Virginia Commonwealth University
In the August issue of Adbusters Magazine, Douglas
Haddow claims that the new, twenty-first century
counterculture is the unfortunate hipster. Haddow
claims, in no uncertain terms, that Gen Y is so unoriginal,
narcissistic, and media obsessed, that we fail
to even create a suitable counterculture. We are, in effect,
doomed to the digital world that spawned us and
doomed to the insignificance of a “metrical mass” where
our unconscious is infinitely plastic and subject to the
environmental forces that surround us (Borch-Jacobsen,
1982). The Adbusters article struck a chord, not because
my students brought me both digital and hard copies of
the magazine during the first week of class, but because
I realized that Haddow was not just talking about my
students—he was talking about me. My course, “English
391: Reading Counterculture: 1950-present”1 is based
on the interdisciplinary MATX PhD program and has
a diverse student body ranging from the School of the
Arts to English. All of the students are juniors or seniors,
making them between twenty and twenty-three years of
age. I am twenty-six. We are Gen Y, and we are getting
slammed—our meticulously mismatched outfits and all.
This research attempts to answer questions that arose,
and continue to arise, as I teach media and culture literature
courses. How do I teach my own generation media
and culture? How do I utilize technology in the classroom
that is meaningful? And, how do I keep their attention—
and my attention for three hours each week, and
up to six more with homework and reading assignments?
The first question skews the subsequent questions dramatically.
Appealing to Gen Y and bringing relevant
technology into the arts and humanities is, fortunately,
a well-researched problem. David Buckingham’s Media
Education: Literacy, Learning, and Contemporary Culture
(2003) identifies and explains strategies for incorporating
and teaching media in the classroom in order
to promote new sites of learning—a democratic educational
approach made popular in the seventies and continued
today. Joe Lockard and Mark Pengrum’s (Ed.)
Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the
Internet (2007), delve into tactics concerning dynamic
teaching on the web. The editors also incorporate the
pros and cons of digital education—namely the lack of
corporeal awareness that is often subscribed to web users.
2 Tara McPherson, another editor of an inspiring collection
of articles, culls a wide variety of educational/
generational topics, such as current notions of temporality
and the increasingly blurry divide between citizenship
and consumption in Digital Youth, Innovation, and the
Unexpected (2007). These publications, and the countless
others not listed here, show the growing interest and
relevant scholarship in the digital humanities and Gen Y.
They are, for the most part, positive and forward thinking
books and articles that attempt to utilize the unique
skill sets of their students while transforming everyday
technology into teaching tools. Yet, none of them specifically
address the issue of the first digital generation
becoming university instructors and professors. The topdown,
rush to know the latest-digital-tools-in-order-toappeal-
to-a-newtype-
of-student is slowly being pushed
aside as a new generation of instructors appear on the
scene.
As many of the aforementioned scholars note, I realized
that incorporating technology into the humanities classroom
was a tricky task, as was sharing my generational
status with my students. My two biggest challenges came
with utilizing technology in a way that appealed to my
students (knowing the technology that was being “used”
on me as a student), and teaching in a way that recognized,
instead of ignored, our Gen Y status.3 In short,
the students and I had to be in it together—all in—or
the entire course would collapse. And, I had to establish
this “all in” concept early. After airing our mutual hatred
of discussion boards, the tedium of being forced to respond
to posts, and a host of other unfortunately typical
uses of technology in the classroom, the students began
keeping personal blogs. They had to post at least once a
week (Saturday at midnight) and, initially, they had to
utilize just about everything the blog had to offer in order
to build a comfort level with embedding video, creating
links, and working in a hypertextual fashion.
A common misconception permeates many “top down”
views of Gen Y: we are all technically savvy. I can say
with certainty, this is not true. The simpler the technology,
the better, the more aesthetically pleasing the technology,
the better, the more personal the technology, the
better. I can also say that nothing irritates students more
than to feel as though they are the guinea pigs in a technology
experiment where the instructor is conveniently
separate—viewing from above. So, I blogged, I linked,
I embedded, and I read each link, watched each video,
and listened to each song on their twenty-four blogs. The
technology extended our conference style class discussions
throughout the week, but the technology was not
enough—and it never is. We critically assessed our Gen
Y status as a perspective and a coda to the vibrant counterculture
movements that preceded us. Instead of being
bogged down by an often pejorative and inaccurate label, we interrogated our actions, views, and aesthetic choices.
The result was a class that used simple and accessible
technology in moderation, utilized various forms of media
in the classroom to spur discussion (video, sound,
etc.) and accepted, instead of ignored, our unique similarities
as the “plugged in” generation. (I think, secretly,
we each sought to prove Douglas Haddow wrong.)
The purpose of this research, as noted above, is to investigate
the benefits and restrictions that generation on
generation teaching has on both classroom dynamic and
the uses of technology in the classroom. I believe that a
shared generational status, although a fleeting moment
in time, can provide new and interesting perspectives on
teaching pedagogy in the humanities.
Works Cited
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel (1982). The Freudian Subject.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Buckingham, David (2003). Media Education: Literacy,
Learning, and Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Lockhard, Joe and Mark Pengrum, Ed. (2007). Brave
New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2005). My Mother was a Computer.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McPherson, Tara, Ed. (2007). Digital Youth: Innovation
and the Unexpected. Cambridge: MIT Press.
White, Michele (2006). The Body and the Screen: Theories
of Internet Spectatorship. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Notes
1This course has a companion course “Reading Twentieth
Century Popular Culture” that I also teach.
2Michele White and N. Katherine Hayles discuss these
themes in their books The Body and the Screen and My
Mother was a Computer, respectively.
3Unlike technical course in digital design or generally
straightforward courses in composition and rhetoric,
counterculture required a certain street credibility (for
lack of a better word).
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June 20, 2009 - June 25, 2009
176 works by 303 authors indexed
Conference website: http://web.archive.org/web/20130307234434/http://mith.umd.edu/dh09/
Series: ADHO (4)
Organizers: ADHO