Category Archives: teaching

So I’ve been thinking a lot about sessional teaching and it’s advantages/disadvantages. On one hand, I’m utterly convinced that it’s exploitative – it is the grape picking, the piece-working of the education industry. Working conditions are not good. The pay-per-hour rate seems good, but isn’t really a return due the vast amounts of time tutors spend preparing for classes. While there’s the argument that repeat-teaching is more cost-effective for tutors, in practical career terms, there is no reason beyond professional networking to teach a subject more than once – it’s not going to look terribly good on your resume. Most tutors don’t have an office on campus – they usually share space with other tutors. I use a conference room. This has some serious drawbacks: students are less likely to drop in for assistance (an advantage for full time staff, but no good for students). Staff are unlikely to drop in for a chat, to foster collaborative relationships (a topic of great issue to employers) or to provide a little incidental mentoring. Most sessional tutors, though they may take the time to peruse and pilfer the departmental stationary cupboard (I wish I knew where mine was), are more likely to spend their money on printer toner, photocopying paper, pens and bandwidth on teaching. We shall not even begin to discuss the computer facilities available to sessional teaching staff. And let’s not even approach the difficulties of working in an industry with mentors and employers and full time colleagues who are increasingly depressed, frustrated and angry with their own working conditions (I have a theory: sessional staff are mentored in dissatisfaction as much as teaching techniques, particularly as most out-sourced tutors are hired by the most desperate and overworked staff).
So sessional teaching is not a particularly excellent position for the tutors. I’m not even sure it’s a good deal for employers: casual staff who may at whim depart for sunnier climes, casual staff who, while experienced in sessional teaching may not have the research skills, interests or CV of more permanent teachers.
I have heard a number of arguments for sessional teaching – casualised teaching.
1. One can depart for sunnier climes on a whim. Hm. I think that I would trade secure employment for the suspect advantages of uprooting and repositioning.
2. One can pick and choose staff members to teach with, thus securing some sort of professional network which extends beyond one’s supervisor or even one university. Again, I’m not convinced. Most of the ‘early career academics’ in my position teach – or have taught – at more than one campus, in one city or more. This does give you the opportunity to meat more staff, but it also usually means that the staff you’re meeting are incredibly stressed and have little time or energy for mentoring or … whatever else it is you’re supposed to get out of networking. Teaching across universities also prevents you digging in at one institution – making a little nest, really cultivating proper, working mentoring relationships and contacts and perhaps setting yourself up for collaborative research projects or even – gold of golds – research funds.
I can’t really think of any other reasons which are even half as convincing.
I have been trying to convince myself that there are avenues for some sort of tactical exploitation of my own exploitation. I’m not really buying it, I’m afraid. But what have been the advantages of teaching across so many universities and departments?
1. I’ve been able meet and work with some amazing staff. All of these, but 2 (in the four universities I’ve taught at) have been middle aged woman who I have admired, respected and ultimately wanted to be. But I’ve also seen how gender works in university heirarchies. It is women (and the odd reconstructed bloke) who end up with the stooge’s share of heavy-teaching loads. And while they’ve been wonderful to meet and work with (and certainly fabulous in terms of the old girls’ network), I often wonder if it might be a good idea to attach myself to the types of academics whose ambition and general cutthroatedness have helped them avoid the need for sessional assistants. But then, would I want to work with that type of person?
2. I’ve learnt an awful lot. I’ve taught pretty much the same topics and readings and ideas, and had taught the same stuff across the five universities I’ve been involved with. But each department has had a different name: English department; Cultural studies program within an English department; Media Studies program; Communications program; Media within an English, Media and Performing Arts program. It’s been fascinating to see how each of these programs borrow from the same pool of ideas to produce and construct a ‘program’ – an ivory tower, a network of ideas, an ideology (both research and pedagogic) – which is quite unique. And reflects the professional, personal and intellectual interests and needs of the staff involved.
I am utterly unconvinced that all that institutional positioning and course restructuring makes any difference. People like me are still teaching the same things to young people, no matter what the name of the subject/course/degree, the CVs of the convening staff or the publishing profiles of the departmental heads. While the course convenors might intend a new and interesting and cutting edge subject, in practice their financial and employment restrictions necessitate using the same sessional stooges. And it is these stooges who actually do most of the teaching in universities. And course convenors beware: we are constantly negotiating our relationships to what you’re teaching, and there’s a very, very, very good (as in 100%) chance we’re adjusting and tailoring your subject to meet our own intellectual, personal and political goals*.
And it is these stooges who are steadily acquiring mad teaching skills (well, hopefully, but certainly not definitely. Or even possibly), but who ultimately regard sessional teaching as a step to somewhere else, a momentary aberration from a ‘professional’ career in academia. One which does not involve teaching.
But I have learnt a lot. I’ve seen some very good teaching in action, and I’ve seen some very bad. I’ve done my share of each (though I’d hope for a little more of the former, it’s impossible to gauge my own professional development in such an impermanent and constantly-shifting context). I’ve used some excellent readers (most of which could simply be reproduced as some sort of ‘cultural studies in Australia bible’, with a few addenda for localised interests or nods to administrative reshuffles and demands for ‘more digital content’ or ‘more practical applications’). I’ve also managed to keep up with current research – filtered down through the staff I’ve worked with, and occasionally stimulated by a particularly interesting lecture or ‘optional reading’.
3. I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds and hundreds of really bright, really motivated and interested students. Just when I think I hate teaching and never want to do it again, I have a class where someone says something so interesting it’s on my mind for days. Students bring fresh minds to familiar readings, they bring fresh ideas to familiar discourses, and they bring – in many cases – young approaches to increasingly older institutions. Many of the assumptions staff make about viewing habits or media consumption practices or just plain everyday activities are critiqued and challenged by students simply describing what it is they watch on television, where it is they go to eat and how it is they communicate with their friends, families and teachers. I love them.
I’m also struck by just how much many of the overworked staff I deal with love them. They just plain love their stoods. And they take their teaching responsibilities very seriously. Perhaps the hardest thing to see is a staff member bitching about their work load on one hand, and revealing committed, passionate caring for their students and delight in the teaching process on the other. I think that many of these people feel, quite profoundly, that teaching is important, an idea which is particularly unpopular in academia these days.
I would, quite happily, commit myself to a couple of years of doing nothing but teaching undergrads. I’d like to be set up in an office with a computer and a library and a bunch of stationary, and told to teach a bunch of subjects. It’d kick my arse, but I’d really like the opportunity. Even though – as a friend said half in jest the other day – [expressing that desire] ‘is career suicide’. I think that this is perhaps the saddest part of sessional teaching – seeing people who love teaching, who love sharing ideas and listening to students develop an interest in – and passionate attachment to – ideas feel guilt about or some sort of reticence to admit this. I’m not saying that we should all be mad-crazy-Mr-Chips hippy teachers. But I am saying that it seems the worst thing about sessional teaching is that you are faced with learning that teaching is a waste of time, is frustrating, is miserable and just plain bad news. Not terribly encouraging when you’re trying to bust on into this industry.
4. My teaching has inspired new ideas and new plans for papers and research projects which other forms of academic engagement (of which I have precious few) do not. I’m simply inspired by the process of reading and re-reading canonical texts, and then having to find ways of letting students find their own ways to fall in love or in fascination with these ideas. It’s challenging to find class activities or interesting learning and teaching games which make these ideas a) relevant, and b) just plain fun.
I think that the most important part of teaching media and cultural and communications and gender studies is to help students find a way to make this material relevant to their own everyday lives, and to find ways to just plain enjoy playing with it. I mean, de Certeau is fun. He’s dodgy, and his stuff falls, down, but it’s fun to find ways to explore and apply his ideas. And it’s also really, really fun to see students then test out the use-value of this stuff, and to begin to articulate their reservations about concepts. I think this stuff should have some sort of use-value, even if that use is only as an intellectual game, just for the sake of playing.
… but, anyway, I have to end by saying that I’m not terribly hopeful about my future in academia. There aren’t enough jobs. I can’t publish a book (I amn’t really convinced it’s actually all that useful a process anyway). No one gives a crap about dance. Working in universities is generally pretty shit. Perhaps it is better just to stick with sessional teaching, rather than committing myself – so emotionally and so finally – to a full time career in it?
* Some of us are not ready to be postfeminists just yet. Nor are we convinced that newspapers, television, magazines and radio are ‘heritage’ media.

…but one of my students was wearing this: so it was a little easier. It made me giggle a whole lot.
I am really tired. I haven’t had a full, proper night’s sleep in a very, very long time. It’s funny how you get used to broken sleep. I don’t like it, I’m not a nice person, but I’m used to it.
Did I mention that I didn’t like it?
Thank god the tutes are only an hour. I honestly can’t figure out how I’m managing to teach when I’m this tired.
I’m going to blog the SLX soon. I promise. But, really, there’s not much to say beyond ‘I danced a lot’ and ‘I did some DJing’ and ‘I stayed up all night a lot’. This year I didn’t do any stunts, but I did go in a dance competition. Ten years lindy hopping, first comp.
Meh.
Basically, competition nights are terribly, tediously boring, even when you’re in them. Social dancing is better.
But getting to the finals of a Jack and Jill as a lead where I was expected to lead >240bpm was a bit much.

This past week I was teaching psychoanalysis. Or more specifically, a bit of Freud and then a bit of other people using and abusing Freud. This may entertain a few of you who know my feelings about psychoanalysis and Freud. We’re not friends. But the reading for the subject was from this neat text by Cranny Francis et al and I liked it – I’ve even bought the book because it gave such a useful overview of this stuff, especially in reference to gender, and I’m collecting useful resources. For The Future.
Any how, we ended up saying p3nis, vag1na, shit, poo and a few other things quite a lot of times. I was all ‘blah blah blah’ and ‘let’s see what the difference between the phallus and the p3nis is’ and forgot to remember that firsties are afraid of naked body words. I mean, each semester I realise they’re also afraid of body hair on women (not having seen any, ever), and get a bit freaked out when I wear a sleeveless shirt as we move into summer. Any how, it took them a while, but eventually they eased up and could manage to use The Words. Not with much comfort, but use them they did. Eventually.
This is actually a more complicated issue than you might realise, especially in the context of teaching a class that’s 80% international or first gen Australian students, many of whom come from families or cultures where it’s totally not on to talk about this stuff in public, especially not in mixed-sex settings, across generations and across heirarchies. Part of me was all ‘oh come on, when I was a lass and doing gender studies we had to use the c word in my feministah classes’. And sure, we were bad ass (though I have to say, it was a bit rough on some of the private school kiddies who hadn’t gone to a rough outer suburbs public high school), but it was a bit challenging at first. I remember being amazed by the thought of ‘reclaiming’ the word. I was used to it being yelled at me out of bus windows as I rode my bike home. I didn’t much care for it, personally, and wasn’t really ready to use it, let alone reclaim it.
But I was surprised by the shyness of my stoods. I guess it’s an age thing – when you’re a teenager sex is all new and weird and freaky. You’re busy testing out your preferences (in terms of gender and relationships and what you do in bed and what you wear and … hell, everything) and you’re a bit unsure of most things, and, well, you didn’t make it to the end of the reading, so you’re not actually sure what everyone’s talking about anyway.
And there were moments when I thought ‘ok, am I demonstrating sufficient cultural sensitivity?’ I can be a blunt object, but I think that this stuff needs to be dealt with just as we would any other topic – clearly, in detail, with discussion and – if possible – looking at google maps. Well, not so much with the google maps. But I was careful to be ‘appropriate’ in my approach. And I was. Except for that one moment when I noticed that my usually-very-big hand gestures had suddenly taken a turn for the explicit when we discussed the difference between p3nis and phallus. But that was just funny. And, as I said at the time “a little ambitious, even for Freud’s neuroses.”
So anyway, this bunch of relatively outspoken Young People were quite shy and at first reluctant to talk. But then they relaxed and really got into it. I couldn’t believe how many people’d done the reading – numbers’d jumped massively from the week before. And it was a long reading with some quite challenging bits. I mean, Lacan + Freud + Saussere + Cixous and lots of other people, all in one reading? I know it took me a while to get through it all, and I’ve read this stuff before.
But they were all really into this, they were just interested and excited about the ideas. Freud always polarises students, and it was neat to see them get in their 3-people groups and hack into the Oedipal complex. Who would’ve thought?

So I’m all lined up to do some serious teaching next semester. The bit that I’m most interested in is coordinating the subject I did last semester. I’ll be able to put together a reader that suits what I’m teaching, I’ll get to rework some of my weaker lectures and tutorials, and I’ll be able to redo the assessment. There’s lots of admin work involved, but I’m actually not too bad at that stuff – MLX has made me strong. Plus I quite like the ob-con-ness of sorting and organising and making lists.
One of my first jobs will be getting some feedback from the sessional staff who taught with me on that subject last year. I want to know what worked, what didn’t, what they’d like to see on the subject (or ditched).
The next job will be working through the lectures and reworking the weeks – dumping the dumb stuff, strengthening the good stuff, adding in some useful stuff that was missing last year. I’m aiming for your basic intro to media studies/communications/cultural studies subject, including some really safe, useful ‘textual analysis tools’ (this is something the department really wants), some stuff about media industries and some stuff about audiences. I’m (mentally) dividing the subject up into those three parts (n those that order), and hoping to have three manageable (and hopefully cumulative rather than discrete) pieces of assessment to go with each (though that’s something that needs to be discussed).
I’d like a reader that had a greater emphasis on Australian cultural/media studies (especially in reference to the industry stuff… for obvious reasons), and including some more up-to-date readings (ie not stuff from the 80s… unless it’s something particularly important or awesome).
I’m also keen on strengthening the weekly tutorial exercises. I’m ordinarily not the hugest fan of this stuff, but this type of weekly mini self-assessment is important and can be really useful. Putting together a comprehensive weekly exercise (which isn’t too long) is also a nice way of making sure I structure my lectures properly (which I’m kind of anal about anyway), make the readings really relevant and giving the students an idea of the most important points in that week’s topic.
All this is for a first year subject, so I have to keep it pretty simple. It also has to work as a ‘teaser’ for later subjects – it has to convince these guys in the general arts degree that media studies/cultural studies/communications is fun and interesting and useful.
I’m a big fan of multimedia components in the teaching and learning tools, but I was very unhappy with webct last year. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get into moodle or another hardcore online teaching tool. But I do think it’s important to have some sort of online component, particularly for teaching across campuses, and teaching students who don’t spend much time on campus.
I am thinking about just using a plain, simple blog. Something like this one (but obviously not this one) which is super easy to navigate, allows me to embed youtube clips, add in useful links, upload lecture notes, etc. I do have reservations about uploading lecture notes to a public forum, though. This is where it’s actually a good idea to have a site where you must log in to get the good stuff.
I have considered other options like druple (bllurgh) and plone, but if I’m going that way, I really think I should use something designed for teaching – like moodle or webct. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to have students learn how to use a whole new system/site, just for one subject. And I’m not keen on learning myself – it’s not really worth the effort.
I also think it’s a good idea to use sites that students are already comfortable with. For obvious reasons. This of course leads us straight to faceplant and myspace. But I’m not happy with faceplant. I don’t want to encourage students to use such a massive data-gathering business tool.
There is, however, the google option. Google docs is something we’re considering using for MLX this year – a central collection point for files and discussions and email and things. But once again, it does require students learning a new system, signing up for new accounts and so on.
So my questions are:
– is it ok to use a blog where the lecture notes are public? My feeling is no.
– should I use something like plone which can have a public ‘face’ yet also requires students to log in to access notes?
– should I just suck it up and use webct?
All of this is very interesting and quite exciting. I’m looking forward to teaching with confidence material I know well, and to being able to strengthen what I’ve already done without starting from scratch. It’ll also be nice to not be working to such a full-on, heinous schedule, writing lectures as I go through the semester.

I’ve been using a combinatin of online teaching tools this semester, and I’m not really happy with most of them.
We use WebCT as a standard, university-wide tool. It is very clunky and, quite frankly, pretty dang crap. It’s windows based in its logic, and it’s counterintuitive, which means that it’s often pretty difficult to figure out how to do basic tasks. Even when you’ve been trained to use it (as I was). It’s also super-slow in uploading and managing files. I don’t know enough about it to know why, I just know that I don’t have that trouble when I’m uploading files to other sites using other tools. It also looks horrible. Not the most important point ever, but when you’re working with stoods who aren’t exactly keen to start off with… And it’s not a very ‘friendly’ site. It doesn’t make me want to explore. It also favours a particular visual logic which is very culturally specific. This is a big deal for me working with students from multicultural backgrounds and who may not have ever used a computer before (this is true of a fair chunk of my students).
Using it has been pretty shitty, and I’m a keen computer nerd. The internet, she is my friend.
We’ve also been using the e-reserve bit of our library website. That seems the most popular option, especially for students who aren’t terribly computer savvy. It helps that it’s within the library universe, so they’re only using one visual interface, rather than having to learn a whole new environment – they know where all the buttons are. It’s also the simplest tool – we just upload basic files to the site and they log in and download them. No fancy teaching modules or whatever. It’s a bit like going to the library to borrow a book – simple and functional.
These expereinces remind me of how we developed an online networking tool for the committee running MLX. We started with druple, but we all found it incredibly difficult to use. Most of the team had only very basic experience with complex online environments, and druple was just difficult to use. So we ditched it. I’d been reading about plone and liked the colour scheme. But the more I fiddled with it, the more I liked its usefulness. That’s the software we use now. And it’s been very useful and successful. We certainly don’t use it to its fullest capability – we really just upload files and then comment on them, or email the links from within the site. But that’s all we’ve needed. And it’s been neat.
So now I’m thinking about our experieces with webCT this semester, and I’m not satisfied.
I keep thinking ‘Most of these guys use faceplant and myface and are really proficient internet kids. How can I steal the best bits of those sites and make a course site that really rocks?’ These guys love that stuff, so how can I get them to love a course-related site?
This is what I want:

• somewhere to put each week’s lecture notes and various media files (films, images, sound files, etc)
• somewhere to put all the assessment documents (assignment tasks, style guide, etc)
• somewhere to put general notices where all the students can see them

That’s the very basic list. It’s really just a course reader online, where everyone can see it and access it whenever they want.
I have students who work a lot and have very busy lives. They need something easy to use and navigate, something useful and something that will make their study easier, not harder. So it has to be easy to learn to use. And fun. And actually valuable (not technology for the sake of technology).
I want the site to encourage their interest in the subject. I’ve been doing some stunt lecturing this semester, trying to capture their interest in the subject. For me, this is the most wonderful, interesting stuff in the whole world. And I want them to find a way into the subject that works for them, and really captures their interest. So I’ve been looking for interesting little films (thank you, thank you, Chaser, I owe you big time), sound files, pictures and so on. It’s been surprisingly successful. I squeeze these into my lectures and then make the urls available. YouTube has been an essential part of this.
I’ve also figured ‘if I’m interested in all this stuff – this whole range of stuff – surely they will find at least one thing that captures their interest?’ And if I set an example of ‘media is super fun’, and a real acquisitive, hunter-gatherer approach to learning, where I ‘bring home’ the interesting things I’ve found, perhaps it’ll rub off.
Partnered with my ‘talk about media you’re into’ strategy (I talked about it a bit here), it’s been reasonably successful. Students have taken the opportunity to talk about the things they’ve seen in the media that have caught their interest. They’ve been a bit hesitant and scaredy about revealing an interest in nerdy stuff, but have generally worked up to more confidence. Even the quieter students.
Ok, so other things I want from an online package:

• somewhere for students to add their ‘interesting finds’ – images, news stories, AV clips, sound files, TV shows, etc etc
• something that will encourage discussion, but will work as a complement to the face to face (I do not want this to become a substitute for tutorial chatting – that is still the absolutely central part of any subject)
• something that’s not too time consuming. This is important for my students with kids and lots of responsibilities. So it has to be easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been thinking about new ways of structuring course. Pretty ambitious stuff, but still. At the moment we have:

• lectures (1 hour is preferable, but our uni tends to 2 hours with 1 hour tutes – it’s a funding thing)
• tutorials (2 hours preferably)
• written assignments (my preference is for cumulative, not discrete ‘blobs’ of essay)
• readings (delivered in a big wad of reader (Glen has made some really interesting observations about readers here)
• and perhaps in-class exercises or random quizzes

Here’s something I’d like to try:

• lectures. Large groups of students together in a room listening to someone talk about interesting stuff. One hour is maximum attention span time. Lecturers preferably some big gun in the department (for all these reasons), including some illustration by way of snippets of film or images – whatever best illustrates the points being made
• tutorials. Small groups (12-15) of students working for 2 hours. Emphasis on discussion and learning to talk about the readings/lectures/ideas. Emphasis on socialising the stoods (eg learning to listen and work collaboratively on developing ideas). Some practical exercises to test theories/methods. I like the ‘talking about media’ tool to encourage students to talk about their media experiences and workshop/develop their assessment ideas
• assessment. Two pieces of cumulative assessment (essays to develop writing skills) and a not-too-hard in-class exam. Short answers. Drawing explicitly on weekly quizzes. This will help students who haven’t quite gotten the hang of extended written tasks and encourages students to study all the weeks’ work, not just the ones relevant to their projects

weekly quizzes. Not necessarily for marks, but covering the essential elements of each week’s topic. A good way to keep lecturers on-track and give students a clear idea of the main areas of discussion. An excellent revision tool. Also a useful de-stresser for students who feel like they’re drowning in a formless mass of details. These could be made available online quite easily.

• readings. Key readings in the field are absolutely essential. Students do need a guide to key readings in the literature. Discussion of readings should emphasise not only what’s in the reading, but also the structure and form of the reading. How is it written? What sources does it use and cite? How does it develop arguments? How does it illustrate key ideas? How influential has it then been on the field? How did it shape opinion? Is it representative of a particular approach? This body of readings should give them a broad overview of important ideas and writing in the field, and serve as a jumping off point for student’s further research. Encouraging students to follow up the articles and books which cite these key readings is a useful way of developing research tools and getting them to think about how ideas develop discursively in disciplines
• possibly some sort of interactive film/slide show/AV. Combining interesting images and audio-visual clips to illustrate points and provide an always-available interactive, multi-media discussion of the issues. This could be available on CD, to be watched in the library, online via a website to be streamed or downloaded.
  This is one I’m not entirely sure of. But I have students with such a range of learning styles and skills, I really like the idea of forcing information into them in a range of forms. I am, though, still wrestling with my instinct to encourage diversity in terms of learning styles within a university context where the one thing we want to do is force them to learn to learn and ‘make discourse’ by reading and writing (it’s ridiculous: I was lecturing this week about the advantages of radio in developing countries – it doesn’t require literacy so it’s more inclusive!)

So when I talk about a useful online teaching tool, I want something that would complement all this stuff.
If I’m encouraging students to work on cumulative assessment, developing their own ‘projects’ over 2 essays during the semester and using tutes to discuss and workshop their ideas, then why not use the site to encourage and support that? It would be really nice to make it possible for students to upload their project notes and files to the site, and to then download them and work on them in multiple locations, uploading their additions when they finish a session. That would allow them to share their work with other students, get feedback from staff (egads – the extra work!), discuss ideas, etc. Importantly, it would provide backup for all their data.
I’d also like to have a glossary or lexicon of terms on the site which they can add to. I’ve had requests for something like this from my students, but haven’t had time to develop it.
I’d like the usual email/discussion board/chat options, but I’m not sure just how successful they’d be. They’d be nice for public questions, eg “how many ads should I use for this assignment?” but could be a big fat time sink. Moderating them could suck.
I’m also wondering about whether to put recordings of the lectures online. As with lots of other people, I’ve been fascinated by Berkeley’s YouTube channel and want to take advantage of this idea. On the one hand, we have resisted making full versions of our lectures available for students because it drops the number in lectures. But the number of students who come to lectures drops off as the semester progresses anyway. Partly because students drop out (especially in first year), but also because the pressure towards the end of the semester thins them out. Which makes me think about alternative ways of structuring the semester, too.
I find, though, that I still get a core group at each lecture (mostly students from my tutes, incidentally), and as the classes have shrunk, their willingness to ask questions during the sessions have grown. This isn’t like a tutorial – I am still declaiming the Good Oil from the pulpit – but it’s an interactive lecture. The students are quite aware of the distinction between the two, and its been interesting seeing how they’ve developed different modes of interaction for each. They realise that tutes are times for them to talk as much as they like while I listen and monitor, but that lectures are time for me to talk with room for requests for clarifications.
While I had trouble with people chatting in lectures earlier in the semester (and man was it satisfying to kick those arses!), I now get a few whispered to-and-fros. When I say “if you’ve got a question or comment, share it” (and it doesn’t sound as facetious as that reads – they know I really do mean it), they usually reply “oh, I was just asking what that last word was – I didn’t hear”. So it’s just a bit of peer-clarification. Which is all good and nice.
That’s actually interesting, because in tutes I encourage students to answer each other’s questions and to work collaboratively towards figuring out answers or ideas. But in a lecture we actively discourage that. It’s a really weird conflict between student-centred/participatory learning and declaratory, lecturer-centred learning.
I’m still not sure where I stand on in-class presentations by students. On the one hand I don’t think it’s a good idea because it freaks them out. I also feel that I can better judge their learning if they’re participating activley in class, than I could by listen to them stumble through a formal presentation. Shit-scarey and tedious for everyone. But on the other hand, sometimes it’s nice to have a chance to actually have the floor to yourself for a while to present a properly worked-through idea.
Maybe a presentation of their research projects? But again, a less formal, more participatory in-group model would be better.
So anyway, to sum it all up, I’ve been having a look at moodle, another online teaching tool. Will let you know what I think. Will you let me know what you think? I’m interested in feedback from people who teach in other fields especially.

It’s no secret that I think the F-bomb is the fushiz, and browsing the internet today (mostly looking for answers for students who’ve asked me “are there any other easy things we can read about media?” – they’re sick of hearing me talk about the Media Report and so am I) I came across this article “Literature, Culture, Mirrors:John Frow responds to Simon During” in the Australian Humanities Review by the Man.
I’ve been thinking about the role of literature – or books – in cultural studies lately. Mostly, I try not to think about the ‘boundaries’ between media studies, cultural studies, book studies and (now) communications studies. They seem to be set down, for the most part, by the funding structures and course requirements of university departments and faculties and otherwise really don’t seem very useful for most of us who are actually in there getting jiggy with kultchah.
But I’d been wondering how to talk about books in a cultural studies context. One of the clearest differences in the way I think about books when I’m wearing my cultural/media studies hat(s) as opposed to the way I thought about books when I was enrolled in an English department doing ‘literature’ subjects,* is to do with audiences. I know there’ve probably been some changes in English departments since I got all into the Screen Studies (that’s what we called it in the olden days), but I’ve noticed that I think about books in terms of the relationship between audiences and textual structure rather than thinking about books as little boxes of words, standing alone there between their covers on the shelf. So while I can get all “oh, I just love blahblah author”, I’m actually far more interested in what people do with blahblah author’s work once they get ahold of the words.
So, for example, I’ve been thinking about writing a paper for a symposium being held as part of swancon. I’d like to write about watching HBO’s Big Love‘s representation of patriarchal polygamy while reading about Karen Traviss‘s matriarchal polygamies in the City of Pearl books. For me, it’s interesting to think about the way we SF fans aren’t just consuming a solid diet of SF – we read across the genre lines. And the way I think about polygamy, humanity, gender and society have been inflected by both these texts while I’m reading them both….which of course makes me want to talk about TV programming, book publishing seasons and structures of consumption, but that would be (yet another example of) digression…
This point was brought home to me the other day listening to a colleague’s very interesting paper on Scifi.com. She noted that there’d been some resentment from hardcore SF fan Scifi.com audiences about the introduction of ‘un-SF’ in the Scifi.com programming. Apparently they weren’t impressed by the wrestling shows**. Now, I’m interested in the gender implications at work there (particularly as a fair old swag – if not the vast bulk – of SF telly involves fighting, violence, warfare and plain old fisticuffs), but I’m more interested in the insistence that hardcore SF fans want only to watch SF on telly. Of course, if I were paying for an SF channel, I think I’d be after a fulfilment of my expectations – SF 24/7 YES! – but at the same time…
So I was wondering how I would go about thinking and writing about literature in a cultural studies context. I don’t particularly want to go down the fan studies track again. Yes, yes, we all know SF fans read SF books, watch SF films and telly, play SF games and party in online SF communities. But what happens when we talk about women reading those interesting romance/SF hybrid books? That’s my other pet interest at the moment – is anyone else writing about these books at the moment (not counting my posts)? And I’m definitely not interested in getting bogged down in discussions about ‘quality’ lit – if it’s a book, it’s literature to me, mate.
But anyway, back to JF. My interest was caught by this bit:

Let me offer two reasons why cultural studies has the potential to change departments of literary studies for the better. The first is that it forces students to come to terms with different regimes of value, different and perhaps incommensurate valuing processes and their relation to social forces and social positions. It shifts the interpretive gaze from a self-contained text to its discursive and social framings, within which students are themselves implicated; while at the same time it opens a potentially fruitful methodological exchange between the distinct protocols of interpretation that apply in the social sciences and the textual disciplines. The second reason has to do with process. Cultural studies supposes a pedagogy in which students are at least as fully in control of much of the subject matter as are the teachers. This isn’t the end of teacherly authority, but it does transform the learning process by challenging teachers to redefine what it is that they do in a classroom, and by involving students – in a quite orthodox Socratic manner – in the understanding and analysis of what they already know. In neither of these respects is cultural studies the enemy of literary studies; the two perhaps work best when they coexist in tension and exchange; but literary studies will not survive if it is taught as a form of religion.

That second bit is the bit I’m most interested in:

Cultural studies supposes a pedagogy in which students are at least as fully in control of much of the subject matter as are the teachers.

It’s the sort of argument that makes a great deal of sense to me when I think about teaching magazines/tabloids this semester. I never read magazines, but for the occasional copy of Nature (the glossy one), or the odd gardening or cooking mag. I don’t watch enough commercial telly to recognise the TV stars and I have absolutely no idea about mainstream, popular music. I was largely teaching this unit in reference to academic reading and a few weeks’ panicky hunter-gathering online and at the supermarket checkout (the latter proving most challenging for a hippy who likes indy grocery shops).
So while I could present the ideas to the students as academic concepts, drawing largely on my own enthusiasm for news values and news papers (hell, it’s all print media to me), we were largely relying on their specialist knowledge of and familiarity with magazines. This offered interesting moments in the tutorials, which are (of course) ten quarters female. Female students who hadn’t said a word all semester were suddenly contributing with enthusiasm. And these chicks really are magazine gurus – they read anywhere from one a week to a dozen a week. And they’re intimately familiar with the complex relationship networks which are the stock in trade of these publications.
At first we had to deal with the (mostly male) students’ disparagement of ‘trash media’. I made the point that reading these things – and making any sense of them whatsoever – required an intimate and extensive knowledge of the personalities, events and mode of discourse. We’d already talked about why tabloids are more popular than broadsheet media the week before, and they’d mentioned that ‘it’s too hard to understand what they’re talking about – the middle east is too complicated for just half an hour of news’. And I pointed out that while they mightn’t be prepared to unravel the middle east, they were prepared to wade into Britney’s social network – equally complex and foreign. Which of course led us them to the idea that personalisation is a really effective way of creating news value – making a story marketable for a wide audience.
But it was mostly an interesting exercise in the sort of stuff JF is talking about in that bit of the essay. For me, as a bub teacher, it can be both absolutely thrilling and exciting, but also terrifying. I spend most of my time worrying that I’m telling the stoods a big line of bullshit – one day someone’s going to figure out that I’m full of shit. I learnt in the very first tutorial that if you lie and pretend you know the answer to something – if you really do try and make up a bullshit answer – they’ll figure it out and you’ll look like a dickhead. So I’m all for admitting ignorance: “I dunno. I haven’t read that stuff. I’m into blahblah. But I do know blahblah writes about it. What do you guys know? What do you think?” I’ve found they’re actually far more willing to speculate and expore ideas when they’ve heard me admitting complete ignorance, but still being prepared to have a bash at figuring out an answer.
But I really like this approach to teaching – the postioning of students as specialists. And then working with them to apply the ideas from readings or lectures to explore (as JF puts it) “involving students …in the understanding and analysis of what they already know”. This was a truly fabulous approach in a media audiences subject I taught last year.
The first piece of assessment was a lit review, where the stoods chose a media audience (ie an audience of a particular media text or form) and then figured out who’d already written about it, or which bits of research could help them research their audience. The second bit of assessment involved planning a media audience research project (each week of lectures explored a different research method). It was fabulous to teach because the assessment worked cumulatively – you were building on their knowledge. The stoods dug it because they began to feel like proper media researchers – specialists with a body of knowledge and skills under their belt.
I also used tutorials to discuss media and their media interests. I encouraged them to think about the media they were into, and then as we began working on the assessment, to talk through their ideas about the research. Because we were all reading the same literature and most of us knew the media they were discussing, we could all comment and discuss the topic knowledgeably. I’ve found that this is the most important part of teaching stoods – encouraging a confidence in their own skills and knowledge. Encouraging them to trust their ideas and instincts. I mean, why not? They really, truly know things that we old sticks don’t – they haven’t read the academic literature, but they’re hard core media consumers. And they are engaged in really complex and interesting media – cross-media – consumption and use. So why not get them using those skills and ideas?
But this approach was really nice for the students – they really felt a sense of ‘ownership’ of their projects (and I used that term – our projects) and a confidence in their ideas. And they did produce some really interesting work. And man, it rocked to teach because they gave a shit and actually got excited about the assessment and readings.
I’m not sure how I got to this point, and I know this is a confusing post, but I guess this is meant to be a story about disciplinarity, about teaching practices, about methodology cross-discipline, and just another fan-atic post about your hero and mine, the Frowstah:

*I’m really sorry about this terrible sentence. I have been marking essays full of this rubbish and really can’t remember how to write any more. Perhaps I need to read more bewks?
** Frankly, it makes perfect sense to me – what could be more fantasy, speculative ficationesque than WWF?

Does it make a difference that Canada’s wielding a sword and not flashing her boobs?
I kind of have trouble with the whole judging people for grammar thing.
Yes, I like the joke, but I often think of grammar in the same way I think of manners – a class thing. So it’s really not all that cool to judge people for either…