Pop Culture Boot Camp

I intended to do a post-Week 1 recap, but since I spent last weekend moving and this past week unpacking and settling in to the new place, a two-week recap it is. The Critical Theory and Study of Popular Culture course is going very well. However, the time-intensive nature of the course is hitting both my students and I.  Although the course is only 50 minutes three days a week, the Twitter assignment keeps many students glued to their digital media devices, or at least feeling guilty if they haven’t updated. A guilt trip is most certainly not the goal of the course. The idea is to participate in popular culture, but I guess as with any new cultural form, sometimes we have to hit burnout before we step back and take a break. Since I’ve been taking a metaphorial scalpel to pop culture for many years in my teaching and research, the effects are less obviously visible on me. Sure, I’ve only been using Twitter since January, but the idea of using the technology to comment on and critique public life, celebrity, politicians and the like, is simply an extension of how I’ve already used Facebook and previous blogs to demonstrate the critical theories of my field. To that end, I at least hope my students are enjoying some of those moments of “Wow, we talked about this [insert smart critical concept here] in class and there it is on [insert title of popular TV show or video game here].”When they officially start blogging later this week, maybe I’ll see that process in action.

Because pop culture is simultaneously recycled and current, we’re never at a loss for topics. We’ve used McLuhan and the idea of symbolic artifacts to name the iPod generation as the “plugged in” individuals grounded in the needs/desires of constant stimulation (multiasking) and instant gratification (I want it NOW!).  And because I’m also teaching our major’s upper level Communication Theory course, pop culture topics are great for demonstrating otherwise heavy rhetorical theories. This week we used Burke’s Terministic Screens to explain our views and mediated images of working class life via Dirty Jobs. We also performed a pentadic dissection of Jon & Kate Plus 8. I don’t want to give too much away here since my students (or myself even) may write papers on these topics that we might eventually want to publish. Despite some very cool calls for making the academic publishing process more open from other academic bloggers, including these fabulous commentaries from Academic Evolution, working within the current system is the best way for my untenured self for now. Regardless, pop culture is providing great stuff for my teaching and research these days–and so are learning technologies. I’ve been invited by our IT crowd to do another workshop on using blogs in the classroom. As exhausting as it is some times, I am still an advocate for integrating blogs in courses where possible. I’ll try to refine the first presentation–of which i just realized I need to post the edited audio–and post some notes here later in October after the workshop. In the meantime, if you’re aching for new Pop Academy content, click on the Blog link in the Sitewide Directories box in the bottom right of the home page anytime, to see what my pop culture topics my students are critiquing and/or celebrating. You can also select random member posts in the top right corner under the Visit tab. Okay, back to my regularly scheduled Sunday: coffee, CBS Sunday Morning, New York Times headlines, then grading over laundry.