Something is Rotten in the City of Detriot

My title hails from a Transformers Animated episode that Brent was watching as I was reading about Hamlet and cultural materialism. It seemed slightly appropriate, even though I don't know if BMWs are made in Detroit...

Reading about these two approaches reminds me of a few books that I've been reading (skimming...) for my paper. One that seems like a perfect example of New Historicism is a book called American Domesticity that talks about the influence of the housekeeping practices and manuals from the turn of the century on Hollywood filmmaking practices. The book offers close readings of films and housekeeping manuals and societal practices, and ends up being a fascinating read. It seems like this is what New Historicism and Cultural Materialism both do: open up the analysis of a text to allow for historical realities, account for 'non-literary' texts and their influence on the literature itself.

The difficult thing about distinguishing between new historicism and cultural materialism when studying this specific text is that we're not really far enough removed from 2oo1 to make a large distinction between a historical text and a current text (though maybe I'm wrong about this...2001 still seems really recent to me). So, I'm going to attempt New Historicism, but I might get it all wrong, and it might seem quite a bit like Cultural Materialism (which I'm no longer going to capitalize because I've been inconsistent enough as it is...), but that's that.

The first thing I ever thought when I saw this film was, "Did this actually work?" It seems like a large price to pay for a commercial. Turns out, it did work. The internet tells me so (their sales were up 12.5% after releasing the films, even though BMW didn't release a new car that year). The BMW films emerge from a culture of product placement so ingrained in the traditional American viewer that not only do we not flinch at its inclusion in anything (in fact, automobiles are the most likely to be included as product placement), but we fully accept that in this case, our entertainment is a commercial, a commercial our entertainment. This pairing of entertainment with economics perfectly reinforces our capitalist system. If I'm not aptly saying it, what I'm trying to say is this: our capitalist society has fully accepted a system where we are informed about our products through entertainment, and it is only in this climate that a film like Chosen can even exist.

In a traditional close reading, we would delve deeply into the text, discussing how differing elements of the film contribute to its overall meaning. In new historicism, these facts of BMW sales and wikipedia articles about product placement are co-texts to be read in tandem with the text. So, beautifully photographed BMW chase scene=reinforcement of societal notions of the BMW as a luxury vehicle. If I understand it correctly, the goal of new historicism isn't only to understand a text or a context, but ultimately to understand a culture. And that is kind of cool.

Here's My Psycho Analysis

Okay everyone, I gave you at least a week to be the first to post, so no whining about how I said what you wanted to. Also, I hope that your respective Thanksgivings were very nice. I spent mine throwing up, which was just about as bad as it sounds.

Psychoanalysis is really interesting to me because I find myself simultaneously accepting and rejecting it. Lacanian psychoanalysis is of particular interest because it seems to me that without saying the words, he seems to support the idea of a "collective unconscious" in that the unconscious is tied to language, which is a shared and complete system shared by all people (or at least those who speak the language in question). So, there are systems at work that govern our own actions more than our conscious selves do, and that's crazy. I find it interesting that we can regard characters "as assemblages of signifiers clustering round a proper name" (108), which seems to relate directly to the ideas of metonymy and metaphor. So, while Lacanian psychoanalysis seems to disrupt or deconstruct many of our traditional notions of self-hood and consciousness, it still asserts that there is some meaning to be had in the world, and that reading texts correctly can uncover this meaning.

All this said, I thought for some reason that psychoanalytic criticism would somewhat easy. I started making a list of the things that the characters could possibly stand for:

The Hire: Western Culture
His Noble Steed: Products of capitalism
Mason Lee: Eastern Culture
Ignoble Steeds and associated drivers: Colonizers, perhaps? Oppressors? Power grabbers?
Wicked Monk of the East/West: Those who would exploit/expose their own culture for status among the Other.
The Box: The unconscious.

However, as I finished this list, I realized that it was just starting to sound like the already hashed out Postcolonial or Liberal Humanist reading I've already done, with the exception of the last element. I also remembered that psychoanalysis (this time of the Freudian type, but what's a good analysis without some hybridization?) privileges "the individual 'psycho drama' above the 'social drama' of class conflict" (101). So, with that in mind, here's take two of my attempt at psychoanalysis, treating the whole thing as an attempt to understand and uncover one's essential selfhood:

The Hire: The individual, lacking in understanding of self
The Chosen: The Other, at peace with the interaction between his conscious and unconscious
The not-as-good-as-Clive Owen-drivers: Distractions that function as screen memories for the hire.
Evil Monk: Another individual, living in denial.
The box: The unconscious itself

So, at the beginning of the film, the boy gives the hire a box and tells him not to open it--it's for later. The desire to understand what is inside the box--and hence, the boy's motivation in giving it to Clive Own--is the mystery that subtly drives the entire narrative. As viewers, we forget that we care about the box, but once it's opened we realize that perhaps a desire to understand what was in the box is what drove the hire to act as he did in preserving the boy. All the distractions along the way function as screen memories, making us forget the box. Perhaps Clive Owen's adept driving is simply his way of transferring his tension with the mystery of the box into physical action.

The end of the film, the opening of the box, could represent pushing away all distraction and allowing the individual to uncover the unconscious thought that has shaped the whole narrative. A hulk bandaid. The use of the Hulk itself suggests the fragmentation of self, the duality of our identities. It is only in accepting and acknowledging his unconscious that Clive Owen becomes whole (after all, psychoanalysis of the Freudian nature was supposedly therapeutic...).

I feel at once insightful and stupid. Is this normal?

In which two German products duke it out, and Marxism wins.

I once clinched a game of "Battle of the Sexes" for my team by knowing that BMW stands for Bavarian Motor Works, which just goes to show that knowing your economic bases really is good for something.

So I did more reading than was required (and as a result, Jeff, you may have to do more reading than is required when my post is longer than 500 words), and it helped me to see the way that base affects superstructure (that reading also refused to pin down one exact definition of a Marxist reading, which was less helpful). Barry states that "Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world, or of forces, beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in" (150). So, all the philosophy, religion, moral codes, etc. that we adopt are purely created by our material reality. In The Critical Experience (196-197),David Cowles explains this by relating this example: most societies accept that stealing another person's property is immoral (which we attribute to ethical or religious codes), but this is entirely based on our notions of personal property and ownership (a material reality). If our material reality was based more on shared ownership, the notion of stealing as wrong doesn't hold, because there's no such thing as stealing what you already own. Thus, the superstructure (don't steal) is entirely shaped by the base (property ownership).

So, taking Marxism way down to its basic roots, I would like to try to locate the base of the film, and see how it affects and creates the superstructure.

Jeff fairly easily addressed the base: this is a commercial. The basic, material reality of this film is that it was created to sell a car. Any notions of aesthetic beauty, interesting stories, or universal themes are all foregrounded by this reality. We create assumptions about the characters based on their own material realities (Good car = good guy. Bad car = bad guy).

It could also be argued that within the story, even the characters shape their moral systems entirely based upon their economic motivations. Clive Own is the hire. Not the volunteer, not the friend, the hire. Any desire he has to help this boy--any loyalty he feels for him, any desire to protect him--is based entirely on the material reality that he will be paid. It is highly likely that the men with the materially (in case you're keeping track, I have used the word "material" in its various forms nine times so far) inferior cars are also putting their cars and their lives on the line for a similar reason, and it is not a stretch to say that had the price been different, Clive Owen may well have been the one trying to shoot the boy, not save him.

It is both interesting and difficult to view texts this way, because I feel like they start to fall apart. If everything is a construct of economic realities, is there such a thing as authentic art? Where does personality (not to mention spirituality) fit into such a model? Am I programmed to value higher-level thinking because of my cushy middle-class upbringing? Am I programmed to like certain films based on their material success? I'm not saying that I find anything morally questionable about paying artists for their work, but viewing any artifact through a strict Marxist lens tends to reduce it to mere product, valuable for sustaining the current material system.

TIPRR 10 - My bandaids have Charlie Brown on them. Seriously.

This post is laden with parentheticals. Sorry.

So here's the interesting thing about Postcolonialism and Postmodernism: they function both as ways of looking at a text and also as qualities that the texts themselves can possess. This sounds easy in a sentence, but I'm finding it a little difficult to negotiate in practice because I can't decide which angle to take. So...that's that.

Looking at Chosen through a Postcolonialist lens is interesting because it keeps challenging me on my own assumptions. A goal of postcolonialist criticism is to show Western literature's "general inability to empathize across boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference." This film seems to portray racial relations much like films we've seen in the past (if they even enter a film at all...): the good white man comes in to save the small Asian boy. Much like The Cheat that we saw at the beginning of the year in film history, the bad guy is the greedy, somewhat culturally assimilated Asian. Ultimately, the good Tibetan monks have to rely on the strong white man, who desecrates their spiritual artifacts in the process (Wikipedia tells me that you spin the wheel in part to receive good karma. Can you get good karma when you set the wheel spinning with someone else's unconscious head? Maybe it purifies the bad karma brought by violence and general Clive Owen-ery?) Furthermore, it's a German car that these films are glorifying. The German car and the white man save the day. This seems problematic.

But then I remember that the filmmaker is, himself, Asian. Not Tibetan, but probably more sensitive to Tibetan culture than, say, Michael Bay (I tried to come up with a director I hated more but...nope.). What do I do with that? What do I do with the fact that Ang Lee has strongly situated himself as both an Asian AND American filmmaker (Eat Drink Man Woman and The Hulk? Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Sense and Sensibility?), as both an action director and a drama director? Is Ang Lee merely adopting Western traditions, is he adapting them to suit his needs, or is he so adept at them that he can do anything, and trying to do a Postcolonialist criticism isn't really even necessary?

Perhaps Ang Lee's film (and filmic work as a whole) is just one large celebration of what Barry calls "cultural polyvalency"--the ability to belong to multiple cultures at the same time (as I remember from science, valence electrons are electrons that can flit about and help to complete the outer electron ring when elements are trying to bond (not to be confused with valance electrons, which are window coverings for a child interested in science)). The story in Chosen can be see to represent a partnership between Eastern and Western cultures, because although Clive Owen is the savior, he's not the chosen--that title belongs to the boy, Ang Lee's son whose actual name is Mason (further evidence of Ang's willingness to simultaneously include both cultures even in his personal life). The whole goal of the film is to help the boy, and rather than colonizing the story, Clive Owen merely comes in, stays a while, and then leaves. Ang Lee is a multicultural, multigenre-al filmmaker, easily tackling both Asian and American cinema, action and Jane Austen (he should just direct a Kung-Fu adaptation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and get it over with), and is probably loved by Postcolonialist critics because of this.

TIPRR 9 - In which Michael Bay makes a brief appearance

So, as far as I understand it, the goal of this TIPRR is to show how Structuralism (or Post-Structuralism, but I'm not feeling decentered today, so I choose Structuralism) operates in Ang Lee's Chosen, thereby demonstrating that I am on my way to understanding what Structuralism does and how it works. So, here goes.

As I understand it, Structuralists assert that no texts have meaning in isolation, but rather, that we understand them (and create them!) only by understanding societal and language codes. Our reality is made up of a system of codes, and each text is merely one iteration (parole) of the larger code at work (langue (which my spell check suggests should be "languish". Apparently blogger also has a difficult time with theory)). To me, a discussion of Structuralism and film naturally leads to a discussion of IMR--Institutionalized Modes of Representation--and how these codes function to shape our interpretation of the text. For example, in American film (and most other films...) we as viewers and practitioners have agreed to a code of editing that says that it's okay that in just three shots we move from dock/parking lot to bridge/highway to house. When we cut to these places, we do not believe that each of these things are connected to each other, we understand that Clive Owen is on a journey. The cut signifies time passing. This is not inherent to the cut--we could have decided that every moment needed to be concretely represented--but it is how the language codes operate within film.

So, when looking at Chosen through our Structuralist glasses, we first need to identify what coding systems operate here. We could go into great detail about specific editing codes, but there are codes that operate even more generally. I want to look at Chosen through two generally accepted and understood codes: as an action film, and as an advertisement.

This film relies on many codes of the action film (and of melodrama, which go together more often than you would think) for the viewer to construct meaning. To do this, the film employs a series of oppositions, resting mostly in good/bad (chosen/not chosen?) For example, from the get-go we understand that Clive Owen is the good guy because he's driving a light car and the bad guys are driving dark cars (white hat/black hat), but we are also to understand that Clive Owen isn't a sissy do-gooder--that's no white linen suit he's wearing. He's good, but he's not afraid to bash some heads. We look at this car chase (in which Clive Owen is the good driver, and all the others are bad drivers) in the context of other car chases; we understand that the chase has bigger stakes than just driving around, because other car chases in other films have similar stakes. Frankly, I'm surprised no cars blew up, but I guess this is Ang Lee not Michael Bay. When the boy arrives at the house, he notices the fragmented character of the evil monk--monk's clothing with cowboy boots? POINTY BLACK cowboy boots? It's gotta be a bad guy--and with a meaningful look lets Clive Owen know that this is not a good guy. All this is communicated with no dialogue--Lee is relying purely on pre-established codes in order to create meaning.

When discussing Structuralism and fashion, Barry points out that often times fashion will break established codes in a knowing way in order to make a statement (46). Examining Chosen as an advertisement leads me to believe that this is entirely what BMW was interested in when it commissioned all of these films. While including staples of the conventional car ad--showcasing the car's superior handling abilities, strong safety features, lush interiors--it dispels with narration and sales figures in favor of telling a story. The fundamental code is still, "I want you to buy this car," but BMW ditches traditional modes of communicating that message in favor of this one: "This car is cool." We still have to know and understand car commercials in order to understand how different this film is, and to begin to understand for what purpose it might be different.

Okay, I'm already at 700 words so I should probably end this. I think that Structuralism is cool and interesting and useful, and I think that Post-Structuralism is cool but I do wonder a little bit what good it actually does anyone. Post-Structuralism seems a bit like a person who consistently points out problems yet does nothing to attempt to fix them. Who does it help to deconstruct and decenter everything? Maybe I'm not giving Post-Structuralism credit, but it seems like a theory-person's way of saying, "Forget You Universe! There's no truth anywhere!" (I thought of several other possibilities for that first phrase, and then decided to make it BYU appropriate). Maybe there are other cool things that I haven't seen yet about Post-Structuralism that will make it seem more helpful.

TIPRR 8 -- If You Liked It Then You Should Have Put a Theory On It

Here is something that is interesting to me: as I was reading the ten tenets of Liberal Humanism, I found myself agreeing with them because I found them logical. Barry is right; these are the things that we are familiar with. These are the sorts of things that we teach students in introductory classes: study a text, determine its meaning (decide on a theme?), and support it with examples from the text (demonstrating a fusion of form and content). However, as I was reading the five recurrent ideas in theory, I also found myself agreeing with them, even though many of them are IN DIRECT CONTRADICTION with the tenets of liberal humanism. How does that happen?

Case in point:

Theory idea number five basically states that theorists (I assume this means theorists in general, not in specifics) "distrust all totalising notions" (34). This denies the possibility of fixed notions such as "humanity" and "reality", and instead chalks these up to negotiation and renegotiation. Though certain theories tend to adopt the notion of fixed meanings (Marxism tells us that all art is created to perpetuate the domination of the ruling class...right? Am I remembering this right?), theory as a whole rejects any notion of fixed meanings. As our friend Einstein probably wouldn't say but will anyway in this cliched phrase, "It's all relative." So, when a TMA 114 class has a screening of Dr. Strangelove and I insist that it is a political satire but one of my students insists that it is a straight ahead portrayal of cold war realities, who is right? Theorists might argue that depending on which theory we were using, we might both be right (though let's be clear: I'm right.).

Liberal Humanism tenet number 4 stands in direct opposition to this notion: "Human nature is essentially unchanging" (16). It asserts that there are certain universal truths/values that transcend time and culture. Reality and humanity are NOT negotiable, but can be found as constant truths in all literature. So, in TMA 102 when we ask students to locate a theme in a film, we are essentially asking them to look for an unchanging lesson about human nature: love conquers all, pride leads to unhappiness, or my personal favorite dillusionist theme, the American Dream is a joke and/or a lie.

Initially, Barry seems to set up Liberal Humanism as the opposite of theory, but it seems to me that Liberal Humanism isn't an opposite, it's just another theory; another way of looking at the world and literature and their relationship to one another. The Sixth Core Principle of Media Literacy Education states that "Media Literacy Education affirms that people use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages." And, if my personal belief is that human nature is unchanging (which I sort of do...), then that constitutes my own set of theory glasses. However, when teaching any sort of media, we always need to be open to the option that our students will disagree with us about what a text means, and that's okay--maybe they're just using a different theory. Theories offer us interesting and different ways of engaging with texts and with the world, and it never hurts to try a few on before deciding which one we subscribe to. We do our students a disservice if we attempt to only offer them one view of literary theory, one way of deconstructing a text, because maybe they'll like the way the world looks through cat-eye glasses way more than those John Lennon specs.

Okay, moving on to our friend Beyonce (whose name, my spell check tells me, should be "Bey Once"), and I'm going to try to say something that isn't exactly what Timbre said. Also, Barry's Leavisite analysis is quite brief, so mine will be too.

A standard, intro to film type theme to emerge from this video might be: "treat others the way that you want to be treated." This is effectively illustrated by having the characters play both roles. Beyonce's behavior as the cop is unacceptable, and when you (mentally) play through the video imagining the roles reversed, the cop's behavior is still unacceptable. The video implies that both characters are equally capable of cheating, and throughout the song Beyonce keeps insists that if she were the boy, she would treat a girl the way that she wants to be treated. (I feel like I'm fumbling over my words like none other. I hope this makes sense). The choice to film the video in black and white illustrates the black and white nature of the issue; it is not okay to live a double standard, to expect complete commitment from someone while not remaining committed yourself.

TIPRR 7

If I'm being quite honest, I found this week's reading helpful but fairly dull and occasionally "duh". It wasn't the organization, it was the content. It's just dull to have every form of actuarial record detailed for me. I know that it was useful--there are a number of creative options mentioned, like using gravestones to research community values, but it just wasn't that exciting. Here are some things I thought of while reading, organized into mostly unrelated but hopefully thoughtful paragraphs:

Thought 1
I appreciate that on page 301 Berg again iterates that when beginning any research, it may be organized as "a research problem, a question, a series of questions, or a hypothesis of series of hypotheses." I think that one reason that Tuesday's exercise was at times frustrating (did anyone else feel like we were occasionally dancing in circles?) was that we kept trying to hammer out THE research question. True research doesn't have to start out this concrete--you start with a general idea, research, refine the idea, research, etc. I'm not saying that we shouldn't put significant effort into refining our research questions as much as possible, but in practice I think that we need to recognize that it's okay to move past step 1 even without completely setting it in stone. The example Berg offers of doing research about women in police forces is quite helpful in this regard.

Thought 2
The unobtrusive research measures that Berg mentions seem more like research tools and less like research methodologies, but I do find them potentially interesting. These are often the sorts of things that I notice but don't really pursue for further research; for example, has anyone else noticed that the north steps in the library going up from the third to the fourth floor have one section that visibly worn down? The fact that the steps are worn in one place shows that people generally walk on the right side of the steps, I assume because it requires covering less ground since it's at the inside of every turn. This is an erosion measure, and it tells us something about human behavior, but I don't really want to do move any further with it than I just have. I typically use erosion or accretion measures as anecdotal conversation starters, not as anything more. Perhaps I just haven't found a purpose for them yet.

Thought 3
It seems to me that the research that we'll do for our film history papers generally falls under the umbrella of archival research, or perhaps even historiography.

Thought 4
On page 299, Berg states that we "must use care and avoid imposition of modern thoughts or understanding when considering information about the past." This sounds good in theory, but is it even possible in practice? Certainly there are degrees of objectivity and subjectivity, and we can try to be more objective than subjective, but clearly we will ALWAYS view historical evidence through (pardon this cliched phrase...) the lens of our own experience. We will always view history with a "Little did he know...." mentality. And, if we are to use historical research to answer questions about the future (as Berg suggests), aren't we required to impose moderns thoughts onto the data? You can argue with me if you'd like...perhaps I've missed the point.

TIPRR 6--Blurring the Lines

As I did the reading for Action Research, it occurs to me that what I actually want to do with my students is not an ethnography, it's an Action Research Project using some ethnographic methods.
I am also with Timbre in that I'm not entirely sure exactly what I'm being asked for. That being said, here's my refined research question (that still seems to address an ethnographic model):

Research Question: How does the BYU student's own sense of community engagement change during Hands on a Camera?

• Follow up research questions: How do BYU students describe their sense of community engagement before the project? What does community engagement mean to them before the project? During the project? After the project?
  

Maybe I've done this completely wrong. That's why we're here, right? Well, not to be wrong, but to learn how to do it right.

Okay, now to Action Research and Case Studies.

As I said at the beginning of my post, I realized as I was doing the reading that what I really want to do is an Action Research Study. It seems to me that the lines between Critical Ethnography (an ethnography stemming from a desire for advocacy and with the intent to change a situation or challenge existing research) and Action Research are fairly thin. Then, when I really started thinking about it, it seems like the lines between all these models are fairly thin; isn't an ethnography a form of case study? At the least, all of these have some methods in common (observation, collecting documents, etc.), which leads me to believe that designing a research project is a little bit like making a documentary film (or any story really, but we're talking about documentary modes in my class so I'm addressing them here): there are lots of modes, and some documentaries are more one mode than another, but in reality all documentaries are generally a mix of one or two. We might design a project that is mostly action research, but it's going to borrow a little bit from ethnography. The best method is to know and understand all the tools at your disposal and design a project that best suits your research need.

I really like the idea of action research because (as was clearly demonstrated in Glori's thesis) it stems from the desire to better a situation--to improve practice, to help others. I also like that even though research needs to happen prior to the project, you don't go into the project with the goal of proving a hypothesis. Yes, Glori hoped that doing a blogging project would help her students with their English, but she had no preconceived notions of how the blog would transform their behavior; she let the research speak for itself. I also appreciate the fact that action research is about helping one community with one problem, and though the results can be extrapolated (my goal is perhaps to use the word extrapolate in every post), the goal of the project isn't necessarily to institute widespread policy change or to generate groundbreaking new ideas (though these can certainly follow). Sometimes I get intimidated by research projects because I'm not sure that what I do will actually contribute to the field in any way, but if I better my own practice in some way, then the research is a success.

And that is cool.

TIPRR 5--I'm a spy...no wait...an ethnographer!

So, in my desire to have witty titles for my posts, I sometimes (always?) come up with something lame. Like I just did. Sorry. I also apologize if some of the ideas expressed here end up in my presentation. Redundancy seems to be my forte and also my strong point.

Strange organization notwithstanding (am I the only one who feels this way?), I actually really enjoyed this week's reading. I found it interesting and engaging, and as with last week's reading, it prompted me to think more about what I can do in my own practice to make for better research.

Something that I thought about (that I may or may not address on Tuesday) is that all of reality TV seems to be one large ethnography experiment, where show producers, editors, and audiences participate in observation without ever necessarily writing about it. We are all familiar with the experience of watching something closely, looking for patterns, and trying to make predictions about what will happen next.

I like what ethnography produces, which is at its most basic form a story: a story of people, of their actions, their surroundings, their likes and dislikes, with the ultimate goal of...what? Understanding. Ethnography doesn't necessarily set out to prove that Factor A causes Behavior B (although it might), and it isn't about producing statistics. It is about understanding behavior and people and practices. Also, am I the only person who actually wants to read all of Ben's field notes because they sound interesting?

I appreciated how Berg acknowledged that all researchers are subjective, and I appreciated that he seemed to encourage researchers to fess up to this and allow it to be a part of the research. It may be easy to be objective when studying tissue cells (though maybe not?), but when you're studying people you inevitably become invested in their stories. Furthermore, you have your own reasons for doing the research in the first place, and your own lens through which you view the world, and all of these things affect the research process and any conclusions you may draw from the research.

Okay, I'm at 331 words, and I don't even feel like I've said about half of what I want to. I guess I'll save it for the presentation. What I would like from you is some feedback about the following idea:

In Hands on a Camera, we usually do our project in two or more schools, with three to five teachers at each. This coming semester we want to focus more on refining the curriculum and keeping costs low (economy, you have foiled us again!), and so we are likely to have seven or eight teachers at one school. This significantly lessens the workload for each teacher, so something I'm considering having them do is a little bit of a mini ethnography as well. I always have them write field reports (though they're not nearly as detailed as the ones described in the reading), but I might want them to write more detailed field notes from the time when they are not actively teaching. This is a research project, and I think that we could do even more to beef it up. I think this would be better for the students (especially since some of them want to be documentary filmmakers, and documentary filmmaking seems to be one significant form of disseminating an ethnography--more on that Tuesday), and more informative for the overseeing teachers. Usually at the final exam I give a final interview, but I think that final would be something more like a paper instead where they synthesize their field notes.What do you think? What complications am I missing? What would make this difficult?

TIPRR 4 --We'll get back to the research methods after the theory break.

First, three non-academic comments:
1. Timbre, I think it's totally hilarious that you put your word count at the bottom, because I had already planned to do that in my post. Now I feel remarkably unoriginal.
2. Did anyone else feel like this was mostly a practical reading with a few brief theory breaks? One minute I'm reading about note card collection, and the next I'm being reading about cognitive reality vs. sensory reality. This seemed odd to me.
3. There were a few glaring and odd typos that annoyed me.

I'm going to be honest and admit that this reading is hard for me to really engage with because I don't feel there's a lot up for debate here. I think that this book is useful in terms of drafting a research project, but reading about the two card system and various types of random sampling procedures doesn't necessarily do it for me. Let me tell you the practical things that I did think about while reading, because that seems most appropriate:

1. I really hate to admit that when researching, I occasionally act like the doctoral student that Berg calls out as relying too much on the internet. I have never used a physical periodicals index to look up anything. I've never even browsed through physical periodicals before Darl's assignment. Granted, a lot of those physical indexes have online counterparts from the actual journals, but there are times when I've given up looking for an article just because my searches in the BYU journal finder didn't seem to yield anything. I think that relying too much on ANY method of research isn't helpful. I need to be more geometrically minded and allow myself to triangulate.

2. As I was reading about project organization and data organization, it occurred to me that for the past few years I've been carrying out a research project without really thinking about practical methods for cataloging the data I collect except to look for great quotes to use in presentations. Furthermore, I haven't even taken much time to consider what sorts of measurable outcomes we're researching in Hands on a Camera, or even what fundamental research questions we're asking. I know that Amy went through all of these steps, I've just allowed myself to focus more on the implementation of the project rather than the actual research (so maybe I should finish transcribing those interviews from last year...).

3. I'm talking about community stories and media creation with my students on Monday, and this quote seemed particularly applicable: "The world is a research laboratory, [and you] merely need to open your eyes and ears to the sensory reality that surrounds all of us to find numerous ideas for research" (24). Similarly, we are surrounded by stories to hear and stories to tell, we just have to be willing to listen. Yes, I know this is a bit of a stretch, but my mind really wanted to find something less systematic...

And on that note, let's take a theory break.

word count: 506, and at least 91 of them don't count.

TIPRR 3 -- "On Their Own Terms"

Perhaps because I'm preparing to teach a lesson on ideology, I found this section of reading fascinating in terms of practically incorporating any kind of fair analysis (and by fair I mean avoiding the spoon-fed conversations that Timbre addressed) into the classroom. The overriding theme for all of these chapters seems to be this:

Allow the students room to incorporate their own opinions into any analysis or creative work. Let them work on their own terms. (it's a blog--I'm allowed to change the text size, right? Maybe a little RaNdOm CaPiTaLiZaTiOn?)

Buckingham addresses a key issue when teaching students to be critical--being 'critical', decoding things 'correctly', can become a form of social capital where students can assert their own superiority over the masses that are being 'duped' every day by media messages. Reading it reminded me of this article (yes, I just plugged the Journal of Media Literacy Education) by Paul Mihailidis where he talks about the results of a media literacy study he did at the university level, and to boil it down for you, he did a study comparing student conversations about the media between a group of students who had taken a media literacy class and a group of students who had not. One of the unintended results seemed to be that the students who had taken the media class were on the whole much more cynical than their media 'illiterate' counterparts. Putting down the media as merely something to manipulate, tearing texts apart for potentially stereotypical representations, etc., without ever allowing anything redemptive into the conversation, became par for the course in his conversations with these students. The control group of students who did not take the class were much more willing to acknowledge personal enjoyment of said media, and though they weren't as well equipped with the vocabulary to discuss media's effects, they were still able to have intelligent and enlightening conversations about media without so much of a cynical stance.

I believe I may have previously mentioned how I had lots of friends who didn't want me to "ruin" the movie for them after we'd watched it by breaking it down (as if a close reading of a text spoiled it...), but perhaps this is why; if we're not careful, talking about media texts can become a joyless exercise where students compete to see which of them can rip apart a media text most effectively. There needs to be room for students to express their honest opinions of a media text, to relate it to their own lives, to look not only for the bad or the manipulative, but also for the good in a text. As Buckingham mentions several times (but here most succinctly), there needs to room for "dialogue or negotiation between students' existing knowledge and experience of the media and the new knowledge that is made available by teachers" (153). Proper analytical and creative activities "should encourage students to acknowledge the complexity and diversity of their pleasures in the media; and to recognize the social basis of all such judgments of taste and value, including their own" (110).

This is getting fairly long, so I won't talk about how I also found the emphasis on student reflection really important (important enough that I want to restructure Hands on a Camera to be sure that the screening of the films is not the last activity, but rather the penultimate one);or that I also agreed with the notion of incorporating more creative activities into a classroom other than the big final project; or that I plan on having my students to a small "media autobiography" in class on Monday. These things could take up hundreds more words. All in all, I liked this reading a lot because it gave me lots of things to consider and reevaluate about my own style of teaching, it gave me lots of practical ideas for future use, and while Buckingham acknowledges that all of these things are difficult in practice, he still gives me hope for a successful future in media education.

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After my post last week of what I can only describe as negativity, I can happily report that most of the concerns raised by last week's reading were nicely answered (or at least addressed) in this weeks reading (which I knew they would be, so why was I so negative towards Buckingham? Because I only want him to give me ideas and not to set up the debate? Fortunately for you, this post isn't the place for me to answer those questions...). Instead of just getting more and more depressed by the reading, I found myself jotting down ideas for future classes, and wishing that my own students were reading chapter 4 this week.

Of particular interest to me was the whole chapter entitled "Locating Media Education", because last week I felt that this was my biggest crises (which makes little sense since I have a job teaching media literacy education...)-- where do I fit? The challenge is that many people are asking this about media education in general, and there isn't necessarily a 'right' answer. There are some answers that may be more right than others for certain situations, but studying 'media' has so many facets that it's virtually impossible to say that it only belongs in, say, the English classroom. It certainly needs to be applied across the curriculum (as I said in my last post), but as Timbre points out, this does necessitate changes in core curriculum and teacher expectations, and will take time and effort to implement. However, media education located in other places (like in Hands on a Camera) also has a place. It is our responsibility as educators in our own spheres (teachers, parents, members of the church, etc.) to find ways to incorporate media education. For example, how might I convince my Relief Society book group that it is okay to examine texts that are not religious? Should I do this?

Another point that I really appreciated is the way that Buckingham both emphasizes and de-emphasizes production. He treats production as an integrated part of the learning process, but he doesn't place it on the 'end all be all' pedestal that sometimes it gets assigned. We talk about the need to access, analyze, evaluate, and create, and in placing creation at the end we (maybe just I?) treat it as the culmination of all of these skills. Buckingham explicitly states that "production is not an end in itself" (p. 84), but rather that production is something that can encourage "critical participation in media". I feel that this is one area in which the curriculum in Hands on a Camera needs a little bit of tweaking. We do the majority of our analytical work at the beginning of the semester, and then we do a project at the end, and there isn't much time to place the students' projects back into the cycle and have them reflect on their own creations as media artifacts .

So, I find this portion of Buckingham's book to be extremely helpful and hopeful. It is true that monumental change of the sort that fully integrates media education into all subject areas, thus creating a more media literate public, will take time, but that doesn't mean that the small things we do don't matter. Choose your "big things come from little things" analogy or scriptural reference, and the small changes we make will eventually add up to some change.

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Beginnings are hard for me. Here we go.

A few months ago, I was talking to my younger sister about media in schools and she mentioned that she had a few teachers who would probably drive me crazy. I asked for an example, and she said that after doing a unit on the Middle East her teacher had shown them Disney’s Aladdin as a reward. (She was right about my being annoyed; I hold this practice on par with giving the winner of a weight loss contest a lifetime supply of Twinkies.) This experience (and the many like it that I have in my own memory) demonstrates the vital need for media education in the classroom: simply bringing media into the classroom is not enough. In fact, using media in this way—as a treat rather than a text—engenders a culture of passivity for young people, as if media is something to engage with after the ‘real’ work is done rather than treating it as the large influence on modern culture that it actually is.

The Buckingham reading is simultaneously inspiring and frustrating for me. I'm in agreement about many issues that he presents, but I also find it a little frustrating how few actual answers Buckingham provides to some of his own questions. I fully acknowledge that the forthcoming chapters do provide some answers as to pedagogical strategies, but to this point in the reading the most common note I have written in the margins is, “How do we do this?” While this might just show that I need to work on writing more helpful notes to myself, it also points to the main point of Buckingham’s book thus far: Media Education is desperately needed in theory, and somewhat complicated in practice.

The initial difference that Buckingham sets up between democratization and defensiveness is quite helpful, especially when use them to find our own motivation for pursuing media education. On one end of the spectrum we have defensiveness, which seeks to protect or ‘inoculate’ youth from the perceived (and real) dangers of media. On the other we have democratization, which recognizes that students use media regularly, and that media should be incorporated into the classroom in order to make education relevant to the students’ out of school lives. One camp asserts that youth need to be sheltered from media influences, and the other asserts that they should be allowed to roam free within the media landscape.

If we hold that virtue is the midpoint between two vices, then the ideal pedagogical standpoint seeks to reconcile these two tendencies (as Buckingham points out). This sounds great on paper, but actually making this work in practice is much more difficult (perhaps it is only difficult for me). Even though I always try to remember that “MLE is not about revealing to students the ‘true’ or ‘correct’ or ‘hidden’ meaning of media messages, nor is it about identifying which media messages are ‘good’ and which ones are ‘bad,’” (CPMLE 6.3) when teaching media analyses (especially to younger students) it is always tempting to try to find the “hidden” meanings, to point out the ways that we are being led to believe what we believe about a text. It is also especially challenging to not try to find the “right” answer, as there tend not to be right or wrong arguments, only supported and unsupported arguments.

One overwhelming thing that I feel while reading Buckingham (and the Core Principles, and the Jenkins reading) is that media education is bigger than one subject; it is a teaching philosophy and practice that needs to be integrated into all aspects of the curriculum. Going back to my initial example, in the same amount of time that it took the teacher to allow the students to watch Aladdin, they could have instead had a discussion about American portrayal of Middle Eastern culture, replete with other examples, treating Aladdin as the text it is rather than a treat merely for consumption.

This reality—that media education is a pedagogical strategy rather than a specific subject— makes it slightly difficult for me to see clearly where I fit in the picture. I approach media education from a film background (as evidenced by Hands on a Camera’s focus on filmmaking), but media education encompasses multiple media forms and their various uses. Ideally in Hands on a Camera we will discuss other forms of media, but the process can only go so far if students do not then engage with that material within the context of other school subjects.