Over the past two decades, podcasts have emerged not just as a site of entertainment but of education. Science journalism has flourished, as have both research- and story-based podcasts about mental health, history, design, and every area of human endeavor. Podcasts about education, however, about the practices of being teachers and students, have remained on the fringe, thriving in their own way among practitioners, but failing to find a wide audience. Kit Nicholls is launching Seed Catalog: A Podcast about Teaching, Learning, and Hope this fall with the aim of building a stronger sense of community among people who work across seemingly very different areas of education. For the first season, Dr. Nicholls interviewed sumerologists about the first schools in recorded history, ethnobotanists and representatives of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault about how people preserve knowledge in seeds, an Olympic swim coach, acclaimed authors, philosophers, some of the world’s preeminent clowns, and even some Cooper teachers and alums. Join him for a conversation about what he learned about teaching and, most importantly, about listening.

Kit Nicholls received a Ph.D. in English at New York University and a B.A. in creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is co-author, with William Germano, of Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (Princeton University Press, 2020), and his essays have appeared in venues such as European Romantic Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Psyche.