Michael Roberts's blog

Presenting Violence in the Classroom

Michael Roberts — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:22:05 +0000

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Michael Roberts

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I teach a Literature class called “Banned Books and Novel Ideas.” It is one of the most popular courses in English at the University, with eight sections being taught this semester. Undergraduates prefer this course to others, I assume, because the title suggests something controversial, risqué, or explicit about the course material. Or at least it does to me; I think that a course on banned books should explore the history of controversial literature and take the reasons for banning books seriously. To me simply celebrating our “liberal open-mindedness” in the academy seems a worthless and self-congratulatory endeavor. So when developing the syllabus for my version of this course, I decided to seriously pose the question if there are any fictional texts that should be read or seen by no one. This question led me to organizing a course full of texts that have unusually violent or graphic material that was considered too disgusting for various audiences throughout the last 400 years. This question also led me to The Human Centipede 2.

For the blissfully uninitiated, The Human Centipede is a 2010 Dutch horror film that falls in the “torture porn” sub-genre, a term applied to films that have little plot beyond the often methodical and disgusting torture of the victims. The film gained notoriety for its particularly horrific and disgusting take on the genre; you can watch the trailer here. The sequel, like most horror sequels, is more of the same, minus the originality. What led me to this particular film, though, is not just that it was banned by the British ratings board; it was that I didn’t find the banning all that disagreeable. After all, what good can come to anyone of the viewing of ritual violence and mutilation? So while I consider the film itself to be pretty worthless in terms of depth or ambiguity, I find the questions it provokes to be very worthwhile indeed.

Fear not, gentle reader; the rest of the texts in my course are not as empty or sadistic as The Human Centipede 2, but some of them may come close in terms of graphic violence, on both the page and screen. Which brings me to the subject of this blog post: how do you--or how do I--negotiate the presentation of extreme violence and brutality without offending or traumatizing students with (completely justifiable) sensitivities to violence?

I am still working on an answer. And in a way it’s a trick question; the goal of a “Banned Books” course is partially to offend, or to at least seriously consider the effects of offensiveness. What I do not want to do, of course, is bring back past traumas of students who have experienced some sort of significant violence in their lives. With a class of 20+ students, I imagine that the chances are relatively high that at least one student has some traumatic history.

To try to avoid this, I put up several warning signs at the front end of my class. The course description contains a bold Explicit Material warning, explaining the graphic nature of many of the texts we will read. I also try to set the tone on the first day of class by explaining how I was led to The Human Centipede 2 and showing the trailer for the film. Even though the trailer is “Approved for all Audiences,” I warn students of the material and give them the option to leave or look away. Afterwards, I let them know that if they have trouble watching or reading scenes of violence, to come up to me after class. I tell those students that they can have alternate assignments to the particularly explicit readings, but that this might not be the best class for them. All of these warnings are intended to give sensitive or traumatized students the chance to drop the class, or at least to let them know what they are getting into.

Interestingly, about half of the texts that I teach have a less-than-serious tone, despite the violence that they use. This is in part because I teach a unit on genre analysis of horror fiction, which typically takes gruesome pleasure in deaths and murders. I want these texts to be fun, but also want us as a class to explore the varied emotional responses to violence and the desensitizing effects of the genre. To do this I juxtapose the least serious moments of the class—horror film analysis--to the most serious: Night and Fog, a holocaust documentary. The documentary truly horrifies my students (who are, again, warned), but the comparison and contrast with horror films is usually one of the most productive discussions of the semester. The contrast between the different emotional responses forces us as a class to examine our own reactions to violence, realism, and history. It also highlights one of the running themes of the class, which is the diverse ways that literature uses disgust.

Again, I am still working through ways to deal with such graphic content in a sensitive way, but thus far my best strategy has been a general openness in the classroom about the emotional responses that the texts evoke. I want students to feel accepted (or even justified) in feeling horrified, but also for us to be able to examine how and why these reactions are provoked. And while I have had some students who have had to pass on particular videos (it’s always video, which is interesting but worthy of another post), all of them have had fruitful discussions about their own feelings and reactions to the class texts. That seems like a good start.

Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

Michael Roberts — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:03:51 +0000

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Michael Roberts

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"facebook" by pshab on flickr

All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents. But besides the obvious privacy issues, the friend request from the student brings up another social negotiation: is it appropriate, or desirable, to become friends with a former student, in any sense of the word?

I don't know if, as Chris Ortiz y Prentice suggests, “you could describe the entire social apparatus of modern-day public schools... as the protection of the adults from the students' sexualities, and vice versa,” but a certain amount of anxiety lingers regarding student-teacher interaction, even at the college level. Even as we encourage an egalitarian camaraderie among our students, we work to maintain a clear distinction between instructor and student. We dress the part, we present strict-sounding policy statements, and we speak with authority even we discussion ventures into unsure territory. Unfortunately, it is all the more important for women and young instructors to maintain this authority. If students see the instructor as a friend, mother, or object of lust, the educational relationship could become confused or compromised, which could create problems for both teacher and student. Most instructors I know are therefore (sometimes painfully aware) of the negotiations involved in creating a classroom ethos. Be informal but professional; encourage participation but not over-sharing; be available to discuss coursework but not ex-girlfriends; be friendly but not a friend.

In terms of negotiating social relationships, though, Facebook is the Wild West. The near-universality of the website also brings with it serious confusion as to its role in the social lives of its users. Some people use Facebook as a professional networking tool, while others use it as a venue to publish their most intimate thoughts and feelings. So what does it mean when a student friends an instructor on Facebook? Is she trying to make a professional contact similar to networking sites like LinkedIn? Is he curious about the instructor's private life, and wanting to start and informal friendship? Is the “friending” the beginning of a flirtation or romantic courtship? It could mean any of these, and additional, more complicated possibilities abound. “Friending” on Facebook is an interesting topic of cultural semantics; the relative novelty of the interface means that the significance of the act is still in flux in our culture, and has diversely rich meanings for different user communities. While interesting, though, this cultural confusion is dangerous for student-teacher relationships, and most of my colleagues wisely avoid Facebook friendships with students.

This social networking issue gained particular relevance for me last year, though, when I taught Rhetoric 309K: The Rhetoric of Facebook. In the class we studied some of the social issues I describe above, as well as issues of privacy, accessibility, and marketability that arise on the website. Not only did the class use Facebook as its object of study; we also used Facebook as the medium through which much of the class was conducted. Each student created a new class-only Facebook profile, and friended class profile as well as each other. They had to update their profiles week by week, updating research, posting screen shots and analysis, and commenting on their classmates' progress. In general this ad-hoc Facebook network worked so much better than my previous forays into class blogging or discussion boards; the students were already fluent with the technologies of writing, sharing, and commenting, and could focus more on the content of the class, which happened to be rhetorical analysis of those very technologies.

The Facebook networking of our class had unintended social consequences, however. The students had to write at least one Facebook post a week, but were free to share more if they chose to. Some students did, and their posts were not always related to the coursework. Some would invite the class to their a capella concerts or basketball games; others would post their articles in The Daily Texan. When a student had a birthday, many of her classmates wrote on her Facebook wall wishing her a good one. A few students even posted funny videos that were borderline inappropriate for a college classroom. In short, some students used Facebook like their audience was their friend group.

The student interactions with me also became more and more informal. Since I distributed assignment updates on Facebook, most of my students contacted me via Facebook message instead of email. These messages were, predictably, often less than formal, and occasionally used the misspellings and abbreviations common to text messages. In fact, many of them were probably sent from smart phones. Embracing the technology, I held office hours on Facebook chat from my usual office in Parlin. I had record numbers of students ask questions on the chat program, but the interactions also veered into the personal, funny, or inappropriate in ways that had never happened in face-to-face conversations. In short, I was delighted at how comfortable my students with communicating with me in this novel format, but also a little concerned about maintaining the distance and authority required to conduct the class.

I addressed these issues by bringing them to the forefront of our in-class discussion. Both semesters, in the second unit on rhetorical analysis, I discussed both my classroom ethos and their interactions with me and each other. I chuckled at a few anonymous students' misspelled messages, but then moved on to how the technologies might affect their self-presentation even in the classroom. These conversations were very productive, and did not shut down student participation. By the end of the year, most of my students had a pretty sophisticated understanding of what the social and rhetorical stakes of Facebook actions are, including posting, liking, and, of course, friending.

That said, I still do not accept friend requests from students, current, or former. In my class on Facebook, we had the time to discuss the nuanced social jockeying that accompanies the Facebook friendship. In my previous and subsequent teaching experience, I have had neither the time nor the inclination to discuss the implications of social networking. And frankly, some things are better left private.