Teaching a pop-culture philosophy course

A lot of really cool practices have been shared in Helen's unusual teaching ideas series. While I've tried out a few unusual things over the years, and I generally try to 'expand the canon' (in terms of content I assign), for the most part my courses have been pretty conventional. My courses are usually highly-structured, with daily reading responses, in-class group work, traditional exams, term-papers, and so on. I also confess to previously being skeptical of 'pop culture philosophy classes' of the sort I've heard about over the years (e.g. courses on Harry Potter & Philosophy and whatnot). However, because I think it's important to be openminded and experiment pedagogically, last fall I created and taught a lower-division special topics course, 'Philosophy and Pop Culture' for the first time.

As you can see in my syllabus, I structured it thematically similar in many respects to how I teach an ordinary Intro class (though I taught a number of specific themes here that I don't there, including figures--such as Ayn Rand--who I don't standardly teach but who have had considerable influence in pop culture). Beyond that, however, the course could not have been more different than past courses I have taught: different in terms of course  policies, content, assignments, and many other things.

First, I experimented with different course policies. For example, whereas I normally have strict attendance policies, in this course I experimented with not having one (above and beyond the requirement that students must turn in their homework). I decided to experiment with this in part because I thought the course's content would be interesting enough to draw students to class on their own, but also because I read a Chronicle of Higher Ed article a while back on the importance of helping students find intrinsic motivation and interest that I found persuasive--so I wanted to give it a shot. Another logistical difference was that whereas course meetings in my other courses are highly structured, in this one there was no daily structure beyond a short lecture by me along with (usually) brief presentations of pop-culture material (television scenes, songs, etc.). These policy experiments, to be honest, did not work terribly well--and some students expressed dissatisfaction in my course evaluations (which were decidedly mixed). However, other aspects of course--the daily reading responses I had students do and especially the final project I assigned--were truly special. Indeed, many of the final projects were truly inspiring, reminding me of why I wanted to be a professor in the first place and how philosophy can be transformative for students.

The reading response assignments I gave were similar to the ones I normally require in my courses, but in this case students had to use some element of pop culture--say, a scene, dialogue, or lyrics from a film or song I assigned, or an element of pop culture of their choosing--to shed some kind of philosophical insight on the reading for the day. These were wonderful in a couple of respects. First, students routinely offered really nice insights on the pop culture works I assigned--and the pop culture works themselves appeared to help students grasp the philosophical issues in the readings better than in my standard courses. Second, students brought in outside pop culture material--scenes from their favorite shows, songs, and so on--far more often than I expected, in ways that again were often really insightful, but also brought (in particularly vivid ways) elements of their background, social identity, and experiences to bear on the philosophical material in ways that I think enriched the classroom for everyone. Finally, the way that students brought pop culture they identified with to class brought students together, helping them relate to each other--and to me as well (students would often talk to me over class, saying things like, "Do you know this song? I think it totally relates to what X was arguing today). The dynamic between students, and between them as me, was very different--more human, more personal, I'd say (in a good way)--than in just about every other class I've ever taught.

Finally, there were the final projects--which I thought were the highest point of any course I've ever taught. Here, I gave the students an option: they could either (A) select some feature of pop culture of their own and use a detailed analysis of some element of it to make an original philosophical argument on a topic in the course (much like in a standard term-paper, but focusing on using the pop-culture in question to make an effective argument); or (B) they could create a pop culture work of their own (a song, a short film, etc.) and then use it to make an argument. I wasn't sure if any students would choose option B, but one student did: an international student who painted a gorgeous original painting to convincingly argue (inspire by Socrates and Nozick) that it is possible, through self-deception, to have high levels of subjective well-being but live a miserable life. All of the other students chose pop culture works from the world around us--and the things they chose and the arguments they gave were, by turns, hysterically funny, moving, and insightful. Let me give just a few cases.

I will begin with one case. One student, an art major, said he had always been taught in his major that "art is subjective." In the course, however, we read a short article giving a Wittgensteinian analysis of art as a family-resemblance cluster concept. So, the student said, he wanted to figure out whether that could be right. He then showed us the following (very silly) video:

Then he told us about Vito Acconci's notorious Seedbed performance art piece (which I had never heard of before), where "Gallery visitors entered to find the space empty except for a low wood ramp. Hidden below the ramp, out of sight, Acconci masturbated, basing his fantasies on the movements of the visitors above him. He narrated these fantasies aloud, his voice projected through speakers into the gallery." The student's question was whether there is any cluster concept (or set of family resemblances) for 'art' that competent language users really share, or whether the concept is so "open" that art really is just subjective. The student didn't solve the issue of course--but we had a fascinating, insightful, and hilarious class discussion.

Another student, who is Catholic, did his project on the problem of evil, showing this astonishing song and video (which I think is fantastic, both in content and performance at all levels, audio, visual, personal, etc.):

The presentation and discussion that followed--which examined the extent to which whether a theodicy seems persuasive may depend largely on one's epistemic standpoint, ranging from one's social identity, to one's personal history, to the psychological standpoint one is in from one moment, or day, or year, to another. It was the single best discussion of the problem of evil I've ever been a part of. 

Finally, a third student picked several scenes from The Green Mile to examine whether Kant's ethics can provide an adequate analysis of what prison guards are morally obligated to do when they know in their bones that an inmate who is about to be executed is innocent. Should they follow orders, or do they have a duty to help the prisoner escape, even at great cost to themselves?:

After showing this video, the student shared that the case was profoundly personal to him: that his own uncle was convicted and executed for a crime that there was convincing evidence he did not commit (e.g. DNA evidence that was ruled inadmissable). The student argued, choking back tears, that Kant's theory requires guards to do their duty. While subsequent class discussion (which was conducted compassionately by all) debated whether Kant's theory really has this implication, the student who gave the presentation came up to me after class and said the course had opened his eyes about a tremendous number of things--about his own life and the world he lives in--that he had either never thought about before or had thought about but felt like he didn't understand. He said the course changed his life. I choked back tears. I remembered why, at that moment, I had always wanted to be a philosophy professor--and of just how much of a privilege and responsibility it is.

Comments

[Michael]

Thanks for sharing! This is really neat.