Speaking the Lower Frequencies: Students and Media Literacy

5. Breaking and Making Frames as Context

On Monday I walked out in the hall just before class started. Walking back to class when I passed two older professors, one of whom had peeked into my classroom. He was saying that it “didn’t have the right ambiance,” that it was too laid-back for a serious class. I was playing Charlie Parker. Note earlier comment by one of two students when I started music as they were packing to leave previous class: “Wish I were in this class.” —walt field note, February 18 I was personally interested from the beginning. I walked in, John Coltrane was playing, the atmosphere was right on. —First impressions assignment, spring semester In order to create the college classroom as Pensieve, I use a number of unusual approaches and “strange texts,” as we have seen in previous chapters. During the 1997–1998 autoethnography I played music before each class as another such technique to create an atmosphere in which students assembled fragments from disparate sources to form more multisided understandings of themselves and their social worlds. As suggested by my field note, some academics would scoff at such a move because they consider it as reducing the legitimacy of the classroom , making it cater more toward student whims and interests rather than engaging serious academic thought (see Aronowitz 2000; Dellucchi and Korgen 2002; Dellucchi and Smith 1997a, 1997b). Anderson and Irvine (1993:82), however, argue that critical literacy is “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations,” and that ethnographic practices can help in this effort. It is my task, Chapter Five Breaking and Making Frames as Context then, to use whatever means are at my disposal to create contexts for active learning, even if that means breaking frames of acceptable behavior for some teachers. As part of the autoethnography I would occasionally ask students to consider the ways in which our presence in a large lecture room at Indiana University in the year 1997 or 1998 affected our ideas and perspectives . In other words, the classroom itself became the text under study. In order to make the classroom a strange text (where usually hidden aspects were called into light) I experimented with alternative formats for conducting class. In each semester I included a “Storytelling Day,” in which I read short stories from Saki (Williams 1978) to the class, to highlight and explore attention to several internal and external interpersonal dynamics. Additionally, in each semester I conducted “Kiva” sessions, in which I broke the class into small groups of students and had them meet me or an assistant at an on-campus restaurant for informal discussion. Each group met for an hour, in lieu of attending the regular seventy-five-minute class. Unfortunately, as we go through this chapter we will see that I did not make these alternative formats strange enough. In the years after the autoethnography I created extensions of the techniques that more thoroughly helped students develop critical consciousness. I will explore these practices and other refinements in chapter 7. Fall Storytelling Cassie confided in me today that this class is “fuckin’ weird.” she’s never had an unstructured class such as this . . . says all we do in here is “talk about shit . . . i mean, it’s cool and all, but we actually do shit in my other classes . . . like take quizzes and shit . . . but i like this class . . . it’s relaxing.” (Beeta FN, October 8, very beginning of class) It’s amazing how field notes sometimes perfectly capture the right sentiment at the right moment. Not only did “Cassie’s” remarks sum up part of the effort to create the classroom as Pensieve to that point, they anticipated the strange turn that class would take on that particular day. Originally the topic was “the news as global,” but since the students seemed to be tiring of the recent focus on the production end of culture I decided to shift into the more exciting consumption side a day early. I must admit, I too was looking forward to the turn, so that made the decision that much easier. 98 Speaking the Lower Frequencies Cassie’s perspectives here mirror the articulation of the professors in this chapter’s epigraph: if a class is laid-back, you can’t be really doing anything important; talk is one thing, but...