Teaching and learning are lifelong processes. In my view, one is always a pupil, whether one leads the classroom or occupies one of its small desks. The instructor’s job is not passively to impart knowledge to students. Rather, the instructor’s usefulness is in their years of additional experience at being an inquisitive student, at undergoing the learning process. In other words, the instructor’s job is to teach students how to learn. From my interdisciplinary perspective as an American Cultural Studies, New Media, and Critical Race scholar, I teach that the intellectual labor required to confront American inequality—broadly speaking—is necessarily uncomfortable and, by extension, iterative. Since I, like my students, perpetually question my own identity in relationship to the world outside of the classroom, I am well-positioned to challenge students’ research, writing, and preconceptions.
To realize this philosophy, I use multimodality—i.e. visual, aural, and textual data—to reflect the many worlds of data students everyday inhabit, teach good research and ethnographic practices, and enhance students’ information literacy. In the contemporary classroom, using multiple media paints a fuller picture of students’ social realities and allows them to connect the historical past to the present, become successful academic writers, and grow into more conscientious citizens. Texts I use include short YouTube documentaries or lectures, online communities where ordinary people engage intellectually with social injustices, academic articles, news stories and opinion pieces, films, literature, and video games. Since these various texts span a multitude of technologies, I also encourage the use of laptops and smartphones during class discussions and activities. I believe these tools have the potential to hone students’ creative impulses, make them better writers and thinkers, and shape them as socially conscious citizens.
Two examples—one in-class activity and one take-home assignment—best illustrate my approach to teaching. A mid-semester in-class activity I assign uses current events to teach basic research methods. First, students brainstorm online news publications that span the spectrum of political bias (e.g. The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, and Democracy Now!). Students collectively volunteer news publications as I list their ideas on the board. Using a laptop or smartphone, students individually select and then visit the website of an online magazine or newspaper, preferably one with which they are unfamiliar. I assign each of the tables (or groups) a topic or controversy (e.g. Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, the Ferguson uprising, or the Charlottesville protests in Virginia). Usually, the older the topic, the more fruitful the research, since students must dig deeper for a reliable outline of the original event and the discourses that surround it. Students follow a list of questions I post on the board as they spend up to a half hour searching for, reading, and parsing one news story related to their table’s assigned topic. Once the allotted time has expired, the students emerge from solitary confinement, join their groups, and compare and contrast notes for ten minutes while I hover around the classroom ready with questions. We eventually reconvene as a class and, for the final minutes, crowd-source the data as I ask the class general questions designed to draw connections between each topic.
One of my favorite take-home assignments teaches students basic online ethnographic methods. The assignment requires students to visit an online community of their choice and write a short paper documenting, in order, the following: the community’s online location (e.g. YouTube, a subreddit—which is a small community—on the social media platform Reddit, a Twitch stream, a private forum, or Playstation Network and XBox Live), the community’s membership size, the community’s level of activity (e.g. how many posts per day, how active is the chat, when was the last site update, and so on), the community’s common values (if any become apparent), what the community cares about outside of their stated interests (e.g. popular culture intertexts or politics unrelated to the medium or art form), and finally their own reflections about or reactions to the community. I ask students to create two separate and sequential documents for their research. In the first document, students set aside their judgments and preconceptions and merely describe the sites and site content in unemotional terms. After students finish with the first document, they write a second document comprising their reflections upon and reactions to their chosen sites. The second document is, by its very design, subjective, but no less integral to their data sets. This second document is essential to students’ reading of their own process of selection. By distinguishing these two responses—cold, descriptive data followed by their personal interventions into that data—students learn how their preconceptions invariably shape the data they isolate from their sites. Through this assignment, student ideally learn to critically position themselves in relationship to the data they collect. It simultaneously instructs that the researcher, a human, is not an impartial observer, but is always already implicated in the research outcomes.
To put it in other terms, my teaching philosophy is that students must experience confusion. Confusion is a necessary precondition for learning. It is a form of discomfort—an iterative process—that leads to both personal and professional growth. My years of experience as a researcher and student have taught me that existing in our own confusions is the rule rather than the exception. These experiences have taught me that everyone is a student, never fully formed into all-knowing intellectuals who have every answer. The classroom activities and assignments I create align with this philosophy and place me in one of the desks alongside my students.