Teaching
Last year my writing class read an excerpt from Howard Zinn’s opening to A People’s History of the United States detailing the landing of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish in the Bahamas. Before we read the piece I asked the students what they knew about Columbus. Students recalled he was Italian, the names of the ships, the year he landed and where, and what he was trying to find. They had been taught that these details were all there was to know. As the reading progressed faces began to change and students audibly gasped at the descriptions of Spanish brutality against the Arawak Indians. Initially few wanted to read out loud, but as the piece unraveled more hands appeared at every pause. When we finished one usually quiet student with a look of anger in his face asked, “Why haven’t I heard of this before?”
What resulted was a vigorous discussion about national myths of community and the costs of capitalistic progress. They learned the value of critical reading to them as human beings while practicing the substantive skills of annotation and summarization they could apply to their own projects about pressing social issues.
As often happens in my classes, this particular lesson was not originally on the schedule. I noticed my class (an introduction to college composition course) was struggling with summarization and also unclear on one of my key pedagogical aims—whenever you write you must have something at stake. Every class I teach—and I have been designing and teaching my own courses every quarter for four years—is grounded by the premise of reading, thinking, and writing in the interest of effecting change. So in addition to learning the key concepts of whatever subject I am teaching, I want better citizens—not just better students—to emerge from my courses. I accomplish this by engaging in the cultural politics that matter to them. I’ve learned to never underestimate students who have something at stake.
My pedagogy also explores innovative ways of leveraging technology to increase literacies across a broad range of media. Class discussion involves a cacophony of media: literature, online videos, film, videogames, music, and even space and architecture. I let the courses evolve and follow emergent strands of conversation and interest and use access to media, particularly the internet, as a way to let these strands open up new spaces of engagement. It’s not uncommon for a student to make a comment that sends me off to a YouTube video, then into the comments section, forward to other related websites, and then back, with new perspective, to whatever textual scholarly material we’re using as a critical apparatus. This has occurred often when lecturing about race and videogames. We’ll start in the 19th century with archival materials from minstrel theater, move to clips from Blaxpolitation film and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, then evaluate the character creation process in World of Warcraft, view the Leeroy Jenkins machinima video and Wikipedia discussion, and finish with homework tasking the students with describing a space’s gender politics in Second Life. As is hopefully evident in these descriptions of pedagogical process, I see myself as a curator bringing together constellations of media and critical work that provoke students toward a position on issues of cultural politics. Importantly, I see this style of knowledge production, steeped in spontaneity and critical media, as getting students to rehearse valuable literacies that will aid them throughout their lives.
I’ve been lucky enough to be afforded a diverse student population and ample technological capabilities to accomplish these goals at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Staples of my courses are class blogs, wikis, and Twitter which I use to create emergent discussions and provide alternative, parallel, and sometimes deeply embedded spaces for cultural critique. One particularly effective pedagogical tool I developed has been a Twitter backchannel for film discussions. While watching films, the students and I will participate in a sideline Twitter conversation affording real time engagement with the film and student centered teaching. Perhaps most useful for the students is how Twitter and blogs open up a different social and instructive experience that the students find fun, safe, and open for play. The first time I used a film backchannel I found that the most quiet students in class were the most vocal on the backchannel. My use of Twitter in the classroom has since been covered in the local media, mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and used by other professors across the country.
I also participated in Victor Zordan’s game design course as an advisor and assistant. His class, which teaches game programming and development, culminates in a game demo day. As part of a Mellon funded research group we were participating in I helped Victor develop the idea of graduate students acting as critics for the undergraduate programmers’ projects. The result was an incredible learning experience where the undergraduate programmers were able to formally present their games and get constructive feedback from graduate students. The process simulated interaction between developers and producers for the undergraduates and forced the graduate students, all of whom were in a technoculture seminar, to articulate their critiques in a completely different context than they were used to.
My courses are also dedicated to transforming students from consumers to empowered producers in novel ways. For example, when teaching game design, I attempt to historicize play and free it from the confines of the digital object. This unit tasks students with building game concepts using practical tools such as paper, markers, tape, and scissors. The inspiration for this unit comes from my own experiences doing something very similar with Tracy Fullerton at the 2007 University of California Humanities Research Institute summer seminar. In my experiences both as a student and teacher, this exercise teaches students procedurality in a way that lecture or reading simply cannot approximate.
Beyond this rudimentary model of production, I plan to have students working with short form digital video, podcasting, and interactive installations and archives in a future class on media production. I am currently developing a model for this course based on preserving local cultures, histories, and knowledges. Students would be tasked with curating their communities, building useful and public resources such as interactive maps or archives of local testimony.
My pedagogical concerns—citizenship, cultural politics, and media literacy—take on a different form when teaching at the community college level—grassroots political action. For the last two years I have been teaching courses in San Bernardino to students radically different than at UCR. The majority of the student population are people of color from disadvantaged circumstances. Few students have access to a computer and the internet at home. The traditional yield of digital humanities production: creating archives, building collaborative tools, and using social media often never reaches them. While these kinds of pedagogical experiences tend to be devalued on the academic job market, they have been instrumental in shaping who I am as a teacher and as a scholar. These experiences force me to adapt to a low-tech environment and direct my attention to invigorating students to take action within their community while supplementing the writing workshop with some critical study of media. My work at this level is informed by the groundbreaking Technicolor collection edited by Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines and Adam J. Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, and Technology which both discuss how we must be mindful of how technologies can either democratize or oppress depending on where, how, and in whose interests they are implemented.
Between these two poles of experience, one of advantage and the other of disadvantage, is where my pedagogy finds its purpose. My particular brand of digital media pedagogy thus explores how new technologies can reshape aging models of knowledge production and classroom dynamics, while simultaneously placing these technologies in political contexts that empower students to think critically about technological media cultures. Most importantly, my students create knowledge that does something.
