Picking up where we left off in Part I of this post, exploring Sean Paul’s long (and successful!) history working with other artists across genre lines is a great way to understand the differences between a research question and a research hypothesis. Seriously, it is!
Read MoreAs you might remember from my post in April about A Virtual Pop Culture Art Exhibit, one of the assignments in my Popular Culture and Communication class asks students to think about how popular culture - broadly or narrowly defined - has shaped their identity, perceptions and behaviour. This is something that we consider over the course of the semester through readings about the CSI Effect (which influence can behaviour) , counter- and sub-cultures (which can influence identity) , and monsters (which can influence perceptions) - among other topics.
In addition to the above, during the semester I also share how popular culture has influenced my life by wearing popular culture inspired clothing, including photos of myself participating in subcultures like punk culture, travelling and engaging in tourism, and posing with life-sized cardboard cut-outs of the Rock in my slides, and talking about how my doctoral research was inspired by my favourite book series.
One of the assignments in the course asks students to do the same…
Read MorePicking up where we previously left off… using the concepts of racialization, dehumanization and affect, Sandlin and Snaza (2018) argue that Disney’s Zootopia shapes the identities, desire and subjectivities of its viewers “by policing ‘negative’ emotions such as anger, which (re)produces social forms by perpetuating white heteropatriarchal privilege” (p.1197).
Let’s take a look at how the authors argue Zootopia does this.
Read MoreDuring the final weeks of the Popular Culture and Communication course that I teach, we focus our attention on (1) different topics or areas of research that are undertaken in the field of popular culture studies and (2) the effects of popular culture. In particular, we examine how popular culture - and the repeated exposure to certain messages or themes in the media - influences our perceptions of ourselves and of others, and therefore our identities and behaviour.
When building the syllabus for this course, I try to take into account emerging research and trends in the field of popular culture, what’s happening in the world, and what students are interested in learning about. One of the topics that we look at is race, racialization and the representation of the police (the police state and police violence). This is explored through a reading called “It’s Called a Hustle, Sweetheart”: Black Lives Matter, the Police State, and the Politics of Colonizing Anger in Zootopia” written by Jennifer Sandlin and Nathan Snaza and published in 2018 in the Journal of Popular Culture.
Read MoreYes, it’s true! I have two weeks of online teaching under my belt and guess what? It’s going pretty well! I miss the face-to-face interaction with students a lot (I also never realized how helpful non-verbal feedback is), but the chat function in our online teaching platform allows enough feedback to let me know how things are going. I also use polls and status updates which provide real-time responses to questions and class content.
To teach online successfully - and stress free - requires advance planning. In addition to preparing slides, notes and assignments, we need to find and set up other tools that make online teaching more interactive and enjoyable, as well as more effective. If you’re filming lectures, this also needs to be done well in advance so that they’re read to go live before you need them.
While planning is important, if not crucial, to the success of both in-person and online teaching, I’ve found several strategies to be helpful when it comes to navigating the world of online teaching. Read about them there!
Read MoreAs you probably know by now, in mid-March post-secondary institutions across North America moved courses online to protect students, faculty and staff from the spread of COVID. Every university handled this process a little differently, and how professors chose to transition their class to an online format varied.
I think that from both a teaching and learning perspective there is a big difference between a class that is designed from the start to be taught and taken online and an offline class that has to be moved online due to unforeseen circumstances. In addition, for both professors and students, the transition to an online learning environment was also impacted by other factors. Among other things, I had students living in residence that were required to move, students from other countries trying to get back home before borders closed up, and students dealing with other effects stemming from the virus (including loss of employment, sick loved ones, and even children or siblings home from school that they had to care for).
I took all of this into consideration when transitioning my course to a virtual environment. Let me walk you through what I did!
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