Philosophy
| History
| Syllabi & Course Sites
Course Proposals
| Teaching Evaluations |
For Students
Like many teaching philosophies, mine developed by accident, rather than design. One morning, I was on the way home from the market when I realized the bottom of my paper bag was soaked. At first I thought it was wet with water, but quickly realized by the smell that a bottle of white vinegar I had bought was cracked and had been leaking. After a few minutes of swearing (I had, after all, covered my work clothes in vinegar) I realized that I might have stumbled on a way to better teach students about performance and critical observation of media.
Before leaving for school, I poured the vinegar into an empty Poland Springs
water bottle. I then headed to class, where I told my students, "Write
down everything you see, focusing on my actions here in the front of the room."
For two minutes, I sat on my desk, looking out the window and taking occasional
sips from my Poland Spring bottle. For two minutes, students dutifully took
note of what I was wearing, how often I drank, the label on my bottle, and
so forth. When they compared notes afterwards, the students paid close attention
to details others had seen that they had missed themselves. "Now, "
I told my students, "I want one of you to replicate my actions in the
front of the room, and we'll take notes on that."
The student volunteer took care to arrange herself at the desk exactly as
I had, raised my bottle to her lips, and took her first (and only) sip of
the vinegar everyone thought was water. Class discussion began instantly:
How much are we missing by relying on sight over all over senses, they wondered,
and how does media help enable sensory forgetfulness? How ought we rework
our theories of "the way things are" when contradictory data emerges,
and what are the social and political costs of this re-working? What is the
power of the Poland Spring logo that we instantly equate it with water and
nothing else? Finally, given that we cannot possibly know everything, all
the time, how should we choose those we trust as authorities in life's classrooms?
People often equate cultural and media studies with pure pleasure, asking
what a liberal arts student could possibly gain through classes on topics
like television and the Internet. Yet for me, "vinegar " has become
code for pleasurable phenomena that seem simple, even obvious, yet on closer
inspection reveal themselves as either disturbing, or illustrative of larger
truths about human struggle, or both of these things. There is a moment in
every good cultural studies class where water turns to vinegar, and easily
digested ideological structures become nearly impossible to swallow without
pause. This is the moment when I think cultural studies matters, and why I
think there are material benefits to be gained from a citizenry trained in
this sort of scholarship. This is the reason I do the research I do, and teach
the courses I teach.