Blogging Pedagogy - digital humanities

Scholarship Outside the (UT) Ivory Tower

Lily Zhu — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:20:44 +0000

Author:

Lily Zhu

Image Credit:

Sean Spencer & Lily Zhu

I’m currently teaching a course on “subversive” cartoons though as a class, we decided to focus on television shows traditionally aimed at children and pre-teens. It’s been a wonderful, engaging experience with passionate students contributing insights that have never crossed my mind. The rhetorical politics of ignorance in Adventure Time? Addiction and depression in Hey Arnold!? Cognitive difference in Jimmy Neutron? PTSD in Courage the Cowardly Dog? I thought I began the course with a substantial appreciation for subversive children’s programming, but I know that upon finishing the semester, I’ll leave with a deeper understanding that would’ve remained inaccessible to me without my students’ inspiring contributions.

One of the difficulties that I underestimated before starting Unit 1 was finding “credible” sources. Apart from Heather Hendershot’s work, and the odd newspaper/journal article, there is a dearth of traditional critical scholarship that deals with this aspect of popular culture. Even worse, traditional scholarship seems to have stagnated. Homosexuality and Spongebob Squarepants. Of course. Feminism and The Powerpuff Girls – that’s a given. Bronies and My Little Pony. Seems obvious. But what else is there that hasn’t been covered backwards and forwards over the past decade? There is certainly more to subversive children’s cartoons than these simplified, mainstream sound bites that often lack the precision and respect necessary for a good, much less a great, analysis.

It became clear to me that to move past this obstacle, I’d have to ditch everything that had been hammered into me since high school. I encouraged my students to use Wikipedia pages, Reddit posts, Blog entries, YouTube channels (I highly recommend PBS Idea Channel and its sister networks), and other unorthodox – but expansive – forms of information distribution. Currently, the majority of the most valuable, astute, and revolutionary critical commentary dealing with children’s cartoons comes from mainstream viewers. For instance, people who are so affected by their viewing experience that they create sleek, polished websites to publish their views, or, even better, publish the informed opinions of other dedicated fans. I’ve always loved what fandom can offer in terms of socio-cultural critiques, conspiracy theories, constructive debate, and creative works rooted in incisive observations (the alliteration in this sentence was unintentional).

Fandom can be such a wonderful, expressive place not just for social conventions, fiction, and art – but (underappreciated and underutilized) critical dialogue. I hope my students can help bridge the (gradually diminishing) gap between academia’s pristine, ivory tower and the messy, colorful, twisting spires of fandom that lie right across the moat. This shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, academic scholars frequently moonlight as fangirls, fanboys, fanwomen, fanmen, fanpeople…

To bring this all back to pedagogy – I’m encouraging my students to submit the Unit 2 rhetorical analyses of their cartoons to popular culture websites for publication. Regardless of whether their attempts are successful or not, I’m proud of them and their work within fandom and within academia.

(Apologies for the rambling structure of this post)

Graphing Empathy

Scott Garbacz — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 11:20:32 +0000

Author:

Scott Garbacz

Image Credit:

Survey created in Canvas.

This semester, I taught a Banned Books class focusing on the ways that authors deploy empathy. One cornerstone of the class was a series of daily surveys. Each discussion was preceded by a survey (pictured above) in which students gave an informal ranking of their empathetic response to the main character(s) featured in the day’s readings. My goal was to help students theorize their own responses to stories, but I also ended up generating some unexpected revelations.

The surveys about The Satanic Verses went as I expected, but not as my students expected, which provided a valuable learning opportunity. Initially, the novel’s two Indian protagonists were too alien for students to initially identify with them. As a result, student empathy with both characters increased as they found themselves capable of projecting their own identities into Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. Halfway through the book, however, they were surprised to find their ability to empathize with the characters to be dramatically undercut. My general conclusion is that this dropoff was caused when the details of Rushdie’s novel began to violate students’ expectations of the character. The students own responses, however subjective or imprecise, allowed me to introduce the concept of “false empathy,” where a deep sense of empathic connection actually serves to blind students to the realities of these characters. The temporary drop in students’ empathy, then, might actually reflect better reading practices, as they deconstruct false images of the character and began to grapple with the unfamiliarity of the characters. This in turn lead to better, perhaps less false, empathy. Most students ended up reporting their strongest connections with the characters as they concluded the novel.

The graph for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, unfortunately, was less enlightening—probably because I chose the wrong character. I had my students rate their connection not with the traumatized Pecola, but with the book’s primary narrator, Claudia. Since her character was not particularly dynamic, students quickly built up empathy for her and stayed quite empathetic. In fact, the only point of interest was a related poll I did on students reactions to the aged child molester who appears later in the book; those results, however, are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Huckleberry Finn generated the most interesting results, managing to truly surprise me. This was true not in the overall graph, but in the details. Generally, Huck followed a similar sine-curve pattern to Gibreel and Saladin, while the less complex (and more passive) escaped slave Jim consistently gained empathy in a linear pattern close to that of Claudia. Yet on the day that students read about Huck’s climactic decision to free Jim even if it meant embracing a life of wickedness, something interesting happened.

Above, you can see a more detailed breakdown of student’s responses before and after they read Chapter 31. Before, most students felt a sense of “moderate emotional connection” with Huck. That is, they felt emotionally tied to Huck Finn’s fate, but they didn’t identify with him on a deep level. After Chapter 31, the class polarized. A narrow majority, as I suspected, responded to Huck’s troubled theological and ethical musings by doubling down on their emotional investment in the character, reporting a newfound “strong emotional character.” But a very significant portion of the classroom found the chapter distancing. They reported being able to “see where he [Huck Finn] was coming from” intellectually, but they lost (at least temporarily) their ability to empathize with Huck.

Charting empathy using an online survey at the beginning of class turned out to be not only a great teaching opportunity, but a great learning opportunity. It certainly didn’t provide rigorous data, and I would be hesitant to make any firm claims based on such an informal series of surveys, but it did provide something valuable: a new way of thinking about how students read, and a series of talking points allowing students to reconsider the nature of their empathic connections with fictional characters.

Field Report: Eighteenth-Century Literature Meets Twenty-First Century Tech

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:27:20 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

Emily Friedman / Prezi

The weekend of March 21st, I was able to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. While I always enjoy attending panels on subjects related to my academic research, another delight is seeing how other eighteenth-century scholars talk about teaching. Far from being stodgy or leather-elbow’d, the scholars on the SHARP panel “Wormius in the Land of Tweets: Archival Studies, Textual Editing, and the Wiki-trained Undergraduate” showed off projects and classroom pedagogies for teaching students about scholarly genres and book history practices.

Because SHARP is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, many of the academics on the panel discussed what kinds of digital editing projects their students had accomplished. The digital edition is a great place to teach all kinds of scholarly labor: researching textual histories, deciding on a copy-text, making editorial and style decisions, writing footnotes and scholarly introductions, locating and incorporating contextual documents and academic research to provide background, as well as considering how to address and direct their work for a particular kind of audience.

On one hand, Dr. Stephen Gregg of Bath Spa University showed off online scholarly editions of Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman and A Hymn to the Pillory that his students created. What’s nice to see is that Gregg’s students themselves considered questions of accessibility: how can more people access high-quality editions? What kinds of audiences should the text and notes be prepared for? His students chose online delivery systems for their texts and even considered how the coding itself is a separate kind of text. They considered how to remix the eighteenth-century page online: one student opted to preserve the catch-words while the other used hyperlinks for the notation system. Each text includes a critical apparatus to explain its methodology as well.

On the other hand, Dr. Emily Friedman of Auburn University had her students create a proposal for a new critical edition of a text. They examined first editions of various period texts and discussed and examined critical editions like Broadview’s edition of Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers to think about what an edition could include. Her students then produced PDFs with sample statements of editorial style, critical introductions, and contemporary textual elements like book reviews. They also designed cover illustrations for their editions and wrote reflection pieces on how the cover represented the book. Her Prezi shows not only pictures of the completed projects but also the students from the class who successfully won a research award for their work.

Interactions with physical books weren’t limited to research archives. Dr. Evan Davis of Hampden-Sydney College discussed how he taught students book history by asking them to take blog posts they had written for the class, revise them, then actually produce a physical book of them. As his course covered Gutenberg to Google, he forced students to embody a variety of experiences from book history, whether reading a book in different formats (iPad, Kindle, and book) or in different situations (by candlelight). What interested me in this was not only the consideration for how format and design affect the reading experience but also how students played around with the low/high tech concerns: one student printed his book with QR codes inside, so the reader could move from physical object to mobile browsing.

Finally, Wayne State University’s Dr. Lisa Maruca teaches the eighteenth century through media events like the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or the début of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Maruca then connected her concerns with public events with the students’ own public personas, encouraging them to choose a blogging platform like WordPress or Tumblr and develop their professional identity on the blog. Maruca got even the digitally resistant students thus to consider questions about design, intellectual property, and publicity through their own created persona, linking the past with the present.

As an eighteenth-century scholar myself who is likewise interested in increasing my students’ digital literacies alongside my own, joining the historical study of communication technology with how to conduct it in the present, such work is deeply inspiring. If you’d like to learn more about the kinds of ideas exchanged at the conference, feel free to delve into the Twitter archive created by Ben Pauley.

Why Teach Popular Culture?

Laura Thain — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:13:09 +0000

Author:

Laura Thain

Image Credit:

Wikimedia Commons

This semester, I have taken great pleasure in teaching The Rhetoric of Celebrity to a group of enthusiastic and talented students. In my office hours a few weeks ago, a student who came in to discuss a recent assignment with me began our conversation by asking if “all rhetoric teachers had to be so young.”

“Well,” I answered, “most of us are graduate students, so we don’t have our PhDs yet. We’re generally in our twenties and thirties.”

“So, what do you want to do, you know, professionally? Do you want to work for TMZ someday?” she asked. I smiled a little and explained that I was a doctoral student studying 18^th century intellectual history and the English novel. She looked perplexed. “Why are you teaching us about music and movie stars and stuff then? Were there stars back then? What does what you teach have to do with being a professor?”

It’s a provocative question. Many of us shy away from studying our “pet” interests in the mass media to make ourselves more marketable—out of fear of entering an oversaturated market of scholars of popular culture. I’ve also heard many of my colleagues voice concerns over ruining what they love by studying it: “I just want to read/listen to/view __________ and enjoy it without thinking about how I can interrogate it!” is a common reprise in graduate offices. But I don’t think we really mean this. In fact, on our Facebook walls, in our informal discussions, and in our lesson plans we examine and analyze the media objects we encounter constantly. We express excitement when we find a particularly glowing example of a rhetorical principle in the most recent broadcast of SNL or The Daily Show. We talk about the ethics of ironic distance in The Colbert Report and Lena Dunham’s Girls. We laugh at memes that mix Derrida with Honey Boo Boo; we eagerly await the season openers of Breaking Bad and Homeland. I even have a fairly well-rehearsed defense of Britney Spears in terms of Barthes’ Mythologies.

At the heart of the importance of cultural studies in general, and popular culture in particular, is the interrogation of the evaluative mode of rhetorical discourse. The controversy model upon which all of our introductory composition courses here in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing are based emphasize three main modes of discourse: the descriptive mode, the analytical mode, and the evaluative mode. These modes represent a cumulative skill set—that is, that one cannot analyze before one can describe, and one cannot evaluate before one can analyze. Within this model, evaluation usually takes place in terms of a position paper on a social issue. For instance, last years’ first year forum book encouraged RHE 306 students to argue for a particular position on school reform; this year, the first year forum topic is oriented toward digital democracy and Web 2.0.

This unit structure transfer neatly into classes that deal directly with public policy—the Rhetoric of Protest, the Rhetoric of Gentrification, or the Rhetoric of Disasters—because the evaluative unit of these course topics easily fits into an argument for policy change. But how do we teach evaluative rhetorics in less civic-minded classes? How do we teach students how to evaluate a music video, a documentary film, or a comedy routine?

Teaching popular culture can be a crucial tool in teaching students how to make the evaluative turn when examining implicit, rather than explicit, styles of argumentation. Because students are often already familiar with the content, they are able to draw on a vast array of cultural associations when formulating their own series of ethical or aesthetic criteria, which is a crucial precondition for adept rhetorical evaluation. It is what keeps students and scholars alike from falling back on response-type criticism alone and seeing larger systems of meaning in media objects. It is what elevates the rhetoric classroom from book club to site of social critique. I believe the most important objective of teaching the evaluative turn in rhetorical theory—as it is in the descriptive and analytical units, as well—is to emphasize the utterly essential concern of audience. In order to do this, we must teach students to think beyond their own personal responses and consider how different rhetorics appeal to others. This process always begins with students learning to recognize these processes within themselves, but they must move beyond this in order to understand the effects of rhetoric in society at large.

The flaw of “book-club” style reader-response is that it is utterly centered on the individual and encourages us to read complex implementations of standard cultural mythic structures for plot, and the actions of the characters within these cultural media objects as somehow changeable. This elicits responses from students such as “If Britney hadn’t driven around LA during the summer of 2007 looking for attention…” or “If Mookie hadn’t vandalized the pizza shop in the end of Do the Right Thing…” in the same way that a reader might muse on the fate of Heathcliff had he not left Wuthering Heights to find his fame and fortune. This sort of response to popular culture undermines the ability of readers to discern that the choices the characters before them make, whether real or fictional, are nonetheless mediated by cultural forces as a precondition for audiences to even understand that a choice was made. In other words, the action and the depiction of the action are the argument; we cannot separate them from each other. Learning to make the evaluative turn rhetorically in popular culture means understanding that we judge the acts of groups or individuals as they are mediated through implicit media arguments; that is, we must teach students to examine with scrutiny the carrier of the message as much as the message itself, because one cannot exist outside of the other. In this exercise, the use of digitally-equipped classrooms is an invaluable tool, because the discussion of the dissemination of cultural myths in media objects is not only technologically possible but environmentally fostered.

Teaching popular culture means teaching students how to read and understand the content and power of implicit arguments as mediated by mass culture. It means deferring knee-jerk evaluative judgments—ones without distinct sets of ethical criteria. It means recognizing and resisting assumptions about the distinctions between high and low culture, and understanding mass media as, at least in some sense, a reflection of, rather than the cause of, cultural attitudes and mores. Close rhetorical analysis of objects in popular culture deconstruct the myths of societal devolution and help us to understand ourselves in our own moment without perspective and without hindsight—all things that make us better readers, better viewers, and, perhaps ultimately, better citizens.

The Case for Digital Submission

Cate Blouke — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:53:39 +0000

Author:

Cate Blouke

Image Credit:

Cate Blouke

It's the end of the semester, and across the nation an all-too-familiar sight is littering the hallways of English departments: the box of student essays. Sometimes it's an envelope, sometimes it's a stack of papers half-shoved into a mailbox or under a door. But the sight of these final papers abandoned by their students and/or professors reinforces my conviction that it's time for us to move to digital submission.

While assessing student essays on a computer screen isn't without challenges (I find myself making many fewer positive comments in the marginal remarks, for example), there are a lot of good reasons why I made the decision to go digital. And I encourage you to consider making the switch for the semester ahead. First and foremost, digital submission improves work flow - for everyone.

No more misplaced assignments: word processing software has its risks regardless of how the final product is formatted. Students will inevitably forget to save documents or suffer computer crashes and viruses before an assignment is due. But digital submission means that once an assignment is turned in (via e-mail or the class wiki or website), there's no longer a risk of any assignment going astray. With the date and time stamping of any digital platform, there's also never any question of when an assignment was submitted.

Coursework isn't restricted to class time: when assignments can be turned in from a computer, the time-frame for submission is opened up well beyond the one hour window two or three days a week. This expansion can benefit both students and instructors. Digital submission gives you the freedom to allow students extra time to revise after Thursday's useful class discussion, but they can still get their papers turned in before your weekend grading binge. It can also reduce turn-around between assignments. You can ask your students to submit short papers each Tuesday, but you won't have to kill yourself to get them graded by Thursday if you can provide your feedback over the weekend.

Feedback becomes a semester-long process: when your comments are stored in a digital file, you (and your students) can access your feedback at any time. You can say farewell to the days of file folders filled with multiple drafts and assignments (which often go astray or unexamined). When grading a student's essay 2, you can look back at essay 1 to see how they've improved (or if they're still struggling with the same problems).

Grading revisions is a lot easier: when you have digital copies of both the original and the revised version of an essay, comparing the documents is a snap with Microsoft Word's "compare documents" function. The changes a student has made will be highlighted, and you can quickly discover if they followed your suggestions and how rigorously they revised.

Smaller environmental impact: this might go without saying, but digital submission is obviously a way for composition instructors to feel better about the environmental impact of their assignments. Given that the U.S. paper industry (alone) consumes 83 million tons of paper each year, requiring 40.5 million trees, and "clear cutting an area half the size of Texas" - I like to think I'm making some small effort to reduce those numbers.

All this being said, I do agree with my colleague, Jay Voss, who argues for the value of seeing one's writing in print. While I encourage digital submission for my students' final assignments, I always hold peer review workshops in print. Though I'm dubious about the efficacy of the feedback they receive, the physical act of marking up a paper (whether their own or a fellow student's) has proved extremely valuable for my students.

No system is entirely perfect. Digital submission means that I can't generally grade papers on the bus, and I'm less prone to use Word's comment function for positive feedback. But in the age of e-readers and social networking, I can only think that asking students to submit assignments electronically is an exercise that better prepares them (and me) for the times to come.