The Times on “Teaching” September 20, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pedagogy, pop culture.Tags: Add new tag, pedagogy
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Reading the New York Times Magazine’s College Life issue this morning was nothing if not a reminder that representations of cultures are seldom analogous to the material realities of those who live in them. I’ve written here before about popular representations of professors (and how those resemble approximately 2% of my colleagues), but the Times today expands its reach to include not just professors, but teaching and writing as well.
It begins with an article titled “Those Who Write, Teach.” The title suggested to me, as it would to many in the profession (particularly those of us at teaching institutions), the long-standing conversation about the connections between scholarly work and teaching. In essence, how does your research inform what you do in the classroom, and vice versa? How might you address the very real difficulties of carving out time to stay current in your field while attending to your students’ learning processes?
Instead, “Those Who Write” is a first person piece by David Gessner, in which he describes the plight of the writer “in captivity”—i.e., trapped by an academic job that slowly sucks the wildness out of him and his writing. To be fair to Gessner, there’s not a teacher alive who doesn’t fantasize about what she could be doing if she weren’t grading papers, fielding student questions, preparing for class. But I can’t help getting my feathers ruffled by two things here: first, the ambivalence of the title worries me. Is it referencing the old inspiring saw “those who CAN, teach,” and thus making writing (here strictly defined as creative writing) the equivalent of ability? Or is it more insidious, calling to mind instead the insult “those who CAN’T, teach” and thereby insinuating that writing within the confines of the academy eventually leads to a lack of ability?
Second, Gessner’s image of the work of teaching troubles me. Even as he critiques an earlier era of creative writing pedagogy (“learn by osmosis” from the “great man or woman”), he cites his love for teaching as one that’s grounded in sharing his work, in being a great entertainer, in being surrounded by people committed to writing. On top of this, the job provides a stable daily structure, a “badge” of legitimacy, and the aggregate of all of this moves toward balancing the ways in which he must trade “reading great literature and communing with writers of the past” for “apprentice writing.”
There’s something crucial that’s missing from Gessner’s description of teaching, and that is arguably it’s most important characteristic: the one where you learn from your students, and learn to teach them to learn. I’m in deep cliched water here, I have no doubt, but it’s very simply true: there is great joy and daily reward from the surprise of what students see that you’ve missed; in experimenting with various approaches to connect what they already know with what you hope they’ll take away from any given text.
The innate reciprocity of teaching is also missing from the Times’ second article: Virginia Heffernan’s study of professors on YouTube. I’ll spare you the close textual analysis here, but suffice to say that as she ranks and assesses the available videos, she constructs a very particular equation: virtuoso teaching=charismatic lecture=box-office gold. I have no interest in rehashing ye olde lecture vs. seminar debate. A great lecture is all of the things that Heffernan so closely observes in the videos she cites. Yet I can’t help but flinch at such a medieval definition of teaching. A “sage on the stage” is still that, even if the stage has become an international and digital one. There’s a special irony here too, of using one of the most popular forms of Web 2.0 technology—a designation that highlights the interactivity of the medium—to relay content without reciprocity.
The “college life” issue is one of many recent representations of college life (see Smart People, Elegy, the movie College for god’s sakes). Any more, and a careful cultural critic might begin to suspect that we’re hell-bent on representing a single professor and his/her well-wraught pedagogical urn in order to distract ourselves from all of the other types of college experiences out there.
Print-less July 3, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in asian america, pedagogy.Tags: asian american, print culture
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If my theme for summer is “procrastinate until the point of panic,” then no single event typifies the theme better than my inability to order books for the fall. I’ve hemmed and hawed about books for both the “fate of the novel” class as well as the asian-american studies course. Tuesday, however, I awoke with the name of a book (Helen Zia’s Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, if you must know) clear and present in my mind, and figured it was a sign from the book fairies. Order! Order now!! [The book fairies must be the fantastical creatures that do the bidding of our long suffering and truly wonderful bookstore manager, B. It is a credit to him that these mystical beings are fairies and not devils.]
So I gamely sat down to make some hard decisions about what to order, in accordance with the secret logic of guiding each of these courses. [The secret? There is more than one logic, and it's not always evident until I get into the course and students themselves begin to make connections that I never anticipated. Wanna know why I love seminars? That's it in a nutshell.] As I started to narrow the lists down, I logged onto Amazon in order to copy and paste ISBN numbers. Horror of horrors: three of the books I was interested in were out of print!
This is a travesty in almost every case. First off, it seems that any number of crucial texts in Asian American studies are out of print. Throughout graduate school and most of my early teaching, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea was unavailable, which is a real pity. As many critics have noted, Chu’s novel does some amazing work with mapping the bachelor society of New York’s Chinatown in the first half of the century. The language is fantastic. A quick google search seems to indicate that Lyle Stuart did a publication run in 2002, but that the book is, yet again, out of print.
I knew enough not to depend on Chu’s book, but I was surprised to find Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World unavailable as well. Kadohata’s novel came out in 1989, and was a NY Times notable book. It tells the story of a Japanese American family post-WWII, unable to settle anywhere due to lingering resentment and fear of the Japanese. Kadohata has moved on to a successful career writing for young adults, and her skills there show through in this novel. It’s very readable, and introduces some complex topics to students who aren’t dyed-in-the-wool lit fans. In short, it’s great for an introductory Asian American class. If you can find 25 copies of it used, that is.
If I was surprised about the fate of Kadohata’s book, I was shocked to find that David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming is also out of print. That novel came out in 2000. 2000!! I wrote a big fat chapter of my dissertation on that novel! Louie has a great sense of humor, a narrative style that both sympathizes and critiques his characters, and close eye on the morays of popular culture. At the height of the Iron Chef craze, Louie gave us a Chinese American protagonist who wanted nothing more than to use his Cordon Bleu training, but was constantly asked to “cook Chinese.” It’s a story about food, about masculinity, about generations and interracial relationships, about the effects of television on cultural identity and performativity…and now it’s unavailable. There is no justice.
And on a completely different note (different course, after all), I’ve decided to brave the judgment of my senior seminar folk by teaching Gore Vidal’s scandalous Myra Breckinridge in the fall. Because who can resist this opening paragraph:
I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for ‘why’ or ‘because’. Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them as it does all men, unmanning them in the way King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.
[For the record, I know the film was a hot mess---in true Christian Siriano form. But the novel, oh, it is glorious!]
You can see where this is going, right? OUT OF DAMNABLE PRINT!! Like Myra, however, I will not be held back. We WILL read this novel! We WILL find copies!
The larger question, of course, is what economic and/or cultural restraints are causing these books to fall out of print runs, and in the case of the first two above, so quickly and regardless of their critical reception?
There has been academic attention to the crisis in scholarly publishing for sure, but I begin to wonder if we should be just as concerned about the longevity and health of the popular publishing market.
[!sevil aryM]
Fistful of Film Techniques May 13, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in film, new media, pedagogy.Tags: pedagogy, YouTube
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M. and I are hard at work on our summer workshop, which we’re privately thinking of as “Personal Essay Filmmaking, 2.0.” Last year at this time, we were trying to guide our students through the incredibly complex task of crafting a short personal essay film in two weeks. This was complicated by any number of factors: mis-advertised course times and dates and lack of lab space being two of the unexpected ones. On top of that, there were all of the difficulties of teaching a class for the first time, and team-teaching for the first time, to boot. In short, it’s amazing that we—and the students—made it out alive.
This time around, however, we’ve streamlined the class considerably. Based on our recent research, we’re also actively thinking about YouTube as a space in which personal essay films already exist, in a variety of manifestations. For the last two days, we’ve been reading personal essays with the class, and using the written text as a starting place to discuss genre, and then we’ve moved on to examining a number of YouTube videos. We’re keeping Jenkins and Juhasz in mind here, but we’re also asking our students to take seriously the potential to produce a personal film with larger societal/cultural meaning. As if that isn’t setting the bar, try this one: they only have two weeks to do it. (!)
My job in class tomorrow is to provide for them a handful of filmmaking techniques that will spur their creative process, and give them some ideas about the visual and aural possibilities available to them. I’ve been assembling clips for the past hour, trying to decide which might be the most relevant to the types of stories they want to tell, but let’s face it: the language of film is infinite, and our time in class is shockingly limited. The task of giving them an abbreviated toolbox of film techniques (and by this, I’m thinking particularly about shots, editing effects, etc.) is a bit like asking someone to build a house, but being told that they can only have three tools with which to do it. A hammer, nails, and a saw? A wrench, pliers, and PVC pipe? Point of view camera, or low angle shot? Non-diegetic sound, or discontinuity editing?
I can’t help but be reminded of the advice of dissertation advisors everywhere: you should have three different versions of your project on tap at any given moment—the 500 word version, the 200 word version, and the 25 word version. Tomorrow, by necessity, we’ll be going with the 25 word version of film techniques. Perhaps there will be time at the end of the week for a longer version.
Excuses, Excuses March 23, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pedagogy, research.2 comments
Why the light blogging here of late? Could it be the looming article deadline, quickly approaching? Or perhaps the conference paper on the horizon?
Could very well be. Could be both.
Between these two projects, I find that I’m running low on words. You know those days of writing where you’re just rearranging your five favorite terms over and over again? Epistemology + digital video + pedagogy + YouTube = conclusion to section. Add a verb or two. Move on.
When I can get out of my head a little, I’m noting some curious observations about writing process. Here’s the deal: I am co-writing this article. Which is due in a week. Not “about a week”, mind you, an actual week. The two of us have been diligent for sure, meeting weekly since January, reading, writing, discussion, drafting, revising, etc. Despite our plans to finish this thing by the first week in March, however, we find ourselves looking at the upcoming deadline like deer in headlights. Part of this could be that neither of us is a person who tends to get things done far in advance. But I prefer to think that it also tells us something about the process of collaborative writing: it takes longer. You would think that I’d have known that going in, but it didn’t really occur to me. What I’ve discovered is that when you’re writing with someone, you’re negotiating and discussing all the time. Which secondary sources to use and why; how much space a particular piece of the argument should occupy; the particular ways that data should be interpreted; style; etc. And that’s all the stuff that we actually articulate. I’d venture that there is also always a secondary level of negotiation going on non-verbally: should I just take the lead on this part?; am I slowing us down?; is my expertise relevant here?. Essentially, there are all of the interpersonal elements to negotiate as well. Is it any wonder that it takes longer than writing an article alone?
Meanwhile, note to self: next time I assign a group project to students (I’m looking at you, film class!), I need to give them ample time to work through not just content, but interpersonal stuff as well. It would probably also help if I could get them to move across the street from one another, and assign one person per group to be the baker who provides snacks for each meeting. And then someone to do the group’s laundry and grocery shopping while they get their article written—I mean project done.
So what’s the collaborative writing payoff, if it creates deadline problems? Well, there’s the obvious: two sets of expertise, two readers, two thinkers. If you can truly work collaboratively, you can pool your ideas, which ideally become greater than the sum of your two parts. [I'm not necessarily making this claim for our work, you understand, I'm simply saying that it's possible.] It is certainly the case that I know more now than I ever would have about the history of composition and rhetoric as a field than I would have if I had not worked with my present co-author. Less obvious: knowledge about your own process, by way of watching someone else’s. I’ve always known that I’m a balky writer; it takes any number of rewards and punishments to get me off the starting blocks. [Embarrassing confession: once, as an undergrad, I wrote a 20 page paper on Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse in a single day by tying my leg to my desk chair. Sad, but true. There was much cursing involved, and gnashing of teeth. And if we see our own sins at the time of our death, that paper is coming back to haunt me.] My co-writer seemingly has none of these problems—she’s happy to produce reams of text as a way of figuring out her ideas. Why has this never occurred to me as an option? Writing as process of thinking rather than as record of perfectly formed idea?! Preposterous!
I suppose the response to the article will be our litmus test for the success of our collaborative process. Regardless of the editor’s view, however, I’ve got a whole new bag of tricks to experiment with when writing my conference paper. Carnivalesque discourse + interpellation + new media = …
So Many Teen Films, So Little Time January 10, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in film, pedagogy.4 comments
It’s syllabus season again, here at Abyme central, and that means making a number of fine-grain distinctions about what to include in classes. As I’ve said before, this is always a moment of great pain. It feels a bit like abandoning your children by the side of the road, or picking them last for kickball teams (I’ll stop short of a Sophie’s Choice scenario). This spring, I have the great pleasure of teaching a course on teen film. Assuming that I have about 12-13 dates on which to show films, how on earth do I narrow the pack?
I know what you’re thinking: there are some must haves. I’m down with Timothy Shary (and a host of film critics) on this one: John Hughes changed the nature of the genre, and thus he’s in, and perhaps more than once. But then which? And why? And there are other concerns at stake here as well; while I could certainly build a list that would speak to the history of the genre, particularly in response to modern market forces, what I find myself most interested in are the ways in which this format wrestles with the anxieties and obsessions of contemporary phenomenon, and in doing so, constructs adolescent responses to them. For that reason, films that are particularly good at exemplifying critique (e.g., Boyz in the Hood) are in, over and above exemplary candidates in the pool.
One last thing that I find myself fascinated by, that’s slowly making its presence known: the stakes of the teen adaptation flick. There are too many of these to count, really, ranging from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (a staple of my high school experience) to the recent Amanda Bynes vehicle She’s the Man. Are they the equivalent of hiding vegetables in junk food, ie., “fooling” a teen audience into consuming something that’s ostensibly “good for them”? Are they depending on the fact that they’ll be shown in schools? Is it just part of a larger raid on high culture texts by the Hollywood industry? The answers to this are going to be different for each film, surely. For my money, I’m most interested in the ones in which the original ideologies of the text have to shift, and sometimes even reverse themselves, within the constraints of this genre. [Case in point: last time I checked, the reason Viola in Twelfth Night dresses as a man is to protect herself in a strange country. Bynes, on the other hand, is motivated by a desire to join the boys soccer team. Is enforcing Title IX the 21st century version of self-protection?]
All of this to say that the canon of teen films is battling it out with those that do the kind of theoretical and intellectual work that I want them to do. Which means, I fear, that a number of old favorites are going to have to drop out. The question of the morning: will Some Kind of Wonderful or Say Anything get the knife?
Old Documentary, New Tricks December 20, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in film, pedagogy.2 comments
When taking an unannounced blog hiatus, is it best to start back up at whenever you have the wherewithal, or wait out a more rational time period? It looks as if I’m just about at the 3 week mark–I could wait until Christmas Eve to post, but why let my blogging get any rustier?
One of the differences between end-of-semester thinking and post-semester thinking is that my brain actually engages with things it encounters. Case in point: after a morning of snow shoveling, I had a chance to catch about half an hour of David Redmon’s 2005 documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China. Ostensibly, the film begins with a simple premise; Redmon notices that Mardi Gras beads are made in China, and he embarks upon a research trip to understand the ways that such a quintessentially New Orleans artifact is produced so far away. What he documents instead, however, are the material consequences of that production, and the misperceptions and rationalizations of those Americans who import and use those beads.
This DVD went to the top of my Netflix cue so quickly it could make your head spin. How did I miss this film when it came out?! It’s such a beautiful representation of globalization and all of the psychic positions that allow economic injustice to proliferate. The American importer of the beads tells the filmmaker that the Chinese workers are industrious–so much so that when he visits the factory floor, they’re too focused on their work to speak to one another (unlike, of course, the jocular American factory workers). Redmon indicates, however, that the workers are fined a day’s pay for talking. Mardi Gras revelers are asked what they think about Chinese workers begin paid pennies a day to produce the beads that they throw away. One man replies that pennies a day makes for a better living situation than others more unfortunate in China. Meanwhile, Redmon interviews workers who are well aware of their exploitation, who feel very little “gratitude” for their terrible working conditions and pay.
It may be the case that I’m teaching the introduction to American Studies in the fall, and if so, this documentary may be front and center. I love the way that it positions an American tradition vis-a-vis workers in a global economy. And it seems to make ever more relevant the recent histrionic fears about Chinese imports. I wonder if I could organize an entire class looking at the transnational underpinnings of specific U.S. celebrations?
Benedictions of the Blogosphere December 1, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in Whatcha gonna do with that?, pedagogy.add a comment
If I had known that I was going to take such a massive break from the blog, I would have asked for it to be subsidized by a sponsor. But two bits of blog-related news are just too good to keep to myself.
When I first started including blogs as writing practice in my courses two years ago (or “forcing us to do this stuff” as some students like to say), I consistently had a few resistant bloggers. Rightly so, really. If you’re not a blog reader, why would you be invested in writing one? So I’ve learned, every semester, to make the case that we often make in composition contexts: online writing equals writing for a real, public audience; it familiarizes you with rhetorical conventions of particular communities; it instills (i.e., forces) a consistent practice of writing as thinking about readings and/or viewings and/or discussions that we engage in for class purposes. And with recent high profile examples of bloggers getting deals in more traditional media (Wonkette’s book, Julie Powells’ book, and Julie Dam’s novel), I’ve been hinting around—blogging is becoming a way to secure a “legitimate” (not my choice of words, but one that comes up) way of leveraging a career in professional writing!
This month, it’s nothing but good news from the Strose Student/Alumni blogosphere. First, Mallory’s soap opera snarkfest, Serial Drama, has bought her a regular column in Soap Opera Digest. And then, Kim C. finds out that her post on Jean Baudrillard’s passing ended up in the latest edition of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. And these are only two of the multitude of Strose bloggers! Who’s next?! [I wonder what to call a group of bloggers. If it's an exultation of larks and a pride of lions, should it be a byte of bloggers? Bring on the collective nouns! Where's James Lipton when you need him?]
So, if that isn’t the kind of good news that brings me back to blogging, I don’t know what is. If you see these two around the interweb, give them a hearty helping of congratulations.
