A few images from daily life this week…
: )
I ran across my campus mascot in the parking lot on a rainy day.
The office stapler now works! As long as you follow the appropriate steps between staples…
Grad lab computer at the computer hospital : (
Who doesn’t go crazy at a bunched greens blowout sale?!
Have you ever heard of “haul videos?” I hadn’t until one of my Contemporary Sociological Theory students recently turned one in as part of an assignment. As described in this New York Times article, haul videos depict people showing-off recent purchases, or hauls, and posting the resulting videos on YouTube to share with others. It was a perfect fit for our topic that week: Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 critique of consumer society in One Dimensional Man. Here’s what we did in class:
Notes:
First, we worked through these big picture questions individually for a few minutes:
After reviewing this questions as a group, we looked at this advertisement and then watched the beginning of the haul-video below (most of them had already seen the later content, which gets repetitive, as they arrived in class). After they saw the video projected onto the screen in full-screen mode, I exited full-screen and drew their attention to how many people have seen the video before (779,798!), and was pleased to hear little gasps go up around the room. : )
In small groups, I had the students use Marcuse’s ideas to analyze the video and the ad. They also found quotes in the text that related to the media pieces, and discussed to what extent Marcuse’s 1964 critique still applies today. Finally, we discussed everything as one large group.
Each quarter I try structuring my classes differently so that I can experiment with a variety of teaching styles. This quarter I worked as a teaching assistant for my department’s “Classical Sociological Theory” class, which covers changes in European and U.S society that occurred during and after the Industrial Revolution. I required each student to sign up for one week in which to turn in a relevant media piece and an accompanying one-page essay. Here are the instructions I gave them:
Each of you are responsible for finding a news article, short video, cartoon, photo collection or other piece of media relevant to our readings once during the quarter. Your assignment is to select a media piece (10 min. max) that will help the rest of the students relate what we are reading about to current events, or help them understand one of the week’s theories better in its historical context. E-mail me a link to this item the Friday before discussion section, along with a one page type-written paper describing how you suggest using the item in class and what its strengths and limitations are for understanding the relevant theory.
I really liked this assignment. I designed it primarily to give me ideas to use as a starting place for what to do in class each week, but it has educational value for the students too. Each week I had between 5-8 one-page papers to skim for ideas. I didn’t always end up using something that the students suggested, but they always got my mind moving in the right direction.
Sometimes I organized the entire class around one or more media pieces, and other times they played much more marginal roles. I used them in a variety of ways:
When everything works well, the media pieces help make theory less abstract and more memorable, help students relate to theory by showing its relevance to current events, and test the boundaries of student understanding of theory by asking them to apply it in a new context and identify what parts of the theory fit and what don’t.
Next time I use this approach, I’d like to spend more time discussing the limitations of using the theory in question to interpret the media piece. I expect this would help the students understand the theories in a more nuanced way, but I often ran out of time to do it.
Here are my favorite pieces. Some of these were submitted by students, some I found myself, and some are from other teaching assistants and faculty. I did not use all of them in class.
Feudalism
Marx
Weber
Durkheim
The enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment
Foucault
I spent yesterday visiting UC Merced – the state’s newest University of California campus, and the first in the San Joaquin Valley. It’s small but quite impressive! They have about 5,000 students, mostly undergraduates, and will grow into a larger university over time. Here are a few shots of their modern buildings and grounds. (The buildings are all LEED certified. Check out the reflective panes attached to the walls of the library to reduce cooling costs, and the gravel parking spots that reduce runoff.)
Tracy Perkins 
