Innovative ways for instructors to encourage students’ interest in politics

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In today’s post, I want to share with you a smart idea that was presented by Dr. Steven Stuglin from Georgia Highlands College at this year’s conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. His talk was on the potential uses of science fiction and fantasy stories to facilitate undergraduate students’  understanding of topics discussed in the Departments of Communications, Political Science, and History.

The major premise of his presentation was that today’s students have become more and more disaffected with politics due to a number of reasons such as political trust, political interest, and political understanding. Consequently, students might find it more difficult to comprehend political concepts and political history when these topics are discussed in classroom environments. However, most students today have either seen or read a number of science fiction and fantasy pieces such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, etc. Thus, Stuglin argues that science fiction and fantasy—as often underutilized tools—may provide suitable lenses through which to understand socio-political realities. In other words, while he emphasizes that science fiction and fantasy stories as well as the characters that live in these worlds need to be regarded as extreme examples, Stuglin promotes the use of plot and character to problematize political theories, systems, and communication practices as a means to bridge the gap between student’s disinterest in politics and the political system(s) they live in.

One example that I found most striking in his presentation was the way instructors might discuss pretty complex texts such as Plato’s The Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty through the prism of science fiction and fantasy. In this case, one could relate Plato’s ideal leader—powerful and strict but generally interested in the public good—to the mighty lion king Arslan in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones might work well as an example of Machiavelli’s claims regarding the attributes necessary for effective leadership: cold, calculating, evidencing fear as a form of control. Finally, Professor Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series seems to illustrate the limits of control, as discussed in Mill’s On Liberty.

As a way to engage students, Stuglin suggests activities where students categorize leader characters in science fiction and fantasy text according to discussed texts. As a next step, students would then do the sam with real contemporary politicians.

Overall, I really enjoyed the presentation, and I will certainly try his approach in future classes.

 

Cheers,

Thomas

A Sifendipity that turned into an activity

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This week I have been quite busy conducting interviews for my hybrid pedagogy promotion project, and one aspect that came up frequently during those interviews was my interviewee’s particular reservation against using the microblogging platform Twitter for pedagogical purposes. Most interviewees said they don’t (like to) use Twitter because it would sent their teaching into a tailspin, thereby making it more difficult to administer the students’ learning experience.

I can certainly understand the attitude. Once we go hybrid with our pedagogy, we introduce additional spaces into the learning experience and it can become quite overwhelming not only to administer the content that students produce on Twitter, but also to use that content for assessment, not to mention that in every class there will be students who don’t use social media tools at all (at least that has been my experience so far). So, from that angle, I can surely understand how Twitter can be quite intimidating at first.

However, a couple of days ago I found an email in my inbox from a research-sharing website which contained a paper on the rhetoric of hashtags by Daer, Hoffman, and Goodman, titled “Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications,” and here I can certainly see the merit of using Twitter in the classroom for critical thinking exercises as well as for practicing analytical skills. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, hashtags are used to connect Twitter messages to larger conversations. Hashtags are words or unspaced phrases that follow the number sign (#), and they can be placed anywhere in a tweet. But beyond its ability to construct a conversation space, a hashtag can also tell users in each instance a thing or two about the contextual configuration of that space. In other words, by looking at the hashtag we can draw inferences as to whether the conversation space was created to inform, identify, entertain, critique, rally, or maybe motivate. Check out a couple of hashtags below and think about the underlying purpose of the conversation space in each case:

#geeiamsubtle

#firstworldproblems

#goodtoknow

#standyourground

#digped


For a composition class or a critical thinking class,  in which questions of audience awareness and purpose are important topics of discussion, I can certainly see the benefit of using Twitter. Surely, Twitter can also teach us a thing or two about the advantages of brevity in writing, but this only goes so far. I find that Twitter would work better for analysis exercises. I imagine that an activity could be that students choose a hashtag, identify its purpose, and then analyze a set of tweets in relation to the extent to which they fulfill the purpose of the conversation space. In order to capture the tweets and turn the activity in for assessment, students could use the free webtool Storify, which allows users to collect and curate material from the internet.

I will certainly try this activity out in the future. If you think the activity is interesting, and you get a chance to do it, then please comment and let me know how it went.

 

Cheers,

Thomas