| What I Learned about
Soviet Politics
As an undergraduate at a small liberal
arts college, I took courses in all sorts of disciplines that I
had never studied before and never would again: Latin, Greek,
Vertebrate Zoology, Ethnomusicology, Soviet Politics, and many others. Twenty
years later, I recall few of the names, dates, theories, and verb forms
that we were tested on, but I recall size, color, connection, and
meaning, often derived from specific classes on specific days, as well
as anecdotes, jokes, offhand comments, things someone brought up after
class in the quad.: From Second Year Latin I recall a comment
about the irreverent, wisecracking
maid on The Jeffersons ultimately deriving from Plautus; from Ethnomusicology
(taught during the disco era), that folk music traditions worldwide were
losing ground steadily to the Bee Gees; from Soviet Politics (taught
during the Cold War), that the Professor got into a fender bender
behind the Iron Curtain, and the elderly lady in the other car launched a stream of Russian
epithets, most of which he couldn't translate for the class. Today I
start my book about teenagers in the World War II era with a discussion
of adolescence through history, realizing that most cultural phenomena
have long genealogies; I am not surprised to see a Pizza Hut on the
Champs Elysées, a globalization more profound than disco; and in spite
of what the mass media avers, I believe that behind the various curtains
we are told to fear live
not robots or monsters, but human beings who get upset over fender
benders.
My point is that students are learning
something different from what we are teaching. Majors may acquire
a familiarity with substantive data through sheer repetition, but even
their knowledge of the basics can be remarkably spotty (my graduating
seniors still call participant observations "experiments"), and in two or three years, what they do not
use every day will almost certainly vanish. We must provide substantive
data, but a much more important job is to provide students with a sense
of the world's size, color, connection, and meaning that they can use in
two or three or twenty years, when they are no longer students, to apply
to situations no one has even thought of yet.
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What I Teach Today
Students (actually, most of us) usually
live in an extremely small, constricted world, in which everyone has
exactly the same attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values, in which every
question has a single correct answer, and the few dissenters are either
crazy or evil. My job as a teacher is to gently suggest that the world
is bigger than they think, that there are millions of people who are
neither crazy nor evil, yet believe or act differently, that students'
points of view may in fact be based on myth or misinformation.
To increase the size of the students'
world, I draw readings and audiovisual materials from a variety of
cultures and subcultures, and from a variety of ethnic, religious, and
linguistic groups. Since students are particularly prone to
constriction in gender and sexuality, believing that gender
polarization and universal heterosexual desire are unquestionable facts,
I carefully select examples and anecdotes with the goal of disrupting
preconceptions: in my presentations, airline pilots are likely to be
women, nurses are likely to be men, and "Bob" is likely to be
discussing random samples with his boyfriend.
Filmmakers use color to mean
concrete details of a location added to give a scene a sense of
reality. Students must not only suspect that the world is bigger
than they once imagined; they must become aware that it is a real place,
with sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, or else they will disregard
class presentations, anecdotes, and examples as fiction, to be learned
for a test and then forgotten, like my student in Popular Culture
who concluded her ideological analysis of I Was a Teenage Werewolf with
"It doesn't really mean anything: it's just a movie," or the
student in Sociology of Gender who knew enough about hegemonic
masculinity, conventional femininity, androgyny, oppression, and
resistance to get an A on the essay exam, but revealed in the
end-of-semester wrap-up that his rigidly polarized definition of manhood
had not changed one iota.
The best way to add color is to get the
students into the field as often as possible; they observe four
different religious groups in American Religions, a gay or
straight hangout in Sociology of Sexuality, and a deviant
subculture of their choice (nothing illegal) in Social Deviance. In
addition to fieldwork, I incorporate field trips (usually observing a
spot on campus), guest speakers, teaching aids that use senses
besides the aural and visual (food is particularly popular), and a wide
and idiosyncratic selection of primary texts. I still recall from Soviet
Politics a Russian-language comic book that the professor brought to
class to make some point or other, and today I am convinced that tv sitcoms,
tv commercials, popular novels, gospel hymns, comic strips, comic books,
and music videos are effective in marking the world beyond the students'
border as real, concrete, and tangible.
Connection means seeing phenomena not as
random, disjoint events, but as locations within a vast web of social,
political, economic, and artistic forces. The personal is the political;
literature is sociological, and sociology is literary. Students are
often unaware of context, or think that it is irrelevant, that analyzing
a text from the Victorian Era does not require any knowledge of what the
world was like then, or that Platoon (1986) reveals a lot about
the Vietnam War but nothing about the 1980's.
To provide context, I organize most
courses around historical periods, and try to bring an awareness of each
period's primary historical, cultural, and economic events into the
discussion of the social phenomena. In Social Deviance, for
instance, students ask why some acts were labeled deviant, and others
not, in American society from Prohibition to the present, and the Sociology
of Popular Culture, they locate mass culture objects as responses to
greater social trends from the 19th century through the
1970's.
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Conclusion
Students are on a journey, and what they are
learning is not what we are teaching. Sometimes a class presentation
that we consider perfectly objective, empirical, and mundane challenges
them, even upsets and angers them. In American Religions,
we do not evaluate the "truth" of any religion; we are only
interested in how middle-church Protestant denominations became
hegemonic in U.S. society, and how other religious groups have
adapted. Yet students often tell me how much the course has caused
them to question their core religious beliefs. Similarly, The
Sociology of Sexuality is "about" why sexual desires,
practices, and identities are organized differently in different
historical and cultural periods, with the students' personal lives as
irrelevant as they would be in Chemistry 101. Yet I often find
students acknowledging their own same-sex interests, challenging their
own unrecognized homophobia, or otherwise re-evaluating their own lives.
The social sciences are evidently not Chemistry
101, and we as social science professors must be more willing to let
discussions take on their own trajectory, to discuss rather than
dictate, to spend today's lecture
addressing what was brought up yesterday, to add to or take away from
the syllabus, and to defuse uncomfortable situations (since challenging worldviews
is an uncomfortable business). We must check in frequently, not
just at the midterm and end of the semester, to find out what the
students are experiencing, what they are feeling. And we must be
extra sensitive to student struggles -- often they are not struggling
with the course content, but with their own life situations, trying to
see beyond what they have been told to see.
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