7-28-11

Think of an instance where a student's cultural background and belief structure informed how they interacted with your classroom or a piece of literature you were teaching.

Oh, there are so many fun examples of this. Where to begin? I found that when I was teaching Frankenstein, students pulled religion and personal ethics into the text quite a bit. Students would say things like, "But, that's just the way God made him, God has a plan for everyone, etc." Students also felt strongly on either end of the "is it right for Victor to kill him" spectrum. Some students said yes, that he wasn't human and wanted to know if they could use the death penalty as a form of sentencing in their mock trial of The Creature v. V. Frankenstein (I said, "no"). Others said that it wasn't right to take somebody's life just because they didn't come out they way you had planned. These students often used God as an example. I found this really interesting because the Creature uses the analogy of being "an abortion," but none of my students ever delved into that topic. I did not press it on them, because I did not find it to be a beneficial discussion for our educational objectives in the unit.

After watching clips of the Brannagh Frankenstein, I had my classes vote on which actors they would cast to play the various characters in Frankenstein. When one student suggested Denzel Washington as the Monster, the students broke out in an uproar saying that Frankenstein couldn't be Black, and asking me if they could cast Black people in the roles. I said of course and asked them how casting a Black man as Frankenstein's monster with a white Victor would change the meaning of the story. What if it was a Black cast with the exception of the Monster? The students got really interested in how the actor changed the meaning of the text.

When I showed the film, Jurassic Park, my students commented on how the only two black actors on screen (one for only a few moments at the beginning) were doomed to die. They commented on the Hollywood trend of killing off black characters. Instead of dismissing this observation, I opened the topic up for discussion. I think this surprised a number of my students, because they didn't have much to say afterwards. I pushed by asking of examples of satire they had observed in other films and they talked about scenes from Scary Movie and Scream 4. The students seemed, not surprisingly, engaged that the classroom forum could be open to matters of import they experienced in their own lives.

Journal number 1 for Sam's class

One thing that really struck me in the Pirie reading was the idea of being an anti-Barney. It seems that this is a growing trend in education. Several instructors have waxed on about the devastating ramifications of the "I'm special" ideology. In my own classroom experiences as an instructor, I too have seen students effected negatively by this me centered approach to learning. Many students cannot find value in lessons if the connection to themselves is not overt or immediate. Students I have worked with also tend to have concrete cultural understandings about others they identify as different from themselves and make value judgments based on those flawed, often stereotypic associations. To say that a better trend in education would be transparency and pursue explorations of differences is refreshing, to say the least. In a strictly business sense, this teaching philosophy provides more real world worth. If I am truly a member of a "global society," I must know that I am intrinsically different than others, AND that does not mean I am any better or worse because of it. Seeing myself as "the other" and understanding how I make different individuals and groups "the other" means that I am one step closer to understanding the politics of my cultural identity.

Additionally, I really liked how the text troubled the waters for traditional literary texts. I think film is an essential weapon in the teacher's pedagogy arsenal. Film is designed to reach as many audiences as possible and how that changes literature, which is very much an intimate, individualized experience, is fascinating to me. When students get into the politics of adaptation, they feel like insiders; they know secrets and truths the rest of humanity flocking to cinema's are not privy to. This can be exciting. Knowledge is a form of privilege, after all.

From the other article, I really loved that the connection was made between inclusivity and politics. As I wrote my response, I used the word "politics" three or four times. That is because I think everything we do as teachers is a political act, whether we know it or not. How we look, how we sound, how we treat certain students, and certainly what texts we chose to include and exclude.