Teaching Philosophy

Although great amounts of teaching philosophy have been covered on the why teach? page, i'm going to go into greater depth with some topics and explore media literacy here.

Today we are awash in technology and consumer culture. Although it's certainly everyone's choice whether or not to appreciate the consumer culture we live in, it's important to have the ability to "read" the symbols seen around us every day--those in TV, radio, film, etc.--and to analyze our rhetorical place within that enviornment. For example, The Merchants of Cool--a documentary about the methods used by corporations to market to teens--shows that companies see teenagers as anthropological objects--things to be studied. This level of objectification can have quite the impact on students--I know that it had a great impact on me when I saw that film in high school.

In regard to the corporate teen-as-consumer mantra, I would like to develop a critical lens to view modern advertising and its culture. This lens-building process does not ignore traditional English texts, it merely builds on them. The best way to learn to look at texts critically is to start where you have the most overt information--in a "traditional" text, such as a book, play, or other written work. When the author uses 100's of pages to tell his tale, it makes the reader's job of gathering meaning from the text much easier. The reader has much more to work with that isn't implied or documented elsewhere. From there it's a reasonable step to move to films, where there is quite a bit more symbolism and stock characters that get created to save time. Analyzing the film version of a text read in class is a wonderful platform to explore this notion. A film version can be analyzed in terms of what it contains from the book, what is modified, and what is left out. My lesson plan on the Minority Report demonstrates this step. After analyzing how films compress stories, the next step would be analyzing ads. The characters, story, and conflict can all be analyzed, along with the things taken for granted in each ad--who they're marketing for, what assumptions they make based on that demographic, etc. This method of analysis will help the students to be able to read books, films, and ads critically, and to relate them to their worlds and the corporate world designing these texts.

I would like to mention that, although it may seem that I take a pretty anti-consumerism stance, I don't feel that everyone should agree with me. To keep a level of objectivity when studying advertising and the consumer culture built around it, I would like to incorporate the philosophy from the last chapter of The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer. After he describes our growing American monoculture, he provides three possible views you could take in regard to what he refers to as the socital cage: it's made of velvet, rubber, or iron. In a velvet cage, it's just delightful to be buried in a consumer culture. In a rubber cage, it's rather comfortable, but the inhabitant of this cage needs to stretch outside every now and again. Being trapped inside the iron cage is the worst of the three--in which the inhabitants believe that they're being caged and seek escape. Using this platform to answer the question of "What do we do?" allows me to escape taking a side on how I feel about consumer culture, letting the students draw their own conclusions.