Brenda Weber, Department of Gender Studies
Evaluating popular media: The gendered nature of online interactions
G225 Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture
Course revision
Support provided by Campus Instructional Consulting
Instructional Goals
- enable students to evaluate popular media critically
- leverage students’ familiarity with new media
G225 is one of the most popular courses taught in the Department of Gender Studies and attracts a diverse group of students in terms of major and class standing. Most of these students have little exposure to gender or media studies prior to taking this class. In G225, students are exposed to multiple iterations of popular culture, which all convey gendered content. For most of these students, popular culture tends to “fly under their critical radar” and they fail to hold it accountable for the messages it conveys. This is one of the main challenges Professor Weber faces in teaching the course.
According to Professor Weber there is a perceptual problem among her students in that they view popular culture as being fun and easy, and they have a resistance to analyzing material they normally consume for pleasure, such as reality television or tabloid pages. Professor Weber’s goal was to have students critically evaluate all sorts of popular media, but an added challenge for her was her own unfamiliarity with certain new media such as chat rooms or blogs.
Professor Weber found a way to increase her own exposure to new media while simultaneously leveraging students’ expertise. While she originally intended to model this Internet-based project on a similar active learning technique used to guide students through a critical evaluation of makeover television programs, she soon realized that she did not have enough experience working with new media to design an effective questionnaire related to the Internet. So, instead of using the questionnaire format she enlisted the assistance of her students in designing a completely new and innovative assignment.
Together, the class held a brainstorming session and developed several ideas for projects that would allow them to investigate the gendered nature of online interactions. Professor Weber then posted her notes from this session to Oncourse so that all of her students could review them. After reconvening and revising their ideas, Professor Weber and her students decided that they would divide into small groups for this project. Each group had to develop a single collective identity that they would assume in a chat room. Then, acting as this new individual, the students would engage other chat room participants in conversations regarding gender. In subsequent iterations of this course, Professor Weber has expanded the options available to her students. New project ideas include general analysis of gendered content found online or the creation of YouTube videos related to gender studies.
Professor Weber’s active learning objective accomplished the dual goals of increasing her own exposure to new media and encouraging her students to critically evaluate arenas of discourse they might otherwise denigrate as outside legitimate collegiate analysis. Incorporating active learning techniques in her classroom allowed Professor Weber to see that despite their different experiences and backgrounds, G225 students have begun to learn the discourse of gender studies.
The interaction that happens between professor and students, listening closely and responding in kind, is what Professor Weber sees as one of the main benefits of active learning. Professor Weber has already written an article based on what she has learned from the implementation of this active learning innovation, which is presently under review at a peer-reviewed journal.
