Blogging Pedagogy - popular culture

"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.”

The Chicken In the Egg: Theme and Comp in the Truthy Classroom, Revisted

Aaron Mercier — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:17:26 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

uggoy

I want to revisit my post from last semester today, because it dealt with the lessons of grading the first major assignment in my first advanced composition course, and this week I found myself doing the last class meetings before this semester’s first major assignment deadline.

I put last term’s lessons into practice this time around by revamping the content and sequence of my readings, favoring media criticism and reportage over theoretical material, putting a few more blog assignments in before the first major assignments, and revising the prompts so that they more clearly integrated class conversation and blog work. Last class was devoted mostly to discussion of a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik on Salon.com, about the Shuar tribe’s struggles against international mining interests and the Ecuadorean government.

Also new this semester, for the first time in my 4 ½ years of teaching composition, is the challenge of a truly combative student. Unchecked, this student will casually dismiss the ideas of others, monopolize conversations, and pull hard to chase down every tangent he sees. After the second class meeting in January, I was sweating bullets over this kid. I didn't know how to keep him in hand without outright suppressing his voice, or getting seriously disruptive pushback from him. As it turns out, however, his approach to the material, and to classroom conversation, has become quite a blessing for me in terms of finding ways to teach rhetoric from strongly thematically-oriented readings. For one thing, he will occassionally make some factual claim that just sounds wrong to me, and as a result, without singling this one student out, I've been much more diligent about making sure students are keeping track of what specific claims are made in discussion, and fact-checking in real time. This use of the networked classroom to habituate "research" as the knee-jerk response to controversy is a good deal less disruptive than it sounds, and has provided tons of opportunities to talk about the differences, and the interrelationships, between information and argument as a class. That set of interrelationships, I think, is at the center of my preoccupying anxiety, the anxiety over balancing strong, interesting, valuable thematic readings (and the energetic class discussions that they provoke) and effective, engaging instruction in the principles of rhetoric and academic composition.

On Tuesday, my combative student argued that the premise of the assigned reading for the day was ludicrous. The reading was a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik on Salon.com, about the Shuar tribe’s ongoing struggles against international mining interests and the Ecuadorean government.It's a provocative piece, full of loaded quotations from protestors, scientists, and mining industry reps, evocative descriptions of history, character, and scenery, and engrossing photography. From the title to the last line, it is a well-crafted bit of activist investigative journalism, published with a big budget. My combative student had a problem with a recurring pop-culture reference that helped structure one of the article's lines of argument about international engagement.

In the opening paragraphs, Zaitchik compares the resistance of the Shuar to the rebellion of the N’avi in Avatar, and he repeatedly circles back to develop and interrogate the comparison throughout the piece. My combative student suggested that the likeliest plotline for Avatar 2 is the humans returning to nuke the planet from orbit. The article, he went on, was irresponsible rabble-rousing for a lost cause, that the Shuar could never resist the march of industrial development, and to suggest otherwise actually contributed to their danger by giving them false hope, and making them less likely to compromise somehow. It was little better than incitement to violence.

Well.

I couldn’t have asked for more class participation at that moment. A forest of hands shot up, and I moderated the conversation as nimbly as I could for a couple of minutes while several students debated his point. Things started pretty calmly, and as the passions were escalating, I chose a breathless pause to intervene. I allowed as how there were some interesting and relevant points about the article being made, but said that at the source of the disagreement is a rejection of an argument that Zaitchik isn’t actually making.

While it’s true that the Avatar reference is strange and problematic in a lot of respects, it plays a complex rhetorical role in the article’s subtle account of the situation. The argument my students were having started with one of them taking a passage out of context. You can’t ask for a more teachable moment.

Recently on this blog, my colleague Laura Thain posted an interesting reflection on the controversy model we use to structure lower-division comp courses here at UT, where she talked about the ways in which discussions of popular culture can powerfully engage students and frame effective teachable moments about the relaitonships of the descriptive, analytical, and evaluative modes of reading. Her post struck a chord with me because it offers another way of approaching the concerns I voiced in my last cotribution to BP, and also of thinking about the Avatarargument as well as another recent class discussion.

A couple of weeks ago, you will recall that Applebee’s had a bit of a "social media meltdown" in the aftermath of Pastor Alois Bell’s theological confrontation with the institution of tipping in American foodservice. When that happened, I acted with the hard-hitting, decisive responsiveness that a course on Truthiness allows—nay, demands!—and assigned them a blog post by R.L. Stollar, an Oregonian journalist who stayed up late the night of that "meltdown," taking screen caps of Applebee’s social media feeds. The reporter offered a fairly trenchant analysis of the rhetorical mistakes Applebee’s social media people made, accounting for their content as well as the fundamentally inept negotiation of Facebook and Twitter, both as communications platforms and as communities. He used the screen caps of the feeds as block quotations, and did it like someone who paid attention in his comp courses. Anyway, that was all the stuff that made me interested in the article. The day that reading was due, I actually had to interrupt the class conversation to start class, and had to do so in a raised voice to be heard. Of course, they were arguing about the substance of the issue: the rights and wrongs of Alois Bells’ notes, of the firing of Chelsey Welch, of Applebee’s PR explosion.

In both these cases, I was able to steer the conversation rhetorically simply by asking a student followup questions about their remarks. With the Stollar article, I had to ask two questions: how are the screen caps like block quotations in a lit paper? How does Stollar use them to stack the argument in his favor? After that, they were off and running. In the case of Zaitchik's article, it took quite a few rounds of Q&A, but I started off asking my combative student exactly what part of the article he was objecting to. When he couldn’t point out a specific passage, I asked him how we could investigate the question of the article’s overarching message, and then opened it up to the class. One person suggested looking for a thesis in the introduction. No such luck: the article begins anecdotally and develops as an overlapping series of historical vignettes, editorial asides, narratives and interviews. Another person suggested we look at the conclusion. The last paragraph was baffling. Someone else said maybe the conclsusion came before the last paragraph, and I suggested that perhaps the conclusion spread across two or more paragraphs.

How had the author structured the article, I asked? Silence. Did anyone make a reverse outline, the way we’d practiced in class? No. Fine, that’s why we have whiteboards and projectors and visualization software, right?

So the rest of the class was spent producing, as a class, just such a reverse outline. We didn’t find anything we were all willing to call the thesis of the article until close to the bell, and not in the first or last two paragraphs. More and more notes got taken as the conversation wore on, and I saw quite a few a-ha moments when we’d take a particularly complicated bit of the text and I’d apply some rhetorical or composition principle to it. The abstract, theoretical language of rhetoric instruction was actually making sense out in the wilds of the reportorial jungle.

Still, though. I remembered seeing those sorts of frownsmile-nods before I got the first crop of major assignments last term, and I remember how many hours of feedback-giving on the subject of rhetorical analysis and what it means, and methodologies suited to its execution ensued. I mean, I expect that’s what every first round of feedback in lower-division comp classes always looks like, but I was trying to limit the number of times I’ll need to repeat myself on the basics this time. So I assigned no reading for Thursday’s class. Instead I gave the whole class over a small-group exercise geared towards building on some visual rhetoric practice exercises and getting them to teach each other discovery and outline tactics. I’ll post that plan on the lesson plans archive soon, but for now, a couple of remarks about how it fits.

With the long articles on Appebee’s and Ecuadorian politics, the students encountered levels of complexity and contingency they didn’t expect to find by lingering in the descriptive mode. Conversations that started off with the evaluative mode holding sway quickly bogged down, getting louder instead of moving forward. They couldn’t help but notice this, and when I showed them that the way out of such dead ends was back through the texts at hand, they followed willingly enough, but we only really had the time to cover the basics. What I did with the following class was present more condensed texts (images), and required the students to generate multiple, and if possible opposed, readings of the same text that incorporated local elements that nuanced a global understanding of the image.

So we teach popular culture, as Laura said, not because of any of the inherent merits or problems in its content, but simply because it’s popular. Popular texts are designed to be accessible, to engage readers, assertively develop audience investment and to communicate their contents clearly and efficiently. As such, they quite deliberately invite, and even cultivate an evaluative mode of engagement from a casual reader, but this is more blessing than curse for the rhetoric teacher, because it means you have plenty of opportunities to defamiliarize your students from a lifetime of over-passive reading habits. When that happens, the student, like the scholars Laura talked about, discovers what we did: that defamiliarization and demystification go hand in hand, that analysis is a productive rather than a destructive activity, and that a critical awareness doesn’t have to mean the death of jouissance.

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.

Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:35:03 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

DestinysChildVEVO

In order to improve my course design and teaching, I ask my students at each semester’s end for feedback on the assignments and course texts. When I reviewed their responses for last semester’s class, in which I taught an E314L class on Women’s Popular Genres, one text emerged as a favorite: the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women Part I.” I used the music video during the first and second class days to introduce students to formal, historical, and cultural reading practices. It did not surprise me to see them bring this up, as popular culture provides unique material for both rhetorical and literary analysis. The various advantages and disadvantages of the material, however, I intend here to further explain.

In this specific case, I agree with my students. Teaching “Independent Women Part I” helped me disrupt students’ expectations and invited them not only to view close reading but the song itself through new eyes. I showed them the video first with lyrics, inviting them to takes notes on anything they noticed in particular: the melodies, the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, the sets, etc. After an initial viewing, during which they also had the lyrics before them on paper, I asked them to talk about what they had observed.

The conversation that followed was wide-ranging: they not only closely read the material but also put it into larger musical and political contexts. They considered how the song’s lyrics and visuals responded to second- and third-wave feminism as well as the specific cultural experiences of African-American feminists. We analyzed how the auditory and visual elements modeled or engaged with these different “feminisms.” The students read the costumes and the performance in light of both the Charlie’s Angels movie the video promoted and the original 1970s television series. We also considered how the song’s rhyme schemes, verses, and bridge build and draw attention to various phrasings, and how lyrics like

“Question: how’d you like this knowledge that I brought
Braggin’ on that cash that he gave you is to front
If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt
Depend on no one else to give you what you want”

developed tone and invited readerly engagement with the text. While the song was familiar and fun, it was also not so recent that they didn’t struggle to reconstruct some of the cultural context (particularly the late-90s/early-00s “girl power” movement). And while we did not have time to read discussions of Beyoncé’s lyrics from pop feminism blog Jezebel, I gestured to it as an example of the connections between art and larger cultural questions.

This may have been so successful in part because, as I’ve previously described on viz, I’ve taught pop culture texts many times before. I’ve planned three classes—one on the Rhetoric of the Musical and two different versions of Women’s Popular Genres—that have all involved popular culture genres: musicals, novels, songs, or television shows. Through these experiences, I’ve learned about the unique challenges that such texts create. For example, teaching my students about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and other musicals in my Rhetoric of the Musical class allowed us to explore the question of how popular culture has commented on and presents arguments about America and “American values” since the genre’s origins in the 1920s. We were able to read and discuss Bruce Kirle’s analysis of Oklahoma!, which argues that the show attempted to persuade people against isolationist policies during World War II. However, the students struggled with accepting the arguments—they had difficulty seeing how something “silly” or “fun” like musicals could have any sort of cultural implications or intent. When teaching them Stacy Wolf’s essay on Wicked, they were even hostile to the arguments. Their own lack of expertise in music also often left them struggling to articulate their analysis of the material: in other words, while they could characterize the melody as “sad,” they couldn’t generally articulate why. Also, while teaching women’s popular genres meant it was easy to allow the students to write their final research papers on any subject they chose, it also meant they were inclined to work on texts that had not yet been included in critical conversations, like the television show The Vampire Diaries or Katy Perry’s music.

Like I tell my students about writing, teaching pop culture texts is a choice with both advantages and disadvantages. Students are easily interested in them, but sometimes lack critical vocabularies to explore them. Their utility also depends on the assignments for which they’re included. In short, I will always enjoy using Glee to teach kairos, but will be sure to provide them appropriate vocabulary to explore how the text performs kairotically.

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.