Know your audience

As in: Teaching , The Living Dead

In an elevator yesterday, I forgot this primary rule of communication. I was chatting with our associate dean about the j-session course I plan to teach this coming January, Understanding Zombies. Here's what I should have said:

I'm planning to propose a media and cultural studies course focused on the horror figure of the zombie. Students will watch films, read comics and stories, read some critical theory, and produce projects in the last week. I'm calling it Understanding Zombies.

Here's what I said:

I'm planning a course for J-session. It's called Understanding Zombies!

Horrified blank stare. The associate dean then mentioned that someone last year tried to propose a one-credit course in "doing your taxes". I spent the rest of the elevator ride assuring him that it would be far more rigorous than the tax class. D'oh.

Metaphor generators: TV research

As in: Teaching

Peanuts inspires a research writing assignment

Choose a historical person or event that you already know something about. Spend an evening (at least three hours) flipping channels and watching programs. Try to watch several different kind of programs (sit-com, drama, documentary, news, educational, food, music). Assume that each program is implicitly about your subject. Take careful notes about what you see and learn. Using evidence from your television viewing, build a website that explains, connects, expands, and/or meditates on your event and its relationship to culture.

The Namesakes series

As in: Teaching

In This is Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins shows Marty DiBergi a tape from the "Namesakes" series, in which celebrities read works by authors with the same last name. For example, Denham Elliott reads T.S. Eliot and Dr. J reads the collected works of Washington Irving.

What if you ran an "intro to theory and pop culture" course along similar lines? Each unit features a theorist discussed in class and related to a namesake in pop culture:

• Walter Benjamin on Andre Benjamin
• Gregory Ulmer on James Blood Ulmer
• Frederic Jameson on Jenna Jameson
• Helen Benedict on Pope Benedict

And if you were allowed to stretch it a bit...

• Marshall McLuhan on Sarah McLaughlin
• Kate Hayles on John Sayles
• Gilles Deleuze on Dom DeLuise

Others?

Hilarious typos

As in: Teaching

Proofreading my syllabus for my class that starts tomorrow, I found this noteworthy quip:

I take academic integrity very seriously, and am deeply insulted by it.

At some point in the past, I must have changed plagairism to academic integrity. Ha!

Something to work against

As in: Reading , Teaching

"The inertia of habituation is at work."

Greg Urban uses that short sentence to explain how Casper Weinberger acquired his tendency to use the first person plural we primarily to describe US citizens.

I think the notion of culture as objects moving through space (with inertia, acceleration, and deceleration) is a great way to explain the importance of cultural studies and education in general. Education in its best form accelerates and re-combines culture; it also shows learners how to do the same.

Having explained this concept to my students, I can imagine using the notion of the inertia of habituation to address concepts we know by habit.

I can tell I'm going to like this book a lot. Thanks Jeff!

What Bombed

As in: Composition , Teaching

For the last few days I've been participating in the 2005 CASTL conference. It's been a pretty cool experience that helped me get insight into some of the ways people do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (or SoTL, which most pronounce like SO-tul but one guy pronounced to rhyme with bottle). Of course, as a compositionist, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was nothing new—we built our profession on it.

Craig Nelson, one of the featured speakers, presented several key points, but the big one was "sharing" your teaching knowledge with others. Again, not a new idea in Composition, but new for many of the audience. He led us to several models of SoTL research, starting with the "What Works" article. It seems like those kinds of articles might be best shared in updatable, searchable online resources like the Practical Muse. I doodled in my notes, though, that we also needed a "What Bombed" genre, in which we explain our ideas for teaching projects, assignments with an eye toward the challenges these bring.

I also composed a limerick, reproduced here for your amusement. NOTE: I'm using the less common but more-easily-rhymable pronounciation of SoTL (SAW-tull):

There once was a souce who did SoTL
who looked for a good teaching model.
  He said, with a wink,
  I really do think
the answer must lie in a bottle.