Here’s a tragically-funny-because-it’s-true video that speaks to some of the concerns Talia raised in her most recent post. Discuss.
Besides deflating grad students and recent PhDs, this video is great example of what you can do on Xtranormal.com, a fun site that allows anyone to easily create animated movies, about which Lauren posted some time ago.
After teaching a summer intensive course in public speaking this year, I thought I’d finally figured out how to be a good teacher. My class was engaged, thoughtful, collaborative and often lively. I knew, though, that part of the charm came from the summer itself—my students weren’t taking five other classes, and we met for longer periods of time, three times a week. It was just more focused and sustained. Towards the end of the semester, I spoke with a few other teachers who agreed when I asked them, “Aren’t summer classes great?” They agreed more heartily than, honestly, I wanted them to, indicating that my own great class wasn’t just caused by my better work, but by the qualities of summer intensive, and maybe also the kind of orientation towards school that students who take summer classes are likely to have.
Twice in the past week, a teacher has told me that they are teaching two classes of one section, and that the two classes respond completely differently to the same material. Shown the same video, one class is inspired and engaged, leading to animated class discussion. The other class is bored. This situation is a good litmus test for a teacher—you know the lack of response from your students isn’t a direct reflection on your work. But, what are you to do? Is it our job as teachers to inspire and engage? Of course, it is a two-way street, students have to come ready to extend their imaginations, not simply be catered to.
My questions is–how to account for this disparity in student response? Should we change our tactics from one class to another? Is it, as other teachers I’ve spoken with have guessed, group dynamics? And how do you change the dynamics of a group, when you’re only one in 24?
The Journal of Public Deliberation (which posts of all its articles online for free) recently posted a special issue on higher education. An article on communication as a discipline in U.S. colleges, “Communication studies and Deliberative Democracy: Current Contributions and Future Possibilities,” by Martín Carcasson, Laura W. Black, and Elizabeth S. Sink, makes an argument common to many other authors in this issue, and one that is probably an inherent belief with scholars of the concept of deliberative democracy:
“It is clear that one of the major barriers to a more deliberative democracy is the lack of quality interaction, and thus understanding and mutual respect across perspectives” (2010: 13).
These authors focus their analysis on communication studies, as well as on other classes such as rhetoric, group communication, and interpersonal communication.
“Perhaps most emblematic of the connection between communication education and democracy are the public speaking courses required for thousands of students each semester. This course has an inherent to skills relevant to democracy, as students are typically asked to research public issues and persuade their fellow student-citizens of particular points of view” (7).
However, the authors remark, “unfortunately” these classes often focus more on “individual achievement, needs of marketplace, and professional presentation skills.”
They see these skills as suitable to an “adversarial” kind of democracy, rather than a deliberative one. I think adversarial democracy more aptly describes what we’ve got, actually. But the question of which values, what system of beliefs, undergirds the way we teach communication is one I was really happy to see grappled with, out in the (relative) open of a free, scholarly journal.
If there are communicative values behind what we teach when we teach Com 1010, they don’t seem to be foregrounded, made available for critique. When I was assigned two sections of this class as a new grad student, I partly compensated for my lack of teaching experience by approaching the class as if it was a thesis project. I grabbed on to a few oblique references to democracy and public speaking in The Art of Public Speaking textbook—democratic values like respect and inclusion. This ended up taking over my own research interest, and really influencing the way I taught the class.
I saw these norms in the way not only public speaking but also composition is taught: including and respecting the other side, representing others’ arguments with compassion as well as accuracy, crediting others’ work. But I wonder if this method of communicating will be fairly unique to college. As my students leave college and advance through adulthood, I imagine them sifting themselves into communities of cultural and political taste, and looking over to the other side from across a wider divide, often apoplectic. That’s been my experience. Political conversations in my observation mostly seem about heightening our own beliefs, more thoroughly dismissing the opposition. Where outside of class do we practice this method of empathy, reciprocity, and inquiry with those whose beliefs most distinctly contrast with our own?
“Deliberative scholars and practitioners” according to the article, “strive to create spaces where multiple voices can not only be heard, but truly listened to, even in communities that have marked power imbalances.”
“Yet despite the numerous links between the fields and exemplary democratic practice, teaching and scholarship too often remains indirect, dispersed, secondary, rather than at the forefront of disciplinary concerns” (1).
The article is a call for what Charles Taylor described as “liberalism as a fighting creed,” rather than a procedural fallback, and rather than a negative freedom to be left alone, to do your own thing. I really like this article, it’s comprehensive and clear, with a nice overview of communication studies in its various versions in higher ed. But I think rather than put this belief system at the forefront of concerns, it should also be discussed, made available for critique, rather than tucked into a textbook like The Art of Public Speaking, an assumed, unexamined, scattered belief system.
My favorite defacement of an ad in a subway station began as an image of the New York skyline in a hazy sunset. I don’t remember what the ad was for, but I don’t think the designers had figured that it was too soon after 9/11 to depict a reddish, smokey skyline without evoking dread and sadness in the commuters who rushed by, barely taking in the image and definitely not noticing the brand. It was great to see how the contributions to this poster added up over a week or so. First, yes, there was a magic marker drawing of an airplane headed towards the top of a building. Then, few days later a cartoon in ballpoint pen of a little alien appeared, hovering in a spaceship over the East River. A smiling Martian, with cute curling antennae. Bit by bit, other drawings started to fill up the sky, drawn with different pens, in different styles. There was a flying alligators, and even a yelling George Bush stick figure. I would pass this poster in its many phases, and feel really happy about my fellow New Yorkers for collectively and creatively remaking what had maybe been a disturbing and insensitive ad agency’s miscalculation. I thought of this graffiti as a great way to respond to the impolite media that was too quick to jump on the event and fictionalize it.
I can tend to read too much into things, but this year I began to feel like the way some subway posters were defaced was asking for attention beyond the usual idle tearing or tagging. An ad for the movie “Leap Year,” suddenly seemed to actually look like the strangling weed the romantic comedy about a desperate single woman actually is. Someone had either tested under the top layer of the poster to see what was underneath, or had remembered the previous ad for a horror movie (“Wolfman”) in the same place. 
Someone sliced pieces of the first layer of the bright green “Leap Year” to show twisted dark vines beneath it. The heroine of the romantic comedy now looked threatened by the clutches of a monster, and it was the encircling grasp of another movie. Was it a feminist cut-up, or a coincidence? And was I over-interpreting? I took a picture, and showed it to a friend. He said, “Hm. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
Later, a sad face appeared inside the poster for the “Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” show.
And, soon after that, a knife and the same tangled vines from “Wolfman” appeared between Jennifer Lopez and some actor guy in the ad for “Back Up Plan.”
My favorite one (sadly, I didn’t get a photo) was of two morning talk show hosts. After their hyper-groomed and hugely smiling faces had been up for a week or so, the subway razor artist peeled around their heads to reveal much bigger heads beneath them. Now it looked as if huge monster heads were surging out of the perfectly suited morning show host bodies.
Eventually, I put my question to Google and turned up a video and an article in the Greenpoint Gazette about an artist who goes by Poster Boy.
At the Schwartz Institute Symposium last week, keynote speaker Clay Shirky described how the internet allows people to critique and adapt systems and institutions. What had previously been one-way communication (television, print ads, etc) has become two-way and multiple-way (Amazon, Facebook). Sharkey succinctly and compelling theorized what he calls a revolution in communication behavior that comes from adapting to these new technologies. I’ve been thinking of how Shirky’s explanations of the effects and significance of new technologies could also be useful towards theorizing older technologies and behaviors. I’ve thought of public art that did a kind of political, public critique of being a 90’s phenomenon, but at that time it was associated with singular artists. I like not being able to tell when subway ad defacement is intentional, when it is the work of someone who considers himself an artist, and when it is more random. It makes me look at these images differently.
For other examples of subway art (and better photography) see this article in New York S8#%ty.
Once, a student told me that he couldn’t present his final assignment for my public speaking class because he had to take the CPA exam. It was understood that the exam would take precedence as a kind of gateway to gainful employment, but I was still a little surprised at how compelled I felt to step aside. As an adjunct, I’ve been made aware of the connection between public speaking and employment for Baruch students. Several teachers work in public relations firms or as corporate consultants outside the college, and students seem to respect and learn from they way they both model and teach the conventions of business professional comportment and conventions.
I’ve told my students that public speaking assignments should prepare them for the corporate world in terms of how to coherently present their work, and how to be poised, authoritative, and collegial doing it. I’d like to have more to say than this, but less to say than the broad justification of humanities that I’ve heard before (and largely believe). While I haven’t had any interest in the business world before, after teaching at Baruch for a few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how much I don’t know about it. I feel kind of hampered in my ability to figure out how what I am trying to offer (my own work research is in democracy and culture) might connect to their lives outside college. And hampered from connecting what I’m doing to what I guess makes up the majority of their classtime. I looked up ‘what can the humanities do for business’ and found a Stanford webpage from early this year, in which several people respond to Stanley Fish’s (he’s like academia’s Joe Liberman!). John Bender says, “Not too long ago, the New York Times reported interviews with a number of CEOs who connected their ability as managers to their long-term engagement with books of all kinds, including fiction and poetry.” Bryan Wolf responds that Fish is “trying to save the humanities from instrumentalization.” But I’m actually curious about what, in terms of business, that instrumentalization might be.
The Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity has hosted some interesting panels, one on corporate failures that may have led to the current crisis called, “Did we get what we deserve?” And another one I wish I’d seen that featured alumni Edward Zinbarg, who wrote a book called Faith, Morals, and Money. So, I vow in 2010 to go to this center’s events, and meanwhile I’m working on a list of my favorite novels and plays, and the different ways they address money. So far, I’ve got: Aristophanes, The Acharnians, which stars a merchant who argues against an idealistic warmonger; anything by Charles Dickens; Easter, a play about debt and Christianity by Strindberg; Jerry McGuire (money and success is love); and Slumdog Millionaire. The more I read, the more leftward I seem to drift. And, while I refuse to read anymore Ayn Rand, I’m interested in literature that views neoliberalism and capitalism critically as well as positively. So far, Jerry McGuire is all I can think of. I’d like to find some writing on connection between literature and economics. So far, all I can think of is the passage in Capital when Marx talks about the lace-maker’s death notice, and how much it reminded me of Dickens. I’d like to read some fiction over winter break, even though I should be working and working. And I would like a booklist of fiction on money.
I came accross a very interesting blog post entitled “Borat is no Ali G” in 3Quarksdaily.
Ram Manikkalingam, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam, makes an important cultural argument about communication:
“The way we get along in strange places is by depending on the interpretive charity of strangers. We expect that they will make amends for our mistakes – linguistic and/or cultural – and assist us in interpreting a different world. What is remarkable is how well this works, seldom leading to complete failure to comprehend each other in the midst of linguistic and cultural difference. It works because when we come across people with whom we struggle to communicate, they also struggle back.”
After reading this blog post, I revisited some of the scenes from Borat, which made me realize how much people go out of their ways to help “others” (whether they are in England, USA or Kazakhstan).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0dbSdZc0Cg[/youtube]
Manikkalingam reminds us that this mutual struggle is also about “suspending the judgement” and is the basis of the success of communication:
“Success in communicating depends on the willingness to suspend judgment during those crucial initial moments when you are not certain that you understand exactly what the other person is saying. And this is exactly what Borat exploits to pull his stunt – the human propensity to communicate in ways that make us seek to understand each other better, even if we may not ultimately agree. He does this by exaggerating exactly the kind of cultural difference – accent, gesture, walk and attitude – that would make any interlocutor assume a high likelihood of miscommunication, thus ensuring that they would give him even more latitude in making the most outrageous comments about women, Jews, Muslims and others, who may come to mind.”
In the movie Borat, Cohen takes advantage of this human effort to communicate with the “other” in a variety of settings: in the Hamptons vs. in a village in Kazakhstan. But the effect is very different. In the Hamptons we laugh at the homophobic attitudes of the members of a priviledged class, in the village in Kazakhstan we laugh at the “strange” habits and the empoverished living conditions. It is clear that the laughter does not erase the inequalities (by making both sides equally ridiculous). On the contrary, it deepens the divide.
However, the question about communication remains: what to do with our preconceived ideas when we communicate with others?
Each year, the Oxford American Dictionary names a neologism the “word of the year,” and this year it’s “unfriend,” a verb that means “to remove a friend from a social networking site.” Pretty underwhelming. I think we can do better.
Last week, Hyewon and David each wrote a post that registered some anxiety about the academic job market. They reminded me that I need to jazz up my CV if I want to be among the mere 50% of the English Ph.D.s who receive a tenured professorship. Unfortunately, I have no authentic edge over my brilliant competitors, so I have to stretch. How about a new CV section, one that no one else will have? “Neologisms Coined; or, My Personal Impact on the American Lexicon.” Arranged chronologically, it will elaborate all the word inventions and new usages I have helped pioneer.
Rough Draft
2000: “seinfeld” [verb]: to interpret a real-life occurrence through the lens of the sitcom Seinfeld. Often pejorative, meaning to analyze complex situations reductively in order to conform them to the plot-lines of a sitcom. E.g. “This is the kind of situation that simply cannot be seinfelded.”
2006: “prebound” [verb]: to actively seek a new partner while still in a relationship; to delay a breakup until a rebound relationship is within view. E.g. “I think Jeffrey and Tara will break up as soon as one of them finds someone new. They’re both obviously prebounding.”
2009: “oblogation” [noun]: the obligation to contribute to a blog, often attached to a job or a casual agreement. E.g. “The workload is light, except for a twice-a-week oblogation.” Or “I was excited to contribute to Antonio’s blog at first, but it’s become a burdensome oblogation.”
Well, that ought to impress the hiring committees, right? There’s more work to be done with this inadequate language of ours, though. Here’s a list of phenomena that still need words: when you introduce yourself to someone you’ve already met several times; when you realize halfway through telling a long story that you’re being rather dull; the weird but delightful way people act on an unseasonably warm winter day; etc. Any suggestions? Any words you’ve coined or repurposed?
And, how about a word for a blog post that’s gone on too long?
Blogs@Baruch was used in approximately two dozen courses this semester, in disciplines that included Fine and Performing Arts, English, Sociology/Anthropology, Journalism, Library Information Systems, Communication, History, and Management.
WPMu continues to provide a flexible platform for our faculty members to structure and explore online communication and composition in their courses. Course blogs this semester have been used to aggregate individual student portfolios in a Do-It-Yourself Publishing course, for students to share and comment upon Shakespeare Scene Studies, to blog about journalism internships (password protected), to write about food and sustainable agriculture, and to show off their multi-media reporting. Students have debated current events on a blog devoted to reading and discussing the New York Times (password protected), blogged about blogging as journalists, and added stories to Writing New York. Some faculty members have been using Blogs@Baruch as their course management system, while others have used it to try to create public writing opportunities for their students.
For a full listing of course blogs, see our “projects” page.
One project in particular embodied the excitement some faculty members and students bring to their work on Blogs@Baruch. Professor Shelly Eversley, in the English Department, had her American Literature students produce pod and vodcasts that analyzed texts they had encountered over the course of the semester. Buoyed by Cogdog’s “The Fifty Tools”, I did an hour in class on free digital story telling tools (including Voice Thread, Yodio, Gabcast, and Podcast People), and also gave some advice on how to construct a story that balanced narrative, analysis, and style. The students produced amazing work, which they collected here in advance of their voting for the initial American Literature Podcast Awards (the ALPs). They ended the semester with an awards ceremony, and have continued to post their thoughts about the class to the blog in the week since.
Here’s two of my favorite videos from the class:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcU6_WH6mVI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXa_MM19-w[/youtube]
Prof. Eversley’s project exemplifies the useful energy that multimedia tools can help students invest in their coursework. These projects are not substitutes for the critical engagement with a text or a canon that some might argue can only be attained through writing an essay; rather, they are additional paths towards that engagement. These students were excited about showing off their work, used the city as a laboratory and an archive, helped each other master the technology, and showed deep engagement with their chosen texts. This is good teaching and learning, and we’re happy to support any faculty member who challenges herself and her students to use a variety of tools and literacies in their effort to produce knowledge.
Kudos to all of our intrepid faculty and their students for providing us with yet more examples of innovative pedagogy on Blogs@Baruch. We look forward to Spring 2010, and in particular two film courses that will be taught on the system. Blogfessors, come on down!
photo credit: andysternberg
Recently a Baruch undergraduate student, after listening to my advice on her Sociology 1000 paper, asked me, “So, what are you?” I replied in the usual way, explaining that I’m a Writing Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and that my role is to help students with specific writing assignments in their Sociology/Anthropology courses.
The student looked at me, still confused. ”Yeah, but, are you a professor? Or a student? Or what?” At this point I extrapolated my role even further, describing each step of the graduate school journey, regaling her with such terms as “adjuncting,” “Level III,” “dissertation committee” and, of course, “tenure-track.” After shaking the glaze of catatonic boredom from her eyes, she asked me a follow-up question that ended up stumping me completely: ”Should I go to graduate school?”
This brings me to the (intended) subject of this post, which is the sometimes difficult task of answering students’ questions about graduate school and academia as a career. Of course, every academic has different ideas about WHY they became an academic, with some I’m sure regretting the entire enterprise, but I think that answering these kinds of questions presents an excellent opportunity to clarify your own ideas about academia, career, your particular discipline, and even your sense of self. Particularly for those “Level III” graduate students looking at impending job interviews, this may be a good time, as scary as it can seem, to practice formally justifying your major life decisions.
For reasons that remain unclear, lots of students ask me about graduate school. Below are three typical student concerns, and a few ideas for how to approach them:
1. ”Will I be able to make money?”
This question comes most often from one of Baruch’s numerous business-oriented students. I often will engage them in a conversation about current events, particularly developments in the world of finance since say, oh, last October. I try to honestly explain that academia is an industry like any other, subject to booms and busts, internal corruption, and strained budgets. However, in general, education is also a field with considerably more historical permanence than, for instance, day-trading. With this question, you would do best to take a middle route. It’s probably a bad idea to reinforce the whole teleology of the “job at the end of the college tunnel” anyway. Say something about learning for learning’s sake, but don’t get preachy.
2. ”Are you glad YOU went to graduate school?”
Ooh. Hmm. This can be a tricky one, especially if caught on a bad day. First of all, as academics, we already have a tendency to make answers to questions like these extraordinarily complicated. But there’s no need to confuse a student with all those shades of grey. Here, then, is the best place for you to articulate your career goals, your internal philosophy, your academic raison d’être. While everyone’s graduate school experience has been mixed (I can personally, nearly instantly, think of dozens of wonderful aspects it has added to my life, while simultaneously considering the many drawbacks), a student really wants to hear your honest, overall evaluation of a significant portion of your life and whether or not it was “worth it.” Again, this is a good opportunity to justify yourself and, not unimportantly, to sound convincing while you’re doing it. Even if you’re only convincing yourself, and barely.
3. ”Should I go to graduate school?”
Ultimately, you can’t answer this question for a student. Each person needs to come to these kinds of decisions on their own terms, but you can certainly give them advice as seems appropriate, without necessarily saying “yes” or “no.” It should also be mentioned that just because a student is interested in graduate school doesn’t mean the impulse should be automatically encouraged. Sometimes, students are just asking because they are curious. Others are fishing for feedback, wanting to know if you think they are “smart enough” for graduate school. Either way, these conversations collectively point to yet another process in the academic’s journey: becoming a mentor. Just like we had figures in our undergraduate years who pointed out the paths to us, so too must we become mentors and guides for our students. That process of transformation, from student to teacher, is arguably lifelong. In talking to students about graduate school and the vast range of experience that comes with it, we can begin to consider our own steps and the many reasons behind them. At the very least, you should be able to ask yourself the question “why am I an academic?” without it sounding in your head like it’s being screamed to the gods.
In a recent Business Policy rehearsal, we were discussing anxieties about public speaking when one group member made the following statement:
“I’m concerned about my accent. The only way to get a good job in the U.S., is to not have an accent.”
I was stunned…. firstly, because this student did not have an accent that was impeding her ability to communicate effectively; and secondly, because I had never heard that this attribute would prevent someone from getting a “good” job.
The Baruch Campus is incredibly diverse, multilingual campus. Everyone has an accent of some sort, right? In this global economy, could this attribute truly prevent one from getting a job?
I bring this issue up again, link it to previous Cac.ophony thread discussions, the Baruch Teaching Blog, and Baruch resources…
A pertinent and persistent student issue!
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