Speaking the Lower Frequencies: Students and Media Literacy

2. Autoethnography of Teachers, Texts, and Space

What distinguishes cultural studies, I would argue, is its radical contextualism. In fact, cultural studies, in its theoretical practice, might be described as a theory of contexts, or, in its practice, as the practice of making contexts. —lawrence grossberg, “Bringing it All Back Home” One thing really bothered me in the beginning of the course, and I even stopped coming for a while. Walt always brought whatever topic we were on into a racial/cultural debate . He always talked about cultural studies and not enough sociology or, as titled, “MEDIA in society.” —student response, 1997 course evaluation When we think of a large college classroom for an introductory course, we often imagine a static place, a space where students imbibe nuggets of knowledge dished out by the sage on the stage, to be regurgitated a few weeks later for dissection by graduate student assistants. In a classroom as Pensieve, however, we create a new context in which students and instructor(s) explore a different understanding of teaching and learning. We put critical pedagogical principles into practice: “critical pedagogy is concerned with revealing, interrogating, and challenging those legitimated social forms and opening the space for additional voices” (Alexander 1999:307). Students explicitly say that they are not passive dupes, and attempt to comprehend and use culture and power reflexively in the physical classroom, and beyond. The classroom becomes a space of “radical possibility” (hooks 2003, 1994a), in which the members “invent and explore counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser Chapter Two Autoethnography of Teachers, Texts, and Space 1992:123). In a classroom as Pensieve the participants speak the lower frequencies. As noted in the epigraph, there is a lot of resistance to this effort, as (among other things) students resist the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the placement of everyday experiences into larger theoretical and social contexts. Through years of socialization about the educational process, they have come to expect not only specific forms of course content, but specific ways in which that content is presented. If we are to make the classroom a place where students can critically interrogate such socialization, we have to deploy experimental course processes such as the Pensieve, and record the results using methods like ethnography to capture a rich set of hopes and fears, exhilarations and frustrations, successes and failures. The challenges surrounding this project are not only present in the creation of Pensieves, they affect efforts to convey the results of such experimentation, given that the conditions of late modernity/postmodernity have altered both the investigation and reporting of group communication and culture: we can no longer be sure (if we ever were) that our representations correspond to an external, objective “reality” (Clifford and Marcus 1986, Clough 1992, Denzin 1997). Norman Denzin (1997:247) argues that Ethnographies will be empirical in the classical sense of the word based on the articulated experiences of people in concrete places. Ethnographies will not attempt to capture the totality of a group’s way of life. The focus will be interpreted slices, glimpses, and specimens of interaction that display how cultural practices, connected to structural formations and narrative texts, are experienced at a particular time and place by interacting individuals. In this chapter I will explain why and how this project works when constructing and analyzing college classrooms as Pensieves, centering on the effects of postmodern conditions on students’ understandings and use of electronic media culture. I provide a heuristic, offering my account as a guide for others to use in their investigations of other postmodern spaces, of the classroom as well as other contexts: “Readers are put in the position of experiencing an experience that can reveal to them not only how it was for us but how it could be or once was for them. They are made aware of similarities and differences between their worlds and ours. It becomes possible for them to see the other in themselves or themselves in the other among other possibilities” (Ellis and Bochner 1994:98; see also Ronai 1994). Further, I agree with Laurel Richardson (1993:706), who wonders “How valid can the knowledge of a floating head be?” She is referring 18 Speaking the Lower Frequencies to scholarly accounts that efface the researcher’s emotions, lived values, and dreams, work that relies almost exclusively on reason and rationality . Knowledge and use of media involves more than the...