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Easing Students into Academia: popular culture in the CGI curriculum

Robin Turner May 2004


One idea that sticks in my mind from my undergraduate course in science ction is that in order to write SF, you need strange people, strange things or strange places; 1 however, if you have strange people doing strange things in strange places, the result is a confused reader. The position of rst-year university students is analogous: too often they are having to write in new and challenging ways, referring to challenging texts about challenging ideas. To add to the challenge, many are doing so in their second language. Too much challenge in education is like too much strangeness in science ction, and the result is the same: confusion, and often demoralisation. Obviously we want to challenge students but not to confuse them completely. As English teachers, we cannot afford to dumb down the texts our students study, or set overly-easy writing tasks; however slowly we build up to it, by the end of a rst-year English course, students should be able to read non-specialist academic texts and write a tolerable essay referring to them. However, there is a sense in which the English class can be a sheltered context for the cognitive demands of new content (Owens, 2002:45). In a content-based English course, we have the advantage of being able to choose the overall theme, which gives us some lee-way which would not available to someone teaching, say, Physics 101. As Genesee (1994:3) points out, content need not always be academic but can include any topic, theme, or non-language issue of interest of importance to the learners. Popular culture is one way to provide students with a familiar base from which they can tackle challenging reading and writing tasks; all things being equal, it is easier to comprehend an academic paper on, say, the physics of Star Trek or the ethics of soap operas than a similar paper on the physics of superconductors or the ethics of phenomenology. This is not to say that basing a course around popular culture means that students will only read popular texts. Consider the following: 1. Nietzsches Beyond Good and Evil 2. Kants Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morality 3. Freuds Love and Debasement 4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5. The Gnostic Gospels
The course was taught by Tom Shippey (Leeds University, 1981-82); I have been unable to trace the origin of this dictum, although the phrase strange people, strange places, strange things crops up periodically in SF fandom.
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6. Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy 7. Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulation 8. The Matrix The rst three texts are referred to extensively in a compilation of essays by philosophers on the subject of the fourth text, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a hugely popular television series featuring a teenage girl who, well, slays vampires). Similarly, texts ve to seven occur in the collection of readings I prepared for a rst-year English course based around the Matrix lms. Basing a course on popular culture, whether it be a cult lm, TV series or music, provides students with a familiar base from which they can sally forth into the territory of academia; as Mohan (1990) points out, students learning should build on the educational, cultural and personal experiences they bring to school.

Approaches to Popular Culture


Popular culture can be approached from a number of angles other than the obvious one of literary criticism. First, we can look at popular culture from a social angle. We might, for example, look at the kind of people who watch soap operas or listen to heavy metal, and try to work out what role these play in their lives. We can analyse debates about the ethics and politics of mass media. Are soap operas about the rich (or the poor) a way of defusing class conict? Is music a way of diverting the energy of the young into pseudo-subversive subcultures? Does Star Wars disguise a conservative message with cute characters and special effects (Brin, 1999)? Is The Lord of the Rings anti-technology? A large number of texts exist asking these kinds of questions. A second approach is through folklore and mythology. The works of Joseph Campbell are a godsend for teachers: we can take almost any lm and plot the events according to the stages of Campbells heros journey, and compare, for example, the Alien lms to Beowulf. 2 Religion also provides us with a rich source of symbolism: we can nd Buddha, Jesus and Judas in many lms. Its dark side, the plethora of folk-devils, allows us to look at modern lms about vampires or zombies and trace the genesis of these myths in Eastern Europe and the Carribean. Psychology also opens interesting avenues. We can take a popular lm or novel and analyse the characters in term of the psychology of Freud, Jung or Adler. We can also look at the effects that such cultural phenomona have on their consumers. Do violent lms encourage people to commit acts of violence? Does rock music rot the brain, and if not, why do so many people want to believe that it does? Are women portrayed as sex-objects, and what do we mean by a sex-object, anyway? Possibly the most fertile eld is philosophy. Since the publication of Roland Barthes Mythologies (1957/2000), popular culture has been fair game for philosophers and semioticians. Recently there has been an explosion of philosophy papers dealing with popular lms and television programmes: the compilation of essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is just one
The Heros Journey is a set of stages that, according to Campbell, most mythical heroes pass through, regardless of the origin of the myth. The number of stages varies according to different versions of the theory, but there are three overall phases: Separation (where the hero is set apart from normal life), Initiation (where he becomes a hero) and Return (where he completes the quest).
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in a series which includes The Matrix, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Lord of the Rings and the lms of Woody Allen. To be honest, though, much of the work in this eld is second-rate, and texts need to be selected with caution; too often they are the result of minor academic philosophers trying to gain a wider audience by making supercial references to popular works and reading more into them than is actually there. Philosophical approaches can take two tacks. The rst, which can be applied to almost any cultural product, is simply to take it as a source of examples for raising philosophical questions. Do soap operas reect virtue ethics or consequentialism? Is a character right to lie to friend? What view of justice do cowboy lms present us with? The second approach is more suitable for more writerly texts which themselves intentionally raise philosophical questions; here our task is rst to tease out the questions from the text. An obvious example is The Matrix, where philosophical questions are asked openly (What is reality?) while at the same time allusions to philosophical ideas and even philosophical in-jokes are scattered throughout the lms (a celebrated example is Neos hiding a data CD inside a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillards (1984/2004) Simulation and Simulacra). 3

Case study: the Matrix course


This course was delivered as part of Bilkent Universitys Faculty Academic English units rst-year programme. Students choose between CBI courses based on themes ranging from feminism to food; however, all courses share common learning objectives, and there is a degree of standardisation regarding the number and types of tasks, and how students performance is assessed.4 Students enter the course with a variety of levels of competence in English language and academic skills, and the two are not always congruent: some students are extremely uent in conversational English but have little idea of how to organise an essay, while others can tell you what a thesis statement or topic sentence is, but be unable to write a grammatically correct example of either. This presents obvious difculties in balancing different language and skills objectives and in choosing texts and task types; for one student, writing a simple summary of a text might count as a challenging task, while another may happily dash off a two-thousand-word paper bristling with citations but with hardly any denite articles or third-person ss. One advantage of choosing a cult lm like The Matrix as the theme for the course was that it levelled the playing eld with regard to content. Students choosing this course were all Matrix enthusiasts, and students with weak language could often make up for this by displaying an impressive knowledge of the lms which in turn created a desire to improve their language so that they could express their knowledge more effectively.
The joke is that Simulacra and Simulation is concerned with how simulation replaces reality; here the book itself is not a real book but a hollow shell, and, moreover, unbeknownst to the characters, or even to the rsttime viewer, the action is taking place inside the Matrix, which is a simulation of a world which has long since been destroyed. 4 At present, all students are expected to write a minimum of four drafted essays (making up 55% of their grade), plus a nal exam (15%); other assessment is up to individual teachers.
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Text selection
Like other FAE courses, this course had a textbook which was literally that: a collection of texts. These texts were of two types, which can be termed academic and semi-academic. The rst term needs no explanation: preference was given to interdisciplinary publications, since by their nature they make fewer assumptions of knowledge on the part of the reader. By semi-academic texts, I mean texts written by people with an academic background (professors and graduate students) but for a more general audience. An example is the philosophy section of the Warner Brothers Matrix website, which consists of papers by academic philosophers on questions raised by the lms. Such texts are particularly suitable, since they follow most of the conventions of academic writing while avoiding specialist terminology, and do not assume familiarity with the seminal works of the eld. In addition to complete texts, I also included a few short extracts: passages from Descartes Second Meditation and Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulation, and a few quizzical stories from Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

Themes and Tasks


In addition to an over-arching theme, it is useful for a CBI course to have a number of subthemes (or topics, in Stoller and Grabes (1997) Six Ts terminology) which represent different approaches to the main theme. In this case, the course was divided into three parts. The rst part of the course dealt with religion and myth in the Matrix, with two papers from the Journal of Film and Religion (Flannery-Davis & Wagner, 2001; Fielding, 2003), and a rather quirky piece relating Gdels incompleteness theorem and Joseph Campbells Heros Journey to the lms (Furze, 2003). The latter was included partly because students do not only need models for writing, they also need to be able to criticise texts, and this was an example of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to combine two unrelated subjects in one paper. While these texts were suitable for the course in terms of introducing students to the conventions of academic writing and academic interpretation of lm, in retrospect, it would have been better to have based the rst reading task on a simpler introductory text. A small but nevertheless disturbing number of students dropped the course after a few weeks, and I suspect that one reason was that they found the rst text intimidating. Although in terms of academic texts these papers were very approachable, I had overlooked the fact that they assumed a basic knowledge of Christianity which most of the students, being Muslims, lacked; for example, a European reader would know immediately what is meant when Cypher is described as a Judas character, while most Turks would not (fortunately I had a Polish exchange student who could be relied on to help out in these situations). In reponse to these texts, students wrote two essays. The rst was a simple summary of ideas in the texts relating to Eastern and Western symbolism in the lms. I generally start courses with a summary task, since being able to summarise ideas in texts is an essential skill for other kinds of writing, and is also a good way to introduce citation conventions. The second essay involved applying the analytical methods used in the texts to another lm of their choice. The quality of essays varied. Some students spent too much time telling the story of the lm with very little real analysis, but many essays demonstrated students ability to take a theoretical model and apply it to a novel subject; for example, one student demonstrated how Braveheart mangled history in order to provide an inspiring tale based on Campbells heros journey, while another showed how Stigmata played with Christian 4

symbolism in a subversive way. The second part of the course raised philosophical questions. Students studied two papers. The rst was The Matrix as Metaphysics by David Chalmers (2003), a leading light in the philosophy of consciousness. This argued that, contrary to the message of the lms, if we were living in a matrix (i.e. a computer-generated simulation of a world) very few of our beliefs would need to change. The second, by Julia Driver (2003), argued in a similar way that living in a matrix would not alter our moral beliefs to any great extent: harming a sentient program is no different from harming a human being. Students had a choice of writing essays based on these texts5 or nding a different philosophical argument and evaluating it. The nal part of the course examined the social and political subtext of the lms. The rst essay (Dodson, 2003) related the lms to the ideas of the neo-marxist Frankfurt School, suggesting that the Matrix was an analogy of the culture industry. The second (Rovira, 2003) investigated the links, mentioned earlier, between the lms and Baudrillards ideas on simulation. The nal essay was a draft of a paper I had written myself, on violence in the Matrix lms (class discussion focussed on how the draft should be revised). In this section, the writing focus was on responding critically to arguments: students took one of the essays and wrote an evaluation of it. There was also a nal exam, for which the text was, for a change, not about The Matrix, but a critique of the Star Wars lms (Brin, 1999). In addition to writing, students also gave short oral presentations. The presentations were informal affairs, since formal presentation techniques were reserved for the second semester. In the rst presentation, students were required to explain a portion of Chalmers paper (which is conveniently divided according to different hypotheses about simulated reality) and give their opinions on it. This paper was probably the hardest in the textbook, conceptually speaking, but students knowledge of the lm helped them cope with the concepts involved. The second presentation was simpler, requiring students to choose a character from the lms and comment on their role, their motivations and any messages they might convey. Although students performed well in both tasks, this was rather more successful, since students related directly to the characters, and the discussion following the presentation was more lively.

Issues and Suggestions


Choosing content area, texts and writing tasks
In choosing a content area, the rst consideration is whether, and how, students will relate to it. There is no point in choosing an area of popular culture which is unlikely to be popular with the particular group of students we are teaching: a course on British comedy would not go down well in a culture which found the British sense of humour incomprehensible. Related to this is the question of whether students have a choice of courses; for example, I would not do the Matrix course with a random selection of students, since many of them would nd the lms boring, or at the very least would nd it hard to maintain their enthusiasm for fteen weeks! Another question is the scope of the content area. Here we can choose
What epistemological and ethical difference might occur if we discovered we were living in a matrix? and Some fundamentalists hold that the world is only 4,000 years old. Is it possible to have a theory that would allow this but not allow the possibility that the world is only four minutes old?
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either a narrow subject which can be approached from different perspectives (e.g. The Matrix) or a broader subject with a tighter scope (e.g., one of my colleagues recently gave a course on the ethics of entertainment). A similar consideration applies to choice of texts. As a general rule, simpler texts need deeper treatment and vice versa. In the case of a really hard text (e.g. the extract from Baudrillards Simulation and Simulacra mentioned earlier), simple comprehension might be a sufciently challenging task, while with easier texts, students can spend more time evaluating the argument or identifying stylistic and rhetorical features. Choosing writing tasks is a matter of blending the course objectives with the texts and themes of the course. In 101 classes I generally concentrate on three types of writing: summary (usually of more than one text), evaluation, and application of a theory to a text or situation, but obviously essay types will vary according to the needs of students.

Language
The role of language instruction in CBI is always problematic. Some teachers eschew specic language instruction as a departure from the CBI ideal, while others teach what is largely a language course with an overall theme. The use of popular culture does not alter this radically, though it can make language instruction more entertaining, and more likely to stick in students heads. For example, since Turkish students always have problems with articles, I always teach at least one lesson on articles in rst-year courses. The time I was able to start with the question: What is the difference between The Matrix the Matrix the matrix a matrix?

Popular culture in other courses


It is not necessary to base an entire course on popular culture; popular lms, music and so on can be used as part of a course dealing with a more academic theme. For example, I taught a course entitled An Introduction to Chinese Thought, with readings from authors such as Confucius, Lao Tsu and Chairman Mao. To show how Chinese philosophy is reected in popular culture, we also watched two kung fu lms. These provided essay questions such as Discuss the conict between Buddhist and Confucian values in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and To what extent is Romeo Must Die a lm about lial piety? (lial piety is one of the primary Confucian virtues). Light relief aside, such excursions into popular culture help motivate students, help them practice the language from their readings (both orally and in their essays) and give good experience in applying theory to different situations.

Teacher-student and student-student relationships


As mentioned before, basing a course on an aspect of popular culture provides an alternative area of expertise for students which offsets the inequality within the class caused by 6

different levels of language. It also has the effect of narrowing the gap between students and the teacher, since many of them will know more about some aspects of the content than the teacher does. The teacher is still an authority on language and academic conventions, but in terms of content, knowledge is shared, rather than simply transmitted. Naturally, in the case of the Matrix course I knew more about, say, Baudrillard than the students, but in terms of details of the lms, many were able to answer questions from other students which had me ummoxed. This tends to create a sense of community in the class a community in which the teacher is a member. Of course, the warm fuzzy end of the TEFL world makes much of the idea of community, but it is preferable to create this community through common interests rather than by articial (and often highly embarrassing) exercises to promote caring and sharing in the classroom (Moskowitz, 1978). This sense of common interest leads to greater student-student interaction in the classroom. Aside from the solidarity it provides (which is not fundamentally different from that provided by, say, supporting the same football team), students see each other, and not just the teacher, as valuable sources of information and opinion. This can spill over into an increase in the quantity and intensity of out-of-class communication. I have always exchanged a fair amount of e-mail with students, but the Matrix course resulted in a startling increase in electronic communication. Hardly an evening went by in which I did not receive a number of e-mails, instant messages (via ICQ, AIM etc.) or (more rarely) posts to an online forum I had set up. Many of these concerned practical course-related issues (When is our nal draft due?), but a large number concerned the content of the course (What do you think about the scene when Neo meets the Architect?) and others went on from there to more general topics (for example, a simple question about the course developed into an hour-long online conversation about Gothic ction). Aside from creating another opportunity to use English, this also breaks the ice, in that a student who might not normally e-mail their teacher to ask about APA citation format or the use of the semi-colon might be more inclined to do so after an exchange about Keanu Reeves acting skills. It may also make students more open about discussing academic problems not related to language; it is easier for a student to explain that she has been missing classes because her boyfriend has a drug problem (to cite an actual example) if she has already spent a fair amount of time discussing the possibility that we are living in a matrix. Of course not all teachers will want to spend this much time on electronic communication. In such cases, the best approach is to limit the media. For example, a teacher may set up an online forum for discussing issues related to the content of the course, restrict e-mails to academic and administrative issues, and not give out their ICQ number at all.

Problems and pitfalls


One danger inherent to all CBI courses is becoming caught up in content. Since we naturally choose our content area according to our personal interests, it is all too easy for us to spend too much time talking about the content area and not enough time teaching language and academic skills. This problem may become more serious when we chose as our content area an aspect of popular culture which both we and the students nd fascinating, since students will be all too happy to divert a lesson which supposed to about language into a conversation about lm or music. The best antidote to this, as I mentioned earlier, is to try as far as possible to link the content and the skills. In contrast, a potential danger related to content is that the teacher may choose an aspect 7

of popular culture which he or she nds fascinating but which is anything but popular with the students. As mentioned earlier, whether students are able to choose between courses based on different content is an important factor. Even when students have a choice, though, it is important to choose a theme which enough students will choose to study. If your content area is too obscure, you risk ending up with a class full of students who are only there because the other classes are full. A nal consideration is face validity. Administrators like courses to look serious, and may look askance at your proposal for a course on video games. If you do not have free reign over your course content, it is worth collecting a few heavy academic texts to show your head of department or director of studies, and of course there is no harm in throwing a few academic-sounding words into your course title (e.g. Alienation and the will to power: deconstructing the postmodern video game). In contrast, students are looking for an enjoyable course. If a course is based around lm or music, students may get the impression that they will spent most of their time watching lms and listening to music. Unless you are the noble kind of teacher who actually prefers teaching a class full of at risk students, it is worth dispelling this illusion before students sign up for the course. Despite its problematic aspects, popular culture can provide good material for CBI courses, either as a primary content area or a sub-theme in other courses. It stimulates students interest in the course, creates a sense of community in the classroom, and provides a nonthreatening content-base from which students can embark into the more challenging world of academia.

References
[1] Barthes, R. (2000) Mythologies. (A. Lavers, Trans.) London: Random House (Original work published 1957). [2] Baudrillard, J. (2004) Simulacra and simulation. (S.F. Glazer, Trans.) Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981). [3] Brin, D. (1999) Star Wars Despots vs. Star Trek Populists. Salon arts and entertainment. Retrieved December 1, 2003 from http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15/brin_main/ [4] Chalmers, D.J. The Matrix as metaphysics. Retrieved June 15, http://www.uarizona.edu/ chalmers/papers/matrix.html 2003 from

[5] Dodson, T. The culture industry has you: How the Frankfurt school might be the key to unlock the postmodern mysteries of The Matrix. PopPolitics.com Retrieved July 1, 2003 from http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2003-08-05-cultureindustry.shtml [6] Driver, J. Articial ethics. Retrieved http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com June 23, 2003 from

[7] Fielding, J.R. (2003) Reassessing the Matrix/Reloded. Journal of Religion and Film 7:2 [8] Flannery-Davis, F. & Wagner, R. (2001) Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix. Journal of Religion and Film 5:2. [9] Furze, E. (2003) Unravelling the Matrix mythos. Keanuvision. Retrieved July 6 2003 from http://www.keanuvision.com/archives/001072.html [10] Genesee, F. (1994). Integrating language and content: Lessons from immersion. Educational Practice Report 11. National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. Retrieved January 12, 2004 from http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/ncrcdsll/epr11.htm [11] Mohan, B.A. (1990, September) LEP students and the integration of language and content: Knowledge, structures and tasks. In: Proceedings of the First Research Symposium on Limited English Procient Student Issues, United States Department of Education Ofce of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs. Retrieved January 12, 2004 from http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/symposia/rst/lep.htm [12] Moskowitz, G. (1978) Caring and sharing in the foreign language class: A sourcebook on humanistic techniques. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers [13] Owen, C. (2002) Content-Based English for Academic Purposes in a Thai University. In: J. Crandall & D. Kaufmann (eds), Content-based instruction in higher education settings (pp 45-61). Alexandria, VA: TESOL. [14] Rovira, J. Baudrillard and Hollywood: Subverting nism of control and The Matrix. Retrieved July 1, http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/hollywood.html 9 the mecha2003 from

[15] South, J.B. (Ed.) (2003) Buffy the Vampire Slayer and philosophy: Fear and trembling in Sunnydale. Chicago: Open Court. [16] Stoller, F.L. & Grabe, W. (1997) A Six-Ts approach to content-based instruction. In: M.A. Snow and D.M. Brinton (Eds.) The content-based classroom: Perspectives on integrating language and content (pp. 78-94). White Plains, NY: Longman.

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