The discussion of the idea of contact zones, "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other" (Pratt's definition from 1992), to me is something that definitely needs to be worked in to every class that we teach. I like to believe that they can help to incorporate the ideas we are teaching to the real world which will hopefully encourage our students to get interested in what we are doing. I think if we can find some ways to bring these contact zones into the classroom, we will find our students more engaged in the work.
One of the contact zones I think we are not discussing would be the way you portray yourself in social media. Many people everyday post, repost, or respond to each other and wind up suffering consequences they could never imagine. In many ways, we forget that the internet is permanent and everything we do can affect us. Most freshman students would admit to using salary as a motivating factor in their decision for their majors. Showing them differing tweets or Facebook posts from random people across the internet and opening a discussion of whether or not you would hire someone who posts like this if you were in charge. Hopefully, this will make them more likely to be self aware when they begin posting things on social media.
Another one that should be discussed in class would be the political debates going on, though the Republican debates have been largely circus jokes on social media. But, these are supposed to be the best politicians in the country and the students should be able to understand what the politicians stand for and what they hope to accomplish.These students will be voting in their first presidential election next fall but the primaries are in March. I would be willing to bet that many of them know only a couple of the candidates and probably will vote for them purely from that knowledge. Showing clips or adding readings that show off the candidates stances at the beginning of class or as part of the class and discussing them for writing styles would go a long way toward helping them. Not only would they learn about candidates who they may not otherwise learn about, but hopefully these discussions will lead them to think about word choice and styles of writing that work.
One aspect of society that actually could be very interesting to discuss with students would be to look at popular CGI movies coming out from Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks. While aimed at students, many of the newest movies actually tend to work in very deep discussions about family, love and embracing your who you are. The way they are introduced would actually get many of the students interested in the class and could lead to some great discussions about the way we write in film. While probably not as deep as social media or politics, it would provide a good change of pace to talk about a movie maybe once a month. I think students would certainly get behind talking about them every once in a while.
Hi, Connor. I think your discussion of the contact zones is very interesting and relevant -- especially in discussion of how students portray themselves in social media. Before I read your post, I was reflecting (and posting on social media) a reference this topic. Jurgen Habermas wrote about bringing conversations to the public sphere in the early '90's. I was thinking today, perhaps a bit abstractly, that students have grown up without shelter from the public sphere. I'm thinking about revising my 1301/1302 course to place their writing intentionally in the public sphere. I think it would be an interesting transition from social media to online publication of academic thought.Here's a link to Habermas' work: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i218/s10/JH-STPS.pdf
ReplyDeleteConnor, I agree that we definitely ought to focus on contact zones in all the courses we teach. I like your idea of discussing how we portray ourselves on social media. It has occurred to me in the past that each of us, whether on facebook, twitter, instagram, or what have you, is really running a miniature PR campaign for ourselves. Of course, this is done with varying success depending on the person. It might be interesting to have a real discussion with students about this, beyond the usual warnings not to post pictures of you drinking or doing illegal things online.
ReplyDeleteI agree: we teach reading, writing, and thinking, but that must be within a context, and that context includes the contact zones related to cultural and social clashes; put another way, we must teach writing within the post-process situatedness of problems we need to solve in the world.
ReplyDeleteWhile we shouldn't take sides and unduly influence students who may be cajoled into our viewpoints to get better course grades, we can talk about the debates without taking a side. Just like in grading essays: we don't grade opinions, but how opinions are presented. Feel free, if you can, to bring in a second of video from the recent debate earlier this week, in make a connection to a principle of rhetoric important to teach students. Bring it up in class!
Perhaps it's more professional development, but feel free to raise professional identity in class. Certainly identity on FB is important, and other social media, and also creating your own website, business cards, etc. As I say often, with media, media is often inclusive rather than a replacement model. What is antiquated to you is not to others, others who are in positions of power and authority, so we have to cater to that audience as well as more newly mediated audiences.
Connor,
ReplyDeleteI LOVE CONTACT ZONES! In fact, I want one of the professors at Tech to teach a class in pedagogy in practice .... a how to teach contact zones course.
Mary D