Subject: Re: [CACS] Teaching Cultural Studies continued
We face similar issues in our intro to Canadian Studies course at
Trent which unsettles students' assumptions about a "great and wide"
country they'd love to love. One curious recurring problem we have is
not only with our students, but with our teaching assistants
struggling with their role in the course, teaching political material
they may not support or they may have chosen to present differently.
On 26-Nov-09, at 1:32 PM, Wendy G Pearson wrote:
> I would also like to stay with this conversation if it moves off-list.
>
> My own experience has been primarily with teaching two very large
> introductory courses in Australia (CUL100 had between 550-650
> students each year and CUL101 ran around 375). As a large course
> with (usually) three lecturers and ten TAs, CUL 100 posed some
> interesting challenges. But the one thing that really struck me was
> how much the course confronted students' world views and how often
> they came back in the middle of second year to tell us that what
> they had resisted originally had finally struck home. I'm not sure
> to what extent different approaches to pedagogy might be able to
> speed up this 'eureka' moment or whether the time involved in
> processing a very different understanding of how the world works is
> itself absolutely necessary -- which, in turn, raises some
> interesting pedagogical questions.
>
> Wendy
>
>
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Julie Rak here--the system won't identify me because I don't have a blog. Thanks for starting this thread, which I hope can be a way to talk about teaching cultural studies. I am interested in the fact that almost all respondents mentioned student resistance as their biggest problem. It isn't really my problem, partly because most of the courses I teach are electives, and so students are there because they want to be. The exception is my Canadian Cultural Studies and Literature class, because some students take it in order to satisfy "Canadian" content requirements. Those students resist what I'm doing in all kinds of ways.
ReplyDeleteI've got other problems--how to teach all the kinds of material out there? what about method? Is multi-media all that effective (sometimes I doubt it)? Is there a decent way to teach people about the internet and its politics? I worry about this stuff all the time. That's what I'm writing about right now too.
Thanks Julie, you raise some very interesting issues. I seem to spend too much time on the internet and am often overwhelmed with the amount of material that comes to my inbox through various listserves. I find blogging as a form of 'publishing' provides a level of editorial 'decorum' to discussion threads.
ReplyDeleteBruce
Hi Bruce,
ReplyDeleteMe too, but I think the rest of the list doesn't understand blogging yet. Sigh.
I note that some members would like to continuing using the Cultural Studies list serve.
ReplyDeleteBruce
Hi Julie, thanks for the encouragement.
ReplyDeleteBlogging is a great form of communication and it's a pity that some of our cultural studies colleagues may not feel that it has excellent use value for the continuation of this type of discussion.
Bruce
I have taught an introductory course on Popular Cultural three times now in the English Department at the UdeMontreal using the textbook Cultural Subjects which, as some of you may well know, has some excellent essays that introduce students to a few of the key figures in Cultural Studies such as Adorno, Baudrillard, William and McLuhan. But I find it hard to get students to engage with the text. Itseems that hey are more interested in the films I show probably because they then don't have to read demanding material. If I teach the course again, I think I will switch to the new edition of Popular Culture: A User's Guide. What do others suggest? And how do you get them to read?
ReplyDeleteElaine Pigeon, PhD
Please accept apologies if you saw this before. My messages get clipped by someone or something at the cacs listserv. With really only 4 months left in academia I'll gladly face any objections. Thing is, I never had any trouble teaching CS. I never had trouble teaching material that others ran from or large classes that left some crying in their offices. Never. But, when there was direct action by my students, to whom I taught only critical thinking and the cogent expression of that thought, I was immediately (along with a then-colleague) held as a Rasputin or a Reverend Moon--by colleagues and by neo-con students alike. I've never shaken the "stench" of that in some ways. Probably my inexplicable (to my committee, to colleagues, etc) inability to secure the magic tenure stream job can be connected. Even so the worst sting was being accused of being popular b/c my courses are hip and easy. The only trick to teaching CS and to engaging students that I've seen and practiced is being honest with them and not ever backing away from that. Fearlessly tackling the tough topics (especially sex, religion, politics) makes all the difference. When it comes time to engaging them in the question of participation, my greatest joy and my greatest frustration is still the cult of the individual and its paradoxical relationship with the prospect of actually doing something. I relentlessly hit the cult of individuality every way I know how, including differentiated learning exercises centred on socialization processes. How can you demand that you're a star, you're special, you're going to be a celebrity and then say "what can one person do?" or "that's just the way it is" or "it'll never change"? Somehow the two don't go together. I never shy away from showing the consequences of tacit consent -- something that Cultural Subjects and the User's Guide seem to overlook. Indifference, apathy, resignation, etc. are all just as good as saying "I agree." Activists used to live by "If you permit, you promote it." What happened to that? I say all this because what comes to mind is that the issues raised on the CACS list apply. Frankly, I think some of us have fiddled away while the number of u/g students has doubled contemporaneously with a 30% reduction in faculty (according to Roger Martin's stats). More recently, we've seen programs cut or reduced to shells with the expediency of "current economics" being cited. At times, we've done the master's bidding in the fear that we might be next (the perfect prisoner does what?) We've even endorsed an alleged meritocracy where respect is measured by the size of one's research grant in the same way quality is measured by box office returns. We have our own star system. We can we even have our frustrations if there aren't any classes? How can we expect our students to act when we can't sustain an email list for fear of offending, bogging someone down or because we end up being so pretentiously self-reflexive that we predictably debate the debate? We often look down on k-12 educators (whether we admit it or not) but roughly 36 yrs ago, nearly all of them in the province of Ontario -- over 100,000 -- effectively resigned to protest the refusal of governments and administrators to recognize the labour of education workers. I was 4. My brother was in diapers and our father, like every other teacher, quit his job a week before Christmas. I was just old enough to remember it; I'm old enough now to fully appreciate it. A couple of yrs ago, everyone in CACS was up in arms about something R Fulford wrote in the Post. The response: let's have a panel, which Fulford won't attend and at which we only talk among ourselves, at our conference MONTHS from now. Typical. Predictable. Comfortable. And here we are, we've been taught the ideas, we teach the ideas, and for many of us, we inspired or developed some of those ideas. What's our excuse?
ReplyDeletebest,
marc.