Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Research Ethics in Impossibly Unethical Situations

Published
by
Jonathan Stillo
on December 21, 2011
in Cross-Cultural Communication, CUNY and To Ponder
. 5 Comments

The very existence of my research site is unethical.  It is a place of poverty and death—a mountaintop tuberculosis sanatorium in Romania where many patients are incurable. They know their situation is hopeless. Dozens of patients I have personally known died during the course of my research. Some have told me that because they are dying, they want to tell me their stories and to help those who still might live.  I enter into every interview knowing that I may not have the opportunity for follow-up questions.  My months living there were filled with ethically tricky situations, from patients (and nurses) asking for my medical opinions to being propositioned sexually by patients. The worst was when Florin a chubby-faced 20 year old patient committed suicide the same day I interviewed him. His doctor gave him the bad news that he had the same highly resistant strain of TB as his father and he would have to stay at the sanatorium much longer. He was so scared, that evening he left and hung himself. I didn’t find out until months later when I asked his father, now also dead of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) how his son was. I didn’t know what despair looked like until I saw that man, cheeks sunken in, wearing his dead son’s brightly colored hooded sweatshirt. When he finally died, I was disgusted with myself for thinking it was merciful–that maybe death was better than constantly being tortured for infecting his son with a deadly disease.   My university Institutional Review Board (IRB) did not prepare me for any of this—in fact nothing did. Here I was worrying about protecting my participants from my research, but who was protecting them from their own lives?

© Jonathan Stillo This couch, where crying relatives sit waiting for the patient to be admitted is the saddest place in the sanatorium. Sometimes, the goodbyes said here are final ones.

The most important “ethics review” I ever received did not come my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), or the Romanian medical ethics board which both approved my anthropological research on tuberculosis in Romania. Rather, it came from Mr. Gheorghe, a fifty year- old Roma man dying of MDR-TB,   when he stepped out on the sanatorium balcony and told anyone within earshot something close to the following: “Jonathan is a good person. He wants to know about your lives and your families. You should talk to him.” I could feel myself blushing as he said this. His opinion mattered to the other patients, especially because he was the one selling them cigarettes out of his nightstand. Suddenly, other patients seemed eager to speak with me when they had been aloof and skeptical only days before.  Gheorghe didn’t live long enough for me to thank him, he died of a “massive hemoptysis” a technical way of saying he coughed up a massive amount of blood. This is how TB patients often die and it is terrifying.

©Jonathan Stillo Hemoptysis- As patients grow sicker, they cough up blood, sometimes pints at a time.

It took years for me to obtain the official permissions required to live at a Romanian TB sanatorium. I even had to sign a waiver for the U.S. National Science Foundation that they were not liable if I caught the disease. But just having the permission of my university and the Romanian government were not enough. I had to actually ask patients for their permission to ask them about sensitive issues, sometimes asking dying patients about their regrets and about how their families will survive without them.  Part of my initial problem was I didn’t know how to ask the patients to let me interview and survey them. Following my IRB protocol, I showed them my stamped informed consent, a full page of Romanian legalese with talk of risks and benefits. I would read sections out loud and the more “informed” the patients became the more uncomfortable they became. This level of formality does not exist in most aspects of their lives. They could not understand that if I only wanted to talk with them, why I needed such involved paperwork with multiple signatures, dates and stamps.  In fact, when I submitted my original protocol to the Romanian medical ethics board, I was laughed at and told that this research did not need approval because it was not “clinical”.

What did patients care about? That I would protect their identities and that the process was voluntary. Everything else, including talk of risks and benefits, names and numbers of people to contact, made them uncomfortable.  They just wanted my assurance that I would maintain their confidentiality by not publishing their names.  Many patients did not even have an expectation of privacy and did not feel qualified to make the decision as to whether or not they should participate in my research. They did not want to hear about protocols. Rather, they wanted someone that they trusted to tell them it was ok and that they could trust me. A document from my IRB could not accomplish this, only someone else vouching for me could.

I gained the endorsement of Mr. Gheorghe by accident.  There was no plan, he just seemed willing to talk so I sat on his bed with him and asked about photographs on his wall, one of a handsome young man in a military uniform (him during socialism), another of a strikingly beautiful woman on a motorcycle (his 18 year old daughter) and my favorite, him and his wife proudly standing with their eight children in front of their rural home. He told me that doctors never sit on patient’s beds and they never ask about things like this. Visiting doctors and researchers only care about numbers and information on the patient charts. They are not interested in patient’s lives, only their disease.

In my last post, The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook,  I suggested that the reason for the existence of IRBs is not primarily the protection of research participants. Rather, it is to provide legal protection to institutions such as hospitals and universities which despite their non-profit status, operate more like businesses every day. Every researcher connected with the CUNY system must undergo an online ethics training course where they are without fail, asked questions about the Tuskegee syphilis study and the importance of informed consent. The problem is that researchers in any time are operating under the ethical norms of their particular time and place. Withholding antibiotics from those men long after their syphilis could have been cured is ethically unconscionable now, but then, it was not, at least to enough of the people involved. Today, it is still the medical industry (specifically pharmaceutical companies) that is pushing (and in my opinion far exceeding ethical boundaries, in spite of the presence of IRBs in virtually every medical and educational institution.

US CDC Venereal Disease Branch (1970-73) Tuskegee syphilis study doctor injects subject with placebo

In Romania, people generally don’t sue each other, especially the impoverished patients I work with. They live on a mountain “beyond the sight of God” as one patient put it. They don’t have access to lawyers and cannot even call or email the contact info on my informed consent because they lack internet access and money for international calls. When these patients give me their informed consent, it is informed by the personal relationship I have with them and those they know. They do so with the knowledge that they would have little recourse if I did behave unethically. It makes their consent all the more meaningful. Ultimately consent, at least in my research site, has little to do with my protocols and institutional approvals. For the patients informed consent is not something I read out loud to them, it is earned over the course of months through drinking coffee, staring off the balcony and exchanging stories of our families. It is something I take seriously not because of the IRB, but because I know that the people sharing their lives with me trust me on a personal level. I owe it to them to behave in a way that is ethically appropriate and respects their humanity and dignity. I think at this point we have a system of ethics approval which is designed by clinicians and enforced by lawyers for the protection of hospital and university endowments in a litigious society. It is the worst of possible worlds and despite best intentions 20 years from now, future researchers will read of all of the unethical research that took place even in this age of IRBs.

I think part of the issue is that ethical research means different things to different people and institutions. In the technical, clinical and legal language of U.S. IRBs, it means limiting “risk” to the study participants. This definition of ethics was inadequate for one of my Romanian transcribers who did not want to work on my project unless there was an actual benefit to Romanian TB patients—that I am not simply studying their “biosociality” or some other nebulous academic nonsense, but rather trying to use my research to improve people’s lives. I told her that is the only reason why I research. This is the same concern that many patients had. However, it never comes up in my U.S. ethics reviews.  I wish it did.

The Mixed Blessing of Bad Publicity

Published
by
Chrissy
on December 20, 2011
in Culture, Marketing, Media and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Earlier this month, celebrity Alec Baldwin made headlines when he was taken off an American Airlines flight due to his refusal to turn off his iPad because he was in the middle of a “Words With Friends” game. Perhaps what was even more shocking than Baldwin’s relatively petty reason for not complying with the airline’s rules was the astounding amount of publicity the story received in the days and weeks following the incident. In fact, Zynga, the company behind the WWF application on Baldwin’s iPad, was reported to have gotten a boost from all of the publicity about the event that circulated the story.

As a consumer behavior researcher, I’ve often heard the saying “any press is good press.” While my good conscience often doubted this notion at first, I quickly became a believer. Just turn on MTV these days and you will see what I mean (if you haven’t already, that is). It seems as though people are fascinated with shows that are filled with a smorgasbord of bad publicity, including (but not limited to) shows like the Jersey Shore, The Real World, and Celebrity Rehab. Nowadays, it appears that bad publicity is even becoming a type of business strategy for companies, as more and more incidences of scandals leading to increases in sales are becoming the norm.

On a psychological level, researchers argue that the attention-grabbing power of bad publicity is so successful because it is exactly that. When some type of bad publicity incident–be it getting kicked off a plane or being unfaithful like Tiger Woods–is shown over and over again, the story (as well as the main characters) tend to stick with people. Thus, more exposure means more saliency, and the more saliency can mean more audience interest. Combine that with the fact that individuals hold a cognitive bias where they pay attention to negative information more than positive, and you have quite the recipe.

Yet with the increasing value and popularity being placed on bad publicity, are we sending younger, more impressionable individuals in our society the message that doing something outrageously bad is a positive thing? After all, these are the individuals for whom a successful online presence is a priority, and thus might think of any attention as good attention for themselves. Furthermore, how is the trend of bad publicity changing the very values adults attempt to instill upon these individuals at an earlier age?

As an instructor of marketing courses, I often wonder how to solve dilemma of trying to instill a sense of ethics and dignity in my students in the face of a culture that is close to valuing bad publicity. Given that it is becoming so prevalent, I’m often finding bad publicity a topic that is hard to ignore in the classroom. While my original stance on the matter was pure disapproval, I cannot help but think that my students’ perceptions are quite different. Nevertheless, I feel that it is an important issue to discuss to some extent, both in business courses and beyond. After all, these are the future leaders of the world we are educating here.

The National Conversation

Published
by
Ben Spatz
on December 19, 2011
in Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Debating, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Media, New York, Politics, Punctuation, Scholarship, Social Media and What if . . .
. 4 Comments

One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time, one of the most inspiring things about the actual site of Zuccotti Park, and the other Occupy encampments, has been their creation of a forum for open conversation about issues of local and national policy.

But what is the national conversation? Where does it take place? Whose voices are involved? Today I want to ask: Could expanding the national conversation become a focal point for political mobilization? Could activists mobilize around a clear articulation of the need for a more open, engaged, diverse national conversation? Could this be a way to bridge constituencies that currently have a hard time talking to one another?

Image Credit: Ubiquitous Clip Art

As a rhetorical strategy, the idea of expanding the national conversation is double-edged. It encourages us to pull back from direct, explicitly partisan mobilization, and to look instead for more “neutral” (read: widely acceptable) ways of framing the issues. At the same time, it also takes for granted the idea that “more” conversation on such issues will ultimately mean “better” conversation.

(When OWS puts income inequality on the table, we assume that this is a push in the direction of less inequality, since current norms don’t allow an explicit argument for greater inequality. Those who want to bolster inequality have to reframe the issue, for example by shifting to a conversation about “job creation” — also something that can’t be explicitly rejected in the current political climate.)

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

Yet I think there is a lot to be said for this kind of strategy, especially in this moment, when the national conversation in the U.S. is operating on a very shallow level, with little substantive debate and much divisive sound-biting. Is this the best we can do?

It bothers me, for example, when my political comrades describe our country as if it consisted of three constituencies: left-wing voters, left-wing leaders, and right-wing leaders. It’s as if they forget all about the right-wing voters, the people who actually vote for and support Romney and Perry and Gingrich. Then they turn around and say: The politicians are ignoring the will of the people! I don’t hear enough activists on my side of the spectrum talking about what motivates Republican voters.

2008 Electoral Map

Of course, gerry-mandering and voter suppression are real. There are all kinds of problems built into the system. To some extent, the politicians are ignoring the will of the people. But we do still hold elections, and plenty of people participate in them — and, of those people, plenty are voting for right-wing candidates. The Republican party has a strong electoral basis in social conservatism and religious fundamentalism. I don’t see how we can hope to change or understand the current situation nationally without taking that into account. And that means framing the national debate to include the issues that mobilize those communities alongside our own.

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

Sometimes it seems as if presidential debates are just about the only time when a national conversation actually takes place. There, campaign finance reform is a central issue, and already a main focus of political activism. But I usually hear this issue framed in terms of who gets elected, as if the only purpose of presidential elections were to find out which of two parties will hold power for the next four years. Shouldn’t presidential debates be the highest level of national conversation? Shouldn’t they be supported by a layered, systemic national conversation that continues throughout all phases of the election cycle? Isn’t campaign finance reform really about trying to make the presidential contest less of what Brian Lehrer calls a “horse race” and more of a substantive conversation on national issues?

In short, I don’t think it’s enough right now to mobilize on specific issues. The bill that just passed in the Senate is a good example: It’s terrifying. But even more terrifying is the fact that we have arrived at a moment where such a bill can pass without significant national debate. There are only so many petitions that one can sign against specific bills that most people in the country have never even heard of. I am yearning for a longer-term view of politics, for a vision of the future that goes beyond slowing or preventing the slide toward authoritarianism.

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

  • What if expanding the national conversation became the explicit platform of a social movement or political party? What kinds of implications (for campaign finance reform, for education, for civil rights, for financial regulation) could be woven into an argument for more open and thorough debate?
  • What kind of articulate challenges could be put forth in terms of how actually to accomplish this expansion? What type of debates, conversations, forums, round tables, symposia, performances, and educational programs would support such an expansion? What kinds of institutions and media are best situated to accomplish this? What kinds of pressure could cause them to do so?
  • And finally: Is there a special role here for education and academia? (Here’s a challenge for intellectuals to support OWS. And here’s a proposal to shed light on how politicians interact with experts in relevant fields.) How can we counter the spinning of higher education as an elitist club? What are the real systems that can raise the level of public debate and get people interested in the national conversation?

Outing collegiality

Published
by
Linell
on December 15, 2011
in Baruch College, CUNY, Faculty Development, Pedagogy, teaching and Writing Instruction
. 3 Comments

At a recent meeting at Schwartz, we talked about what sort of web platform would best serve the needs of teachers, helping us share materials, voice problems and elicit advice, and compare experiences, basically to share our practices as teachers. This Wednesday, Luke, Mikhail, Craig, and Erica launched a resource site/discussion space for the English Department. Last week, associate professor John Weir circulated an email to the English department at Queens College which made me think of what else is needed, besides a departmental forum, like web-based discussion space, to foster collegiality. Weir’s email has a kind of openness and immediacy that, in my experience, characterizes informal talk between friends and colleagues—the rant of exasperation or excitement—that I’ve shared in hallways, after a meeting or between classes. It is one thing for one adjunct to talk to another, or even to senior faculty, by the Xerox machine, and another to post online in a forum, where your thoughts are exposed to an entire department. Sharing pedagogical experiences and practices more publically requires perhaps a more expansive collegial spirit.

This fall, I taught a literature course for the first time, and at Queens College, where I’d never worked before. The class was scheduled at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday, and during this time the Queens campus seemed pretty deserted. I dragged my wheely bag around empty floors and stairwells, from my office, to tech services, to the building where I taught. One faculty member observed my class, and the meeting with her that followed was a bright, warm spot of collegiality, advice, and encouragement in an otherwise pretty isolated semester. Then, Weir’s email arrived, and I had that great moment that comes from sharing experiences in a particular profession: “That exact thing happened to me!” Weir mentions students’ tendency to open papers with broad general statements. I had just spent a day with student papers that began with some variation of “Since the dawn of time, humans have thought about the important topic of identity….” I had also spent the day writing in the margins of my students’ papers comments like, “Interesting claim, can you support and develop this with an example, or cite a source?” Weir addresses these issues in this informal email in a way I found very helpful.

Last year, Talia wrote an excellent post about how to get adjuncts (who are isolated from professionalization events because they are already “stretched thin” timewise), to participate in pedagogy workshops. She came up with three great tips for how to reach out and engage adjuncts. Below, I offer Weir’s email as an example of the sort of spirit of collegiality and engaged, attuned teaching that did not wait for a Wiki or a workshop, but just reached out—both to colleagues with whom I can assume he already has a rapport, and to strangers and fellow teachers like me.

Weir wrote:

“…..I wanted to share a “teaching moment,” if I may, and forgive me for jamming up your email at this point in the semester, when everyone has too much to read.So my undergrad students and I (ENG 395W) where talking about the first paragraph of the first drafts of their research papers -”research-,” “term-,” “analytical-,” whatever you call those papers.

And my students are of course in love with generality and with big sweeping introductory moments.  Not in a hostile way: They are convinced of the importance of big contextualizing opening remarks,and why not?  But it leads to first sentences like: “David Foster Wallace develops literature in an artistic way.”  They do think that a general introductory move is important and necessary and basically required.

And so we were trying to figure out how to write an opening sentence that was both specific and catchy, that hauled you into the essay, set a tone, and also got right down to business – just as one example of an opening-sentence-strategy.  And don’t ask me how we ended up talking about marijuana.  Um, I don’t remember?  But suddenly we were discussing all the ways in which folks get busted for carrying a tiny amount of pot on their persons; and one of my students said, “Cops like to make arrests right at the end of their shifts, because it forces them into overtime and extra pay”; and one of my students said, ”Drug busts for a small amount of marijuana are really popular because the NYPD can use those arrests to pump up statistics about how they’re
keeping down crime in NYC”; and there were like 5 students in the room who had information to add, and they mentioned various articles they had read on this topic in other classes and/or on their own.  They cited their sources, in other words.  And everyone in the room, all 17 students, were suddenly talking, with way more interest and excitement than they had shown in our discussion of, well, anything else all
semester.

And it so happens that I’ve been reading Judith Halberstam’s *The Queer Art of Failure* (Duke U Press, 2011), wherein, among other things, Halberstam has stuff to say about pedagogy and the academy, including her assertion – a propos of Jacques Ranciere’s *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* and Laurent Cantet’s 2008 documentary *The Class*(*Entre Les Murs*) – that “learning is a two-way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.”

“Okay,” I thought, “here’s our dialogic relation,” and I drew my students’ attention to how instantly and fully they got engaged in a conversation in which each student entered into the argument with a specific example: Cops make drug arrests at 5 PM; the NYPD uses drug busts to brag about crime control; etc.  And I reminded them that they had cited their sources.  And I asked them if they imagined that they might begin a paper about David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” by pointing immediately to a piece of evidence, a moment from the text, an event, a compelling linguistic turn, a critical intervention made by a scholar or critic or writer, etc. Rather than, you know, ”Western Literature has long struggled with the problem of language.”

And I think they got that.

All of which is to say that I have found that the only pedagogical tool I have is ignorance and unknowing, which I perform for my students whenever possible (usually out of necessity!), and that mostly this strategy fails, but sometimes it gives students room to veer away from the topic and demonstrate their expertise in some other area of discourse.  And once in a while, I am able to point out to them that they already know how to do what we are struggling to figure out how to do.”

The Digital I & Thou

Published
by
Rebekah
on December 7, 2011
in teaching, Technology, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 3 Comments

At a recent faculty roundtable, a familiar conversation surfaced: why do students incorporate the rhythms, abbreviations and tones of digital communication at all the wrong moments and in all the worst contexts–using emoticons in requests for paper extensions or text-speak in formal essays, for instance? A core complaint runs through this line of questioning: technology has ruined students’ ability to write. And as familiar as these dilemmas are, so too is one potential pedagogical response: the problem is not texting or emailing or twittering; it’s learning to teach students to move competently and consciously amidst various modalities, to identify and name types of writing and forms of mediation, and to practice when and how to deploy them.

When I first taught freshman composition, I was charged with covering the five primary rhetorical modes. Of course there have always been more than five, but the contemporary moment demands that we re-direct our gaze toward the reality of an infinite body of modes (even if we continue to insist on the tidy and classical handful of five: they can still be useful). This doesn’t mean that every classroom must embrace and welcome tweets and texts and slang into its culture and content, but rather that even if we want to limit the language-types circulating in our classrooms or in our students’ essays , we’re going to have to name them, collectively, first. “The ability to write” does not constitute one undifferentiated field, and as teachers we must liberate ourselves from that fantasy.

I’m curious to hear about strategies others have uncovered for teaching multiple fluencies. One of the challenges of living up to the promise of this pedagogical approach is that the very assumption of audience that underlies the conventional conception of rhetoric has been thrown into deep disarray.  To whom is a Facebook status update addressed? Is it to an individual, to some parcel of one’s collection of “friends,” to some imaginary conglomerate Other, or an aspect of oneself?  I’m quite sure that in many cases both the identities of speaker and audience are unknown. Perhaps one route of entry into the new rhetoric of communication is via a return to, and revision of, an elemental study of self and other: one that accounts for student, teacher and screen.

 

 

What is Communication Across the Curriculum Today? (Part 3 of 3)

Published
by
Sarah Ruth Jacobs
on December 5, 2011
in cac and Communication Intensive Courses (CICs)
. 0 Comments

This post is the final of three posts looking at the development of Communication Across the Curriculum. In Part 1 I discussed the rise of Communication Courses and charted the long term trends of publications on the topic. In Part 2 I looked at the motives and aims behind the creation of Communication Courses, the trends in how they were discussed over a number of decades, and how the Communication Across the Curriculum movement emerged.

Today I would like to look at common threads in articles on CAC during the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s. I also want to discuss current questions or concerns that have emerged in articles in the past few years.

The emphasis on how Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) courses might prepare students for corporate jobs continued through the 1980s:

The importance of the development of oral communication abilities has been documented in a number of sources. Studies of graduates, employers, and corporate executives have revealed, for example, that skills in problem solving, communication, and interpersonal relations are most valued in high tech corporations….One way of assisting students in developing oral communication competencies is the required speech communication course, and another way is to integrate communication skills into content area courses. (Hay 1)

Communication Across the Curriculum at Baruch is certainly part of this lineage of CAC programs which emphasize communication as a business skill. However, since Baruch’s Communication Intensive Courses are in Theater and other humanities departments, they represent more than just communication for business. Depending on the class and the instructor, the emphasis might be communication as effective performance, communication as the transmission of cultural understanding, or communication as a means of displaying academic knowledge. For a rich background on the development of Communication Intensive Courses at Baruch, this 2008 Change article is required reading (Warner).

The 1990s witnessed a surge of articles on the assessment of Communication Across the Curriculum courses (Cronin and Grice) as well as on the applications of new technologies (Reiss, Selfe, and Young). Email, the web, and presentation software helped to increase the relevance of CAC and CIC. This seems fitting, since (as I showed in my last post) the original idea of Communication Courses came out of training in the use of communication technologies such as the typewriter.

Despite the spread of CAC and CIC, the basic Communication Course still exists within Communication Departments Across the country, though of course it has evolved through the decades (Morreale, Worley, and Hugenberg). Alongside the notion of Writing in the Disciplines, discipline specific definitions of communication have spread through Communication in the Disciplines movements (Dannels and Gaffney).

The first decade of this century witnessed articles demanding an even greater standardization of CAC, even while acknowledging that standards of communication are developing within each discipline as much as without (Dannels and Gaffney). Articles in this decade appear to be just as likely to survey the field of CAC as they are to pose discipline-specific (CID) questions (Hyavarinen et al.). Many writers also focus on questions of practical pedagogy (Dannels, Gaffney, and Martin).

The question, then, is what is CAC today? One of the issues that CAC faces is how to balance general communication practices with discipline specific standards (Garside). New communication platforms will likely also stimulate scholarly inquiry.

I personally am interested in the ethics and human purposes of communication, but these questions are generally not addressed by authors writing about CAC; I imagine this is because moral or ethical questions are seen as disconnected from “objective” standards of communication. However, looking at our Cacophony posts from this semester, it seems as though we are continually returning to questions of how communication relates to power dynamics and identity. I wonder whether these are questions that are being asked by CAC participants in other parts of the US.

Zucotti Park, October 2011. Source: emilydickinsonridesabmx‘s Flikr photostream

Works Cited

Cronin, Michael W. and George L. Grice. “Oral Communication across the Curriculum:  Designing, Implementing, and Assessing a University-Wide Program.” 77th Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. Atlanta, GA. Oct. 31-Nov. 3 1991. Conference Report.

Dannels, Deanna P., and Amy L. Housley Gaffney. “Communication Across The Curriculum And In The Disciplines: A Call For Scholarly Cross-Curricular Advocacy.” Communication Education 58.1 (2009): 124-153. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Dannels, Deanna P., Amy L. Housley Gaffney, and Kelly Norris Martin. “Students’ Talk About The Climate Of Feedback Interventions In The Critique.” Communication Education 60.1 (2011): 95-114. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Garside, Colleen. “Seeing The Forest Through The Trees: A Challenge Facing Communication Across The Curriculum Programs.” Communication Education 51.1 (2002): 51. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Hay, Ellen A. “Communication across the Curriculum.” 73rd Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. Boston, MA. 5-8 November 1987. Conference Presentation.

Hyavarinen, Marja-Leena, Paavo Tanskanen, Nina Katajavuori, and Pekka Isotalus. “A Method For Teaching Communication In Pharmacy In Authentic Work Situations.” Communication Education 59.2 (2010): 124-145. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Morreale, Sherwyn P., David W. Worley, and Barbara Hugenberg. “The Basic Communication Course At Two- And Four-Year U.S. Colleges And Universities: Study VIII-The 40Th Anniversary.” Communication Education 59.4 (2010): 405-430. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Reiss, Donna, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young, Eds. Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. ERIC Database. Urbana, IL:  National Council of Teachers, 1998. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

Warner, Fara. “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility.” Change Nov. 2008. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

History Re-Tweets Itself

Published
by
David Parsons
on December 2, 2011
in Social Media and teaching
. 0 Comments

 

 

This semester, my students and I have been struck by a series of uncanny synchronicities between the course material we are covering and national events.  First, the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno scandal and ensuing student riot climaxed the night before we watched a documentary about James Meredith and the violent resistance he met as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.  Watching reactionary students overturning cars and attacking journalists in the Deep South of 1962, because they resented any “outside threat” to their beloved institution, was particularly chilling in light of the previous evening’s images of Penn State students rampaging in misguided defense of their hero.  Similarly, units on the People’s Park occupation of 1969 in Berkeley, California, resonated neatly with the Zuccotti Park occupation and subsequent eviction.  Finally, our coverage of Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement, which is portrayed with clarity and emotion in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (now streaming on Netflix!), in the context of the wider campus uprisings of the Vietnam War era, coincided (somewhat sickeningly) with the recent incidents of protest and police violence in our very own Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch.  In all of these cases, discussions of the similarities between eras of past upheaval and the current sociopolitical landscape were unavoidable, and helped reinforce, for me, a couple key points about teaching in the 21st century.

I think every teacher wants their students to connect the subject they are studying to their everyday lives, to see its relevance and to integrate its teachings into their lived experience.  As social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to expand in popularity, particularly among college students, it makes sense to employ these tools as a way of connecting students more directly to their course material.  Tom Harbison and I have been experimenting with this a bit, creating a shared course wiki that allows students to collaborate in creating a database of historical knowledge.  One aspect that’s been fascinating to watch develop is the visual aesthetic of each wiki page, and how students find unique ways to communicate often profound historical observations. One recent, brilliant example (above) shows how students juxtaposed two images of Rosa Parks to create a striking tableau of change over time.

At their root, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking utilities all seem to nurture a particular human desire to narrativize our experience of reality, to take the primary sources of our shared history and arrange them into an understandable story.  This impulse can be useful, and is indeed ubiquitous in pedagogy, because it allows for the communication of complex concepts by embedding them in easily digestible narrative morsels.  Of course, making a “story” out of everything has its dangers, as well: imagine whole generations of students getting all of their information about World War II from Saving Private Ryan (shudder).

Speaking of the Second World War, a recent New York Times piece describes a project called “Real Time World War II,” in which an Oxford University history graduate, Alwyn Collinson, is recreating, hour by hour, the events of the war, beginning in 1939, via an astoundingly detailed (and increasingly popular) Twitter feed.  Collinson’s project appeals to me because it satisfies the “you are there” excitement of storytelling while simultaneously demonstrating the necessity of thorough research.  Also, it’s a lot of fun (not to mention incredibly spooky) to witness the march to world war in the postmodern vernacular of Twitter.  A Yale professor quoted in the Times article states, “People in the past weren’t living in the past, they were living in their own present. . .These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”  For me, Collinson’s experiment offers one example of how to use the raw tools of social networking to stimulate a more imaginative connection to course material, and serves as a reminder that, as technologically-enhanced human communication continues its expansion, so does the need to adapt our learning strategies to fit a rapidly shifting set of historical circumstances.

Pop Cultural Pop

Published
by
Ben Spatz
on December 1, 2011
in Art, Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics and Style
. 2 Comments

Doing pop culture analysis is like trying to carve a tunnel through a mountainside with a spoon. But as a daily rider of public transportation, I can’t help but notice the images that barrage us as we travel from one point to another. It amazes me that we have sold this space to advertisers rather than using it for art, news, or public dialogue.

Here’s one that I noticed recently:

Advertisement for "The Big Bang Theory"

What strikes me about this ad is that it seems to un-self-consciously demonstrate mainstream America’s imaginary world of neatly defined identity categories and their associated hierarchies of power and influence.

I have never watched “The Big Bang Theory,” so I don’t know anything about these characters beyond what’s shown here. But when I look at the poster, what I basically see is a central white man surrounded by four other, less central people. The central guy is taller than the others and, in the poster I see most often, he is the only one looking directly out at the viewer.

Then there are the “others.” From left to right: the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s effeminate and/or retro and/or gay (as indicated by tight purple pants); the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s not white; the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s nerdy and/or intellectual and/or Jewish (as indicated by glasses); and the woman. Whether or not these descriptions are true of the characters in the show, they are clearly marked this way in the poster.

If you think I’m being reductive, note that these ads for “The Big Bang Theory” (produced by CBS) are in every case — as far as I’ve seen, on the subway — bundled with ads for “30 Rock” (produced by NBC). I’m not sure if I would have thought to read these ads as such an obvious statement of mainstream television’s understanding of identity politics if the two ads weren’t so bizarrely, strikingly similar to each other.

Advertisement for "30 Rock"

I have actually seen “30 Rock,” so I do know something about the characters. All the same, the line-up in the poster is identical to the one I’ve described above, with a single, possible significant difference: the nerdy / intellectual / Jewish role (the one marked with glasses) is now being played by a woman.

So we have again, from left to right and top to bottom: the guy marked as effeminate, emotional, possibly gay; the racial other; the silly, blond woman; the intellectual (now female); and finally, of course, the white guy. No markings on him!

There’s nothing new about this analysis. We all know that white men and women dominate mainstream television, and that identity politics gets absorbed into pop culture — for better and for worse — through the addition of secondary characters, more or less stereotypical, marked as different kinds of “other” in relation to the central white male.

Even given all that, I am struck by the juxtaposition of these two ads — plastered side by side all over New York City’s public transportation system — and by the fact that whoever put them together either did not notice their eerily parallel composition, or else accepted it as a statement about what counts as “prime time” in today’s world.