“You wouldn’t know it just by listening to the music,” said Allison Adrian, an assistant professor of music and Hamlin’s partner in teaching the course.
“Really?” Hamlin asked. “Even in ‘Bad Romance’?”
“It’s a dance pop tune,” Adrian said. “You need the hint the video gives you to make sense of the lyrics.”
A few years ago, Hamlin and Adrian paired up their academic specialties to teach a course called “Music, the Visual Arts and Politics in the Twentieth Century,” and were struck by how often students brought up Lady Gaga in class discussions.
They decided she’d make a powerful focus for a course but worried that students and faculty members might not take it seriously.
“We’ve gotten asked plenty of times by skeptics, ‘What are you going to do? Are you just listening to her music in class?’ ” Adrian said.
St. Kate’s Prof. Cecilia Konchar Farr got similar “blowback” when she began her class on Harry Potter.
Why not teach Shakespeare? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Despite the novels’ target audience, her class, which has proven so popular that she has had to raise the cap on enrollment, deals with serious analysis, “not just playful dancing with the text.”
In a sense, Harry Potter beats Jay Gatsby at helping students see how literary theory applies to the texts they read each day, Konchar Farr argues. “I’m not just thinking critically and analytically when I open my volume of James Joyce,” Konchar Farr said. “I’m doing it when watching ‘The Office.'”
She suspects that the current crop of pop-culture courses is the result of a movement in the 1960s and 70s, when students demanded more relevant course work. Some of those students went on to earn doctorates and are now the ones teaching.
When University of St. Thomas Professor Wendy Wyatt paired up with a sociology professor to teach a course on the TV series “The Wire,” “we thought we were being so unique,” she laughed.
Turns out four or five universities across the country had the same idea.
St. Thomas’ seminar asks two key questions about the series, which depicts the police, drug culture, and politics of Baltimore: “Is it accurate? Is it fair?” Students review criminal justice research to help them answer those questions. Pairing the show with the research is more effective than “handing somebody a textbook or a research article about drug legalization,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt, who researches media literacy, argues against the idea that “entertainment doesn’t matter,” and believes the United States is behind on teaching students how to think critically about what’s on TV. “If you are willing to engage with pop-culture in serious ways, you will see all the ways it does matter.”
Sophomore Kristina Poss majors in chemistry at St. Catherine and plans to go to medical school. Her schedule is “very structured, with a lot of science-based curriculum.” The class on Lady Gaga, she said, is “not at all like that.”
- Extron AV Switching, Streaming, and Control Systems Aid Higher Learning at Idaho’s First Medical School - June 1, 2021
- Extron XTP, Streaming, and Control Systems Empower Point Park University’s Varsity Esports Program - June 1, 2021
- Extron NAV Series Delivers AVoIP Throughout Allied Health Veterans Hall at UNC Wilmington - June 1, 2021