Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Media practice in the humanities classroom.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

While there is good reason to be suspicious of the enthusiastic rush to integrate technology into the classroom, we in the humanities should embrace the opportunity it presents for media literacy and critical cultural inquiry. The mass media saturate our daily lives and circumscribe the cultural environment of our era. Media literacy initiatives under such conditions must go beyond "reading" the media and encourage practice-based reclaiming of the powerful communication technologies they employ. Significant hurdles which prevent the integration of practice-based work in the humanities classroom need to be articulated and addressed.

Introduction

In discussions around curricular change in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant College, we focused at one point on trying to articulate our unique contribution to the college mission. This exercise was required not only because of our particular circumstances at Bryant, but because of larger trends in our fields and in college organization more generally, which seem to threaten the humanities with irrelevance or with its reduction to a mere service role in professional training. Among the distinguishing features we struck upon and claimed for ourselves is a notion of cultural practice, the idea that what we offer our students is a platform for developing a view of themselves as cultural agents, rather than as employees or consumers. The focus on practice, we realized, is critical in a social and cultural climate in which the knowledge that was traditionally produced in the humanities is increasingly marginalized. And while all the implications of this focus on practice have yet to be realized in our curriculum, it has underscored the importance of many of the experiments with media that some of us had undertaken individually in our classrooms. Some of my colleagues and I have been working with students to produce web-sites, videos, photography, CD ROMs and other media in courses across our literary and cultural studies curriculum. I am convinced that this work is vital to the survival of the humanities. Not only does it give us the appearance of relevance in our technocratic era, but it brings our unique resources into engagement with some of the defining features of our culture. What I want to share in this paper are reflections upon the importance of the idea of cultural practice, particularly with respect to media and the use of technology in the classroom, and to address what I see as some of the barriers to its institutionalization within the humanities curriculum.

Technology and the Humanities: Warranted Suspicion

There are many good reasons why those in the humanities are suspicious of the enthusiasm for technology so in evidence on college campuses these days. Intensive...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!