Blogging Pedagogy - audience

"Don't Feel So Down": When Your Students Don't Understand Your References

Jeffrey Boruszak — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 18:30:56 +0000

Author:

Jeffrey Boruszak

Image Credit:

Flickr, wumpiewoo, 2010

I recently had a teaching experience I could only compare to being on a sinking ship—like the band on the Titanic, I played my song dutifully as I sunk into the murky waters. With every word I spoke, attempting to explain the material I prepared, I could sense the students’ disinterest, disengagement, and utter confusion. This wasn’t the first time I experienced this sinking feeling of a total misfire while teaching, nor do I expect it to be the last time. And do you know whose fault it was? Julian Casablancas.

Well, let me clarify—it was not Julian Casablancas himself that sunk my lesson, but rather the expectation that my students would know that in the early 2000’s there was a popular band called The Strokes. You see, I was in my introduction to rhetoric and writing class, and the topic of the day was identifying different kinds of evidence and relating them to the main argument. The centerpiece of my lesson was a group exercise involving an op-ed in The New York Times earlier that week. In “Brunch is for Jerks,” David Shaftel argues that Manhattan’s indulgent brunch atmosphere has hit a critical mass, and that the meal’s ubiquity is evidence of widespread gentrification and the failure of the ultra-hip millennial lifestyle. Or, in the words I figured wanted my students to get—“People may think brunch is still cool, but really it’s just two-thousand and late.”

The key to Shaftel’s argument about the hip-ness of brunch is his use of a Julian Casablancas quote at the beginning of his article: “I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.” Shaftel comes back to Casablancas two more times in the piece, representing him as an arbiter of what is cool. “Perfect!” I thought, while preparing the lesson. “This example is straight out of the textbook’s chapter on evidence, and between talking about brunch and referencing a hit rock band, I can keep a fairly dry topic upbeat and engaging.”

WRONG. Once we were in the actual class, my students didn’t seem to really be getting to the “cool” part of Shaftel’s argument. I slowly tried maneuvering them to the paragraphs where Casablancas is mentioned. Still nothing. Finally, a student brings up brunch’s cool factor based on another paragraph. Here is my moment—I ask them to find evidence for the article’s argument on brunch’s coolness, but they can’t find it. As the search gets more and more drawn out, I eventually write Julian Casablanca’s name on the board. Crickets. They’ve never heard of this name before. “He’s the lead singer of The Strokes,” I tell them. Then came the moment I hadn’t been prepared for—my students had never heard of The Strokes.

I had been told this would eventually happen. Another professor told me that his students no longer understand his references to The Matrix, and that one day I would struggle after making what I thought of as a still-contemporary pop culture reference to something my students had no idea about.

And so there I was, caught entirely off-guard by a reference that my students just didn’t understand. And in this critical moment, I fumbled the ball. How do you explain what “cool” is, especially when your reference to what is cool is a rock star whose hit songs you suddenly realize came out over a decade before? Now my students seemed more lost than ever. I wanted to just move on—what I had prepared as the crown jewel of my lesson was a total wash. But there was nothing to move on to—I had to deal with “cool” on my students’ terms, not my own.

And so they left the class with bewildered looks on their faces. It didn’t help that my other examples besides Shaftel’s article also failed to hit their mark (one of these exercises was staging a debate over which Austin burger is better—Whataburger or P. Terry’s…except none of my students had been to nor heard of P. Terry’s). The next class I picked up the shattered dregs of my dignity, and gave them a boring Powerpoint reviewing kinds of evidence to reverse the effects of a disastrous lesson.

And so I am left with numerous questions: What do we as teachers do when we fail to connect with our students, especially when it comes to pop culture? It is something that will only get worse as time passes. But more importantly, what do we do when our references fail? How do we recover? For me the answer is now contingency plans—from this point forward, if I use a pop culture reference as a focal point in a lesson, I need to prepare options so that I don’t leave my class confused and bewildered.

But like I said before—despite my best intentions, this will not be the last time I have a lesson that falls apart in front of me. Maybe it won’t be from pop culture references next time. I’m sure that any teachers reading this have had their share of misfires in the past, and the fear of a bad lesson plan is a constant source of anxiety. So maybe the only option is to take a deep breath, and know that no matter how bad any individual lesson goes, there is always room to recover. Just remember to listen to Julian Casablancas: “Oh baby, don’t feel so down…gonna be alright.”

Teaching to a Hostile Audience, Or, When Your Revolution Class is Full of Counterrevolutionaries

Regina Mills — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Author:

Regina Marie Mills

Image Credit:

publicspeakingsuperpowers.com

This semester has been interesting, particularly because I am always comparing my Fall course on revolution to my summer course on the same topic. My perception of my summer class can be boiled down to one line: “if Communists were fighting for equal rights for women, the end of child labor, and against exploitation of the poor, then why is it so bad to call yourself a Communist?” This line (remembered to the best of my ability) came from a summer semester student and showed the open-mindedness and general willingness to see the inequality, poverty, and contradictions in the US and the world. Of course, we discussed after this sentiment how the history of practiced/attempted communism must make one question the theory, but the ability for my summer students to read sympathetically, first trying to understand the argument then offering criticism, has generally set apart my summer students from the fall.

However, the composition of students in my courses between summer and fall have also been staggering. The majority of my summer class was composed of first-generation college students from low-income or rural areas, and only a few students were white. In my fall class, only a few students are not white. Only 3 claim to have come from impoverished families. I am unsure how many are first-generation college students. In addition, the number of students in my class who are libertarian or staunchly conservative is staggering. I often wonder if they misread my class as “Rhetoric of the Ron Paul Revolution.”

It has taken a while for my students to learn to read generously, since, despite my best efforts, finding conservative/counterrevolutionary texts has been difficult. They are either too long to excerpt, too difficult (particularly since many have older language), or merely newspaper editorials, without the same history or rigor as many revolutionary texts. I have stuck to Locke, the Declaration of Independence, the Confederacy secession documents, and the Second Vermont Republic’s manifestos. However, the list of radical or leftist manifestos seems never-ending, and the class definitely skews to that side.

Teaching to a hostile audience has thus been even harder because I know what teaching to a sympathetic one is. However, it has also been helpful. It has helped me realize that many colleges are full of conservative people (just like my undergrad alma mater was), those who fight for the status quo (or “tradition” as it is affectionately called) either actively or through attitudes of apathy, and those who fight for change I don't agree with. But this mirrors the current world we live in. It is more realistic that those of us who want change will be faced with hostility, and it requires me to up my teaching game, which I think I have, as I have gotten more comfortable with my students and experimented with different teaching methods. For example, I just facilitated a student-led discussion of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West’s “The Poverty Manifesto.” Students brought in the questions, and I merely picked some to help them guide their conversations. I was not allowed to respond, and the students had to talk to each other, not me. I will admit, it was incredibly difficult to stay silent, but I heard from students who I had only heard from a few times (if any) this semester.

Another thing I have learned from teaching a class of counterrevolutionaries is that I don’t need to hide my beliefs, bite my tongue, and allow the sanctification of “neutrality” and “objectivity” to be an excuse I hide behind to not speak up to opinions that hurt the classroom dynamic and go against my ethics. After all, my students don’t. I am a person, too, not a teaching robot. This issue is particularly hard for me, having so recently taught in a public high school where you are constantly required to pretend to be neutral and act like you feel passionately about nothing, giving the idea that all ideas are equally valid (when this is clearly not the case). However, as one of my good friends discussed with me when writing this post, public school and university are not the same. Students pay for the privilege of college and the opportunity to hear the thoughts marinated upon by motivated students and scholars, so I don’t need to succumb to “neutrality.”

Of course, I also have to be careful about the power that comes with the title “instructor” and work to show my students that though I have opinions, those opinions will not lead to lower grades for those who don’t hold the same opinions. I think my move to the Learning Record next semester will help this. I would talk more about the scourge of “neutrality” but I think my colleague Meredith’s recent post will suffice.

The last thing I have learned from teaching to a hostile audience is that the strategies we teach in rhetoric matter. It is true what I tell my students: we grow from having our ideas challenged, by defending our ideas, and by having the humility to realize when some of our arguments fall short. As my students begin to compile their manifestos on topics as varied as when/if a country has a responsibility to respond to genocide, fighting rape culture in India, gun rights, and reforming the tax system, I hope that I see their arguments targeted towards convincing a hostile audience. Then they’ll finally know what it’s felt like for me since August 28th.

Theorizing Social Media in Pop Culture Contexts

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:22:40 +0000

Author:

Elzabeth Frye

Image Credit:

Elizabeth Frye

Social media has long stood out to me as something rhetoric instructors should discuss in the classroom. Aside from email, it is perhaps the most commonly used technology by our students and ourselves. Increasingly, it’s the medium through which we access news stories and forms of information and promotion. Yet, because it raises questions about the overlap between public and private and what’s acceptable or desired in terms of pedagogy, I’ve often hesitated to use it. I don’t necessarily want students to find me on Facebook or Twitter, and I think that most of them would feel the same way. That said, using either of those social media sites as a means of communication for my class has been something I’m avoided. While I know other instructors have used them with great results, I haven’t figured out a way to make them work for me. However, I still think they provide a significant opportunity for discussing argument and appeals.

Because I teach RHE 309K – The Rhetoric of Celebrity, it makes a lot of sense to talk about the use of social media in popular culture. Throughout the semester, students observe and analyze various sorts of media—print and digital—in which arguments are made about particular celebrities and cultural relevance. They also are asked to observe and analyze how celebrities make arguments about themselves. Because social media increasingly functions as a legitimate PR campaign for both celebrities and celebrities as businesses, examining the field allows them to think about digital ethos, argument, and multiple audiences.

I ask them to examine a celebrity Twitter feed or Facebook page of their choice and then in a developed blog post on the class blog to evaluate the celebrities’ social media presences in terms of argument and rhetoric. They consider who appears to be speaking, i.e. if it appears to be the celebrities themselves or their handlers. I ask them to think about how the celebrities imagine or gesture to a viewing audience. I also ask, what kind of ethos is promoted? Are there other rhetorical strategies being used (kairos, logos, pathos)? Are there conversations with others? Who is being addressed or not addressed? Because we’ve already dealt so much with visual rhetoric, students also examine the visual impact of the page and how it connects with the celebrities’ images in terms of other images that are circulating about the celebrities. Students also post screenshots to the blog.

In class we discuss whether there seems to be a common rhetoric and whether celebrity use of social media appears to be different from or seems to align with regular folks’ tweeting and posting. The exercise allows all of us to discuss social media in a way that preserves personal boundaries but is also directly relevant to the content of the course.