcasting into the curriculum. We describe this continuum as starting with minimal integration by using podcasts as a platform for disseminating traditional content (i.e. lectures), to podcasts as a resource that informs and enriches student engagement, through to using podcasts to inform critical pedagogies.