Pop Academy

As the busiest semester of my life draws to a close on this final 90-minute stretch of highway returning from the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m relieved and panicked at the same time. On one hand, most of my academic duties for the semester are behind me. On the other, many tasks will present themselves in the coming days. My pop culture students take their exam tomorrow and begin group presentations this week. My theory students turn in their lengthy annotated bibliographies Friday. Some students are enrolled in both classes. To them I extend my sympathies. In all seriousness, it’s been a fast ride this term. Not only did I fly to Los Angeles and Chicago for conferences within a month of each other, during the same month I also flew to my hometown in the Midwest to attend to a family matter for a week and coordinated reviews for a division of a regional conference in my discipline. At the end of this marathon my body decided to shut down and contract a non-flu bug that kept me in bed for three days.

My students deserve much credit for grasping 300- and 400-level theories in my extended absence. The pop culture class in many ways has taught itself via the course blog and Twitter. In the theory class we relied on Skype and the department video camera to keep group presentations on schedule. I want to examine these classroom tech topics more closely once the semester is officially complete. Many research and pedagogy ideas came to me at the National Communication Association annual convention in Chicago earlier this month that I have to find time to digest. In short, I attended a daylong special seminar on intersectionality and feminism that may turn into a book project with other scholars. I also made some connections at an amazing panel focused on using social media in communication research. Google Docs and Wave may give my research agenda just the boost it needs to study social media in the classroom.

The Twitter project made perfect sense for the pop culture class. However, the non-graded use of Twitter by my students for their other classes makes a compelling case for Twitter adoption by other professors in my department. I have noticed an uncommon offline connection between the communication students via their online chatter. They started creating their own course hashtags and making associations across courses and professors. I’m looking forward to our Twitter wrap-up in class Wednesday but feeling bittersweet about letting my tweeps go.

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.