Final Reflection for "Storying Educational Lives" (Spring 2012)

I have been doing a lot of reflecting on this year in the past two weeks, more reflecting than I tend to do when an academic year comes to a close. While I consider myself to be a naturally reflective person, deeply in touch with my emotions and presence of mind, observant of what is happening around both near and far, I think I tend to engage in reflections on personal experiences only when the experiences have ended and I’ve had some distance from them. Maybe this is a typical and unsurprising ritual given my largely type-A personality. I reflect when I’m able to fully grasp the situation, when I’ve gained enough time and space to see the experience in isolation, while also aiming to situate it in the appropriate sociohistorical and cultural contexts. But this time it’s a little different—perhaps it’s because I’m completing the first year of a doctoral program and know I’m going to be here for a few more years, but I think even more than that, there’s a lot more at stake with school this time around. Every course that I take, every reading that I do, every conversation that I have, I am constantly evaluating and processing how each bit of information reinforces or challenges my research interests, informs my pedagogical thoughts, and fits into the bigger picture of life after this degree.

I attended an event at my school this past May featuring Dr.Valerie Kinloch, a professor at Ohio State University, whose research interests include social and literary lives, literacy learning, and collaborative engagements of youth and adults in in-school and out-of-school environment, particularly in urban contexts. During her visit, Dr. Kinloch spoke about her new book, Crossing Boundaries: Teachingand Learning With Urban Youth (2012), in which she explores how stories are told about youth—which tend to reinforce stereotypes and misconceptions, especially about youth of color in urban contexts—and what happens when stories are instead told with and/or by youth. Kinloch said that the question she kept coming back to while writing her ethnographic account of working with students of color in Harlem was: “How do we understand the stories that are written about us? And what happens when the stories told about us are not necessarily the ones we want to tell?” I was immediately reminded of a book chapter by Maxine Greene entitled, “Multiculturalism, Community, and the Arts,” where she explains that there have been voices silenced throughout history and there have been people made to feel that their stories were not as important as others. She presents a charge that we must now embrace and practice the notion of multiple perspectives, of pluralism, of multiculturalism. Other queries in Kinloch’s research included: “How do we privilege the voices and perspectives of diverse young people? How do we listen closely to stories and perspectives in ways that get us to push each other towards new perspectives and understandings?” And the question that moved me, I mean emotionally, spiritually, and almost literally physically moved me out of my seat was: “What is the work that our souls are calling us to do?”

Kinloch spoke about approaching teaching as a “reciprocal act,” something that can and should happen fluidly between teachers and students, and the need for democratic engagement that brings everyone into the role of the ‘learner.” In working towards achieving what she refers to as “equity pedagogy,” we must:

- engage in a larger discourse of power and privilege

- be explicit about codes and cultures of power

- create content and safe spaces that are co-generated by teachers and students

I have learned a lot this year, particularly this semester, largely due to the very different experiences I’ve had in this art education course. With my background in media literacy and as an advocate for culturally relevant pedagogy, I have always felt that educators have an obligation to intentionally and thoughtfully create spaces for youth to exercise voice and agency both in and outside of the classroom. Encouraging students to tell their stories not only provides them with a sense of empowerment and self-worth, but also helps us all to deconstruct culturally essentialized images and messages about “other” cultures, ethnicities, and races. Without much experience as a classroom teacher, however, I’m very aware that my prescriptions and beliefs for these spaces and practices sometimes tend to fall in the “easier said than done” category. Yet, because most of my classmates in my courses this year were pre-service teachers from various programs, I think I have gained some more insight and a better understanding not only of what is happening in many classrooms today but also how teacher education programs are preparing teachers (or should be preparing teachers) for the classroom. As a result of my deep readings and discussions in and out of class, I’ve determined that many teachers are still lacking a certain knowledge and understanding of how incredibly important it is for us to be creating and delivering more culturally relevant pedagogy to our youth.

As we have seen in the work of John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, Zadie Smith, and Ruth Behar (amongst many others), narrative, storytelling, and voice play incredibly important roles in constructing safe spaces and providing socially just and culturally relevant pedagogy to students. Dewey contends that classroom discourse is at the heart of the teaching-learning process and represents the meaning systems that are mutually constructed by teachers and students. He writes: 

These meaning systems do not occur in social or historical vacuums, but are rendered meaningful to participants according to both personal and cultural histories and contexts. The acknowledgment and sharing of these meaning systems and their contexts becomes a significant and always unfinished ‘text’ in the teaching process.

I’ve also been incredibly inspired and impressed by the work and contributions of my classmates, most of who are in the arts education program. On top of being challenged by the assignments themselves, I was also productively challenged by my peers, as I watched the trajectories of their artwork over the course of the semester. Everyone had such different stories to tell and employed such different methods through which to tell them. I recently revisited the notes that I jotted down after creating the first visual and written story set:

Reading and telling a visual story:

• It’s non-linear
• There is a 'translation' process in trying to explain the story was a lot harder than creating the story, have to translate very tactile experiences into words
• Theme: make connection to recognizable images
• Give attention to the relationship between linear and literal, and more open/symbolic/gut-reaction storytelling
• This is about bringing in what you know, what your experiences have been
• There is an idea of “saturation” (both physically and symbolically) 
• Recognize the value of listening

How this relates to education:

• Voice and agency: This process provides students with different mediums for expression while simultaneously challenging students to understand the importance and benefit of doing so; challenges both students, and more importantly, teachers to pay attention to what is being said through chosen mediums. This can be particularly powerful in "diverse" classrooms. 
• Allows students to bring outside experiences into the classroom

I wanted to include these thoughts and notes because they encapsulate the themes and questions that I have perpetually revisited throughout the semester: how can we create culturally relevant pedagogy that challenges the stereotypes and racism deeply entrenched in our educational system? How can we empower students to find and use their voices as a form of social activism and engaged citizenship?  And the question I am left with at the end of this semester is how can I work with teachers to better understand who they are (in terms of their social identity, how their race, class and gender inform how they think about themselves and others) in relation their students and their sociocultural contexts? How can I continue to practice and infuse aspects of art education into my own notions and practices of critical pedagogy? Needless to say, I’m definitely leaving this course and this semester with more questions than answers, but I think that’s a good thing! To end, I wanted to share the quotation from Maxine Greene (2000) that Dr. Kinloch used to end her presentation, which I think serves as a highly appropriate and fitting conclusion to my final reflection of this course:

I think of how much beginnings have to do with freedom, how much disruption has to do with consciousness and the awareness of possibility that has so much to do with teaching other human beings. And I think that if I and other teachers truly want to provoke our students to break through the limits of the conventional and the taken for granted, we ourselves have to experiences breaks with what has been established in our own lives. We have to keep arousing ourselves to begin again.

The Need to Educate the Rich Kids of Instagram

There is a new Tumblr page that has been getting quite a bit of attention in the last few weeks. It's got an unoriginal, yet strangely catchy title that would cause almost anyone to click on the link: Rich Kids of Instagram. Your finger might hover over the mousepad for a moment--sure that it could not possibly be what the straight-forward label is seeming to describe, yet weary that it most likely is--you wonder if this is what you should be doing with your time? Should you throw a load of laundry in before you make this time commitment for something you might later regret, or worse, that you might absolutely love (but not be able to tell anybody about)? But like so many other viral videos and Internet memes, in which a mere click stands between you and knowing what everyone else is talking about, this site wins over any rational thought, and just like that you feel the pad of your index finger make contact with the cool sensory surface beneath it. 

As soon as the URL loads and the site opens, you dive face-first into a scrolling cluster of photographs and hashtags. The images have all presumably been taken by smartphones (most likely iPhones) and have been enhanced through an application called Instagram, which adds different filters to digital pictures and allows them to be uploaded to various social networking platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) instantly and seamlessly. The subtitle of the site is "They have more than you and this is what they do," and the hashtag is #rkoi. The images are first uploaded by the young people who snapped the shots to the RKOI's Twitter account and are then fed onto the Tumblr page for easy viewing. 

The pictures are displayed in gold frames, suggesting that they are pieces of fine art and conveying an obvious and assumed air of wealth, high culture, and importance. Below each image we find numerous hashtags that the artists have used to 'describe' their masterpieces: #mansion, #wealth, #yacht, #personalchef, #cartier, #NBD (no big deal). The seemingly endless collection of photographs are obnoxious, yet every time I visit the site I find myself clicking from page to page, thirsty for more, even if I've seen the same images four or five times at this point. What is going on?!

As hard as I try to maintain that I am fascinated by this warped website solely for "critically analytical and research-related purposes" (I'm making a very serious face while saying this), the reality is that I have been 'trained'--socialized and normalized--for decades now to associate the types of images and messages depicted on this site with notions of what "happiness", "success", "popularity", etc. look like and what they mean to each of us in respect to our own lives. If I am having these reactions as a 28-year-old, we must seriously consider how teens might be viewing this site and think about the kinds of conversations that we as educators, adults, parents, can have with the young people in our lives. A few possible topics come to mind: 

1. The subtle effects and implications of the gold-frame template: 
While viewers might feel as if they've become numb to composition after streaming through dozens of images, there is an undeniable novelty and uniqueness in seeing photographs, not oil paintings, housed in these garish golden frames. Instead of invoking a simulated feeling that we are strolling through the quiet rooms of art gallery or museum--observing these masterpieces interspersed on stark white walls--the juxtaposition of the bold, saturated, filtered photographs with the chunky golden frames instead creates a feeling of voyeurism among viewers. We are outsiders looking in, being granted access to certain snapshots, postage-stamp views, of what life in the 1% is like. 

As a result, it's necessary for us to think deeply and critically about what this voyeuristic sensation might mean for both the creators and consumers of these images. There is an extreme sense of excitement on both ends: for the creators of these media images and messages--they are sharing their lived experiences and material possessions with their peers (and now with wider audiences). Hell, at 14-, 17-, even at 25-years-old (especially in the age of social media and social networking sites), there is a certain undeniable, almost unavoidable [I said almost] narcissism that runs rampant in users' status updates, photos, etc. It's the nature of the beast, but it doesn't make it ok, nor does it mean that we should simply and passively accept that this is "just how people can and should act" as a result. Now more than ever before we must consider the potential effects that these displays of wealth, materialism, lifestyle and activities might have on the "99%" who have been socialized to think that these representations are covetable or on the "1%" who think they are "normal." 

What it really comes down to is that we should be thinking about how 100% of today's youth are interpreting images and messages like the ones depicted on RKOI and how they fit into the larger sociocultural landscape of North America. Virtually almost (again, almost) every young person in the U.S. is exposed to and interacts with some sort of media on a daily basis--whether it's using a cell phone, playing a video game, surfing the Web, or watching television. Today's youth are growing up in an increasingly media-saturated culture and we have a responsibility to help them learn how to successfully navigate their lives through the unprecedented products, behaviors, and activities now being "the norm" in the 21st century.

2. Understanding digital footprints & increasing awareness about digital citizenship: 
On August 10, 2012, an article was published on the Bloomberg Businessweek website entitled, "The Very Real Perils of Rich Kids on Social Networks". The article provides an account of how some recent online activities of Alexa and Zachary Dell, daughter and son of Michael Dell (of Dell computers), got them their 15 minutes of Internet fame as well as a terminated Twitter account after Alexa posted a photo of her brother in their private jet, heading to Fiji on RKOI. It was later discovered that this was just one of numerous photographs and statuses containing personal information about her family's whereabouts and activities that she'd posted over the last few months. Mr. Dell pays almost $3 million a year for security protection of his family, so needless to say, this breach of security from an insider was probably both alarming and upsetting. This article provides a powerful illustration and example not only of how quickly information spreads via new media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but more importantly how easily this information can directly challenge others' efforts of enforcing tangible security measures. In addition, and most importantly, this article serves as an excellent example of the lack of awareness and/or regard that young people tend to have for the often permanent digital footprints that they create as a result of their online activities, particularly on social networking sites. And while some may argue that there are greater implications when the rich (and not necessarily famous) upload pictures of everything from party invitations with the date, time, and location to license plate numbers (all of which can easily and automatically be geo-tagged) to the Twittersphere, the reality is that this online behavior/activity of constantly over-sharing details about their lives can have very real consequences, regardless of one's social class. In a recent New York Times article on the recent upsurge of 20-somethings sharing TMI (too much information) in the workplace, Peggy Klaus, an author and executive coach of corporate training programs explains,   

Social media have made it the norm to tell everybody everything...MANY people blame narcissistic baby-boomer parents for raising children with an overblown sense of worth, who believe that everything they say or think should be shared. When I told a British colleague that many Americans were starting to realize that they reveal way too much about themselves, he gave a full-throated laugh and said, “Finally!”

While our first instinct may be to want to protect youth, the takeaway here is not that we need to shield young people from the media tools and content that might cause them to engage in risky activities and behaviors. Instead, we should regard the situation with the Dell children and the realities of the millennial generation outlined by Klaus as important illustrative examples of the fast-forward-moving trajectory that our society and culture is travelling on. As educators, parents, and adults in the 21^st century, we have an opportunity and obligation to use these examples to engage the youth in our lives in conversations about digital citizenship, which can include topics of online safety and privacy, cyberbullying, and copyright fair use of online information; media literacy, understanding how and why media messages are constructed and how they can influence beliefs and behaviors; and digital literacy, how to read and evaluate information online.

Use the images on RKOI to ask youth about who they think the image is intended for, what attracts their attention, what lifestyles and behaviors are represented, how different people might interpret the images and messages differently, and what they think may have been left out of the image and why? A conversation about the composition of both the photographs and the website itself—having students think critically about representation, communication, and production—could be integrated into an English lesson on writing about and showing one’s lived experiences through words and images; a social studies lesson on the powerful images and messages from the Civil Rights Movement, juxtaposing them with the very different content displayed on RKOI (in which case, it would also be crucial and a unique way to address issues of race, gender, and class as they relate to both sets of images and messages); or a computers and technology lesson focusing on the dos and don’ts of web-design.

The bottom line is that we must have conversations, many multi-layered conversations, with each other and with youth about sites like RKOI: about the activities and lifestyles represented, as well as the online and offline behaviors fueling the creation of and participation in such sites. It is ok and very normal to want to protect our youth from the unknown, but we’re doing ourselves and them a disservice if we think that leaving these unprecedented realities unaddressed is better than sinking our teeth into them in order to proactively figure all of this out, and we need to do it together--parents and children, teachers and students, peers to peers, or else we're never going to get anywhere.   

Visual & Written Story #4: Where I Am Now

Where I Am Now

                              

Yesterday I completed my first semester as a teaching assistant. While my only major responsibility as the TA was responding to the students’ weekly reading responses, there were 25 students enrolled in the course this semester (as compared to 15 last semester, when I was a student in the class) and the added workload was the equivalent of taking a fifth class. It was a lot. That said, the course is about how to both teach “diverse” student populations, as well as about how to bring issues of “diversity” (racial, ethnic, cultural, gendered, socioeconomic, linguistic, etc.) into the classroom. I took the course last semester, although it’s out of my department and although I do not intend to become a classroom teacher, because I do anticipate working in education and specifically with teachers on how to create and practice culturally relevant and socially just pedagogy, how to talk about difficult sociocultural issues, and how to incorporate mass media and popular culture texts into their curriculum to better engage and prepare students to become 21^st century learners and citizens.

I learned a lot as a student in the class last semester—the readings were excellent and the class discussions were productive—but the real source of learning for me was through my self-appointed role as ‘participant observer,’ as I observed many of my classmates critically reading and analyzing texts and topics about race, diversity, social class, gender, for the first time. While my initial reactions were filled with frustration and fury at the naïve and ignorant comments being made by my [predominantly white] peers in the first few classes—using the terms “diversity” and “race” interchangeably, identifying as “colorblind,” and having no idea about how their positionalities (in regards to intersections of race, class and gender) have affected who they are and who they will be as educators—I soon realized that this group was a fairly accurate representation of the groups of teachers I hope to work with someday. By the third class I’d decided to think of my time in subsequent sessions as ‘professional development’ as much as an academic class. Using this lens, I followed the trajectories of the other students in the class over the course of the semester—watched as their readings of the texts got a little deeper, their criticality of themselves, youth, education, and socially constructed concepts got a little stronger. And, at the end of the semester I inquired about serving as the course’s teaching assistant this semester.

The spring semester got off to a bit of a rough start, mostly due to the professor’s scheduling conflicts which made him unable to physically be in class, and when we all finally resumed in the fourth week of the semester, it was clear that there had not been a safe space or a trusting relationship established between the professor (and me by default) and the students. I was quite aware of what was going on, but as a first time TA, I was unsure of how to go about trying to remedy the situation. I finally decided to take a proactive approach and attempt to initiate the creation of a safe space through leading an ice breaker activity the following week (ironically the week we were reading about and discussing ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’, a topic I am passionate about and which I personally feel needs more attention in the course, so I was determined to make this the week that changed the uncomfortable classroom atmosphere). The next Monday I facilitated an activity on social class and privilege (“stand up if the following statements apply to you, sit down if they do not”). Although participation was not mandatory everyone stood up in front of their chairs when notified we were about to begin. The room was silent except for my voice reading the questions, the professor and I also participated (which I think said a lot), and in less than two minute’s time, the 27 people in our classroom had shared more without speaking a word than they had in four weeks of class. It was powerful. So incredibly powerful. I’m not exaggerating when I say that by the end of the meeting the mood, comfort level, and climate had dramatically changed; it felt like a different class.

Throughout the semester I have spent hours each week taking the time to provide thoughtful feedback to the reading responses of 25 students—asking them questions, pushing back on notions and attitudes that I feel need to be more carefully analyzed and deconstructed; always being sure to clarify when I was giving my personal opinion with “I think…” and challenging statements with “Perhaps…”.  I received a few emails from students throughout the semester thanking me for my feedback and suggestions on how to deal with situations, bring up difficult conversations, or think about themselves and their students more critically. And as the weeks went on, it was clear that the classroom environment had greatly improved—conversations were getting deeper, more people were participating in class, and many of the students were really taking the time to honestly and critically reflect and share personal stories and experiences in their weekly reading responses. I felt privileged to be given access to all of this incredible information and I let students know that, thanking them for sharing and for taking the time to use the texts to synthesize what they had experienced in their own lives.

Cut to last night, students shared their final group projects, something they’ve been working on since late February, and they were amazing. All of the unit plans they’d developed had culturally sensitive and relevant content and activities, and the students had critically engaged the assignment with the hopes to actually be able to use the lessons developed by each group in their own future classrooms. At the end of class, the professor left and I remained to administer the student course evaluations. On their way out, two students handed me their papers and said they gave me “shout outs” on their evaluations, two more students approached to sincerely thank me for the obvious time and effort that I had put into replying to their reading responses every week, and they wanted me to know how helpful my feedback had been for them as student teachers this semester and as real teachers next year. A few other students wished me luck on finals, a few smiled and left silently, but I was on top of the world. All of the long hours, frustrations about not getting all of the work done for my other classes because of the time I’d spent on the work for this class, questioning why I was giving paragraphs of feedback…it was all worth it. Not only that, these few comments reinvigorated and reassured me that this is what I want to do with my life—although I’m not exactly sure about what the work will look like, I have no doubt that this kind of work needs to be a part of who I am and what I do for the rest of my life.  

I was not at all planning on writing about this for my fourth story, but I think I really needed to reflect and document what proved to be an incredible experience this semester right after it ended. And I needed to do it now, and not a few weeks ago because in the thick of it I wasn’t always thinking about how useful and beneficial this role was for me. In writing stories about “educational” experiences and thinking about “storying” our educational lives this semester, all I can say is that I don’t think that I could have written any other story for my last piece because this to date has probably been one of the most personally significant educational stories that I can tell and that I know will stay with me and continue to influence my work for a long time. 

Visual & Written Story 3: Public Speaking

Public Speaking

I can hear my heart beat in my ears.

The blood’s pounding, pulsing through my veins.

The butterflies in my stomach just.won’t.quit.

My right hand shakes in the slightest as I jot down just a few more notes on the piece of printer paper…

Creaseless, perfect, with only computer-processed words on it, my words, gorgeously printed in black ink…

Well, up until about 5 minutes ago when my internal thesaurus kicked in and red-flagged what is now striking me as an incredibly unimaginative and uninspiring word: [insert word here]. Cross out, re-write, draw an arrow, remember to say “this”.....here.

I stop jotting. Pull my face up from the paper to rejoin what is happening around me.

My left hand’s now experiencing sympathy tremors.

I glance back down and find I’m now holding a creased, folded in-half, blue-ink-notes-over-black-font-print piece of paper.

This always happens. No matter what, I always end up making edits right up until it is time.

“…please welcome to the stage, Emily Bailin.”

Now it’s time.

I stand up, pulling my pants up and my shirt down.

For a moment I think my heart rate has slowed, I’m calmer this time…I think.

I wear a half smile as I walk towards the podium, only facing my audience once I am up there and settled.

“Good morning,” I say and am greeted with an immediate echo.

I tend to break the ice by calling attention to and commenting on the way I have just awkwardly handled a situation in the mere moments that have passed since leaving my seat—whether I slightly tripped on my own pant leg on the way up to the stage, was not able to lower the microphone mount when I arrived at my destination, or now feel that the stage lights are only reaching half of my face.

Imagining people in their underwear never worked for me. Number one, who the hell has the time and presence of mind to take a few moments to actually visualize their audience not wearing clothes? And number two, did it not occur to anyone, particularly adults imparting this so-called “advice” unto kids, how potentially distracting and, more importantly, traumatizing such an exercise could be to youth in their formative years?! No thank you. I’ll stick to opening with a mildly self-deprecating, yet harmless, joke.

-- cue: laughter [and hoped for applause! applause! BRAVO] --

As the aftermath of my comic relief subsides, I look back down to my paper.

I iron the sheets that I’ve unconsciously folded in half (again), a smear of blue ink at the top of the first page, consequences of a sweaty thumb.

I forget to take that last deep breath and a mild thump returns to my chest, my ears…but I nonetheless begin.

By the second sentence, I’ve regained a regular heartbeat, and am delivering my thoughtfully constructed sentences—which are intertwined with notions of cultural relevance, engagement, citizenship, criticality, encouragement, hope, and passion—as if I’ve read them a hundred times before…

[begin inner monologue:] Some people engage in extreme sports activities for an adrenaline rush. I engage in public speaking.

My love for public speaking is uncommon and I often make people uncomfortable when I express just how much I love speaking in front of large audiences.

Surely, it’s not for everyone. In fact, some studies have found that a small percentage of people fear public speaking more than death.

There is a unique and certain type of space that public speaking provides.

I found my voice and agency as a girl, a young woman, a woman through writing and through opportunities I had to speak to large audiences. Public speaking not only reinforced my sense of self and confidence, but also provided me with a platform to make sense of and share my lived experiences and connect them to pertinent and pressing issues regarding coming of age, applying to high school, being in college, making deeper and better sense of the media-saturated world in which we live...[end inner monologue].

…As I come to my last few sentences, I remember to slow down (something I’m still working on doing throughout my delivery…) and finish with a “Thank you.”

Most times as I walk back to my seat I realize how much of a blur the last two, five, ten minutes have been, as if I blacked out and have just regained consciousness.

I sit, feeling unsure of how I’ve done—if what I’ve said has resounded with the audience. The residual shaking in my hands starts to calm and I finally take that deep breath that is many minutes and one speech overdue.

I sit back, cross my legs, and regain focus on the person who has taken the podium after me. They too seem to be spending the first few fleeting moments on stage ironing out wrinkled, damp papers.

But they haven’t chosen to make light of the situation, joking about the self-inflicted watermarks now on the white sheets.

I get an uneasy feeling in my stomach. I’ve been there. When the seconds it takes to get settled on the stage feel like an eternity and you have no recollection of all of the other speakers you’ve seen in your life who have been flustered, and awkward, and sweating; you forget how, in those moments, as an audience member you forgave the speaker’s momentary clumsiness and almost wanted to shout out, “You’ve got it!”

The audience waits patiently, silently. Finally, despite both hands still visibly shaking, the speaker’s world slowly rights itself back on its axis and everyone is happy to resume.

And in that instant, as my nerves relax, I realize how much I’ve improved as a public speaker, but am also aware of just how much the mission to perfect the art of public speaking will be an ongoing, lifelong process that I will continually aim to improve, but which will continually evolve as society, culture, and I all inevitably continually change and adapt to new concepts, issues, trends, concerns, and possibilities. I’m up for the challenge. I look forward to a life full of last minute edits, permanent butterflies, and the exhilaration I get from providing audiences with useful advice and information that makes them think and want to engage with the world around them in deeper and more meaningful ways. 

Visual & Written Story #2: The Stories of Girls

The Stories of Girls

Growing up, we are told stories. Dozens of stories, perhaps hundreds of stories. Stories about love, about hope, about happiness. About funny and fantastical characters, places, and situations that always seemed just out of reach of reality. As girls, we hear these stories in a certain way, through certain lenses, with certain voices. What do we focus on? What is focused on for us? And who is doing the focusing? Although my parents read to my sister and me on a daily basis when we were children, I find it both curious and unsurprising that most of the stories that first come to my mind are from movies and television shows that I watched when I was little. VHS tapes of Disney movies were a staple in my household. My sister and I never grew tired of the characters, the storylines, or the original musical scores in The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty. I do not recall ever regarding these female characters as role models necessarily, but these fictional women most definitely played a substantial part in formulating my conceptions of beauty, happiness, whiteness, and heteronormativity. Now, fast forward twenty years…

I saw Jean Kilbourne’s film, Killing Us Softly, for the first time when I was a sophomore in college. It changed my life. Call me dramatic, but it really did. In her presentation, Kilbourne examines a multitude of images and messages from print and television advertisements that have conveyed distorted and destructive ideals of femininity for more than a century. She challenges the audience to think more critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, racism, eating disorders, and gender violence. I left class that day with mixed emotions—I was enraged to find that such advertising practices and behaviors had become so engrained in our society; exhilarated by the possibility of analyzing and questioning the media we consume; and frustrated that these ideas were just being called to my attention.

Concurrent to discovering media literacy, I read Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) essay, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” about white privilege, as well as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) and Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) scholarship on intersectionality, the ways in which socially constructed concepts such as race, class, and gender interact and affect one’s access, opportunities, and life experiences. It was at this time in my academic career and young adulthood that I began to explore the intersections of my own race, class, and gender and the role that my resultant sociocultural location has played in my experiences, interactions, and observations as a white female. I knew I had been exposed to hypersexualized and hyperracialized images and messages of women on a daily basis for years, but when I learned that I had the ability and agency to speak out against these injustices, my relationship with the media changed. I began to see emerging patterns of damaging stereotypes that reinforced unrealistic and unhealthy perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality of women. Soon after, I was unable to leaf through a magazine or watch a television commercial without scrutinizing the images, implicit and explicit messages, and language used to grab audience attention and influence their decisions and perceptions.

I unwittingly began conducting ethnographic research on the intersectionality of gender, race, and class, as well as the media’s influence on girls, at the age of 14 upon entering the 9^th grade at a private, all-girls K-12 school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The school’s mission was to empower girls with the self-confidence, intellectual curiosity, and independence needed to lead successful and happy lives through a rigorous, but well-balanced education. Yet, when girls are seen at lunch or in the hallways reading about how to lose weight or look sexy, and idolizing the emaciated models showcasing the hottest fashion trends in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Seventeen, the school’s mission statement becomes little more than a formal technicality of the institution’s creed. It was not only the media texts that had a powerful hold on girls’ perceptions of themselves and others. The inhabitants of the school and the atmosphere of the institution and its surrounding community also generated a corresponding system of implicit expectations and definitions of what happiness, beauty, and normality looked like predominantly based on certain social, racial, and cultural constructions.

The resounding message coming from both popular culture and the school culture was that to be thin, white, and constantly concerned about appearance and material possessions was normative and everything else was “other.” Although I embodied a “typical” girl at the school in many ways—I fit the bill in terms of my race and socioeconomic status, was heavily involved in athletics and extracurriculars, and elected student body president in my senior year—I often found it difficult to relate to the conversations, attitudes and lifestyles of the majority of girls due to my penchant for leadership, not being easily influenced to follow the crowd, and dedication to talking about issues of diversity and intolerance within and beyond school boundaries. Looking back, it is evident that I spent my formative adolescence collecting field notes and gathering data on a variety of topics that would develop into a passion in college, evolve into a specialized area of study in my master’s program, and ultimately lead to my pursuit of a doctoral degree.

On occasion I imagine (and truth be told, sometimes become concerned about) the kinds of stories I will want my children to hear, and wonder what stories I will want to tell. The last thing that current media literacy educators advocate is protection from the media, and yet, it is sometimes impossible not to want to shelter young and malleable minds from the power and influence of media images and messages, particularly those that reinforce and perpetuate gender binaries and stereotypes in such incredibly rigid ways. I do not anticipate the first few years of my future children’s (and husband’s) lives to be easy, due in large part to my hyperawareness and sensitivity about these issues, and that I will most likely have a very hard time detaching from my personal life. But I am determined to raise my children with the media literacy and 21^st century competencies that they will need to prepare them to be lifelong learners and global citizens and there is no way that I will ever apologize for that.  

Lessons for Life in Academia: Learning to Defy the Dominant Discourse (or at least taking the first few baby steps in the right direction)

[a post started in December, that I am just revisiting and finishing up now]

In class last night, one of my professors (a man who has been teaching the same subject at the same institution for over 40 years) imparted some wisdom upon his students at the end of our last two hours of the semester together.

He explained that when he sees "liberals" in the media defying the dominant discourse in this country and pushing back on issues that subscribe to and perpetuate our hegemonic ideologies (for him, particularly in regards to conversations about Israel, Palestine, and/or Egypt due to personal ties and work), he thinks to himself, "Yes! Finally. Someone else to add to the small existing group who get it!" This was not meant to sound arrogant or elitist, nor did it come across that way. My professor was trying to make the point that it is often incredibly difficult to speak out against the dominant discourse, particularly if you are part of an important, stoic institution such as an esteemed university.

After providing this typically longwinded, yet profound example, he said, "If you feel this [what I'm saying]...I mean, feel it, deep down in you. If this moves you [the rarity that people in academia have enough courage to challenge the status quo] and elicits a reaction that you almost have no control over...that means that you are on your way to understanding how these hegemonic ideologies are inbred in our society..."

Before he even got to the "...what this means," the hair on my arms was standing up and there was a pull in my stomach. As he uttered these words, putting his emphasis on feeling the real effects of social ignorance, of misinformation provided by the media, of the injustice of preventing citizens and intellectuals from expressing opinions outside of the mainstream, something in my very being was moved by his words and his call to action. His message greatly resonated with me. It mobilized my  internal gears and cogs, causing them to turn and repeatedly interlock with one another as they began to grind away. I felt my drive begin to whir deep down and the passion that I am all to often challenged to articulate to others and put it all into complete, but concise sentences--about what it is that I want to do, how I am going to do it, and why it even matters--surge throughout my body.

Returning to graduate school and reentering the complicated and political world of academia for the second time last fall, my professor's jarring words resonated with me more than ever before. And for an older, white male, who has been at the Ivy League institution since the late 1960s (he did his undergraduate, masters, and doctoral work and then became a professor here), it meant something to me that he was acknowledging the ease at which such an institution can create and perpetuate a rather warped reality, but label it as 'normal' and continue living life (this is what hegemony is/the role that it plays in our society). Now, I'm not ignoring this man's racial and gendered privilege, but for the sake of this post, I'm choosing not to deconstruct one man's positionality and how it has 'enabled' him to voice his opinion above; rather, I'm choosing to focus on my relationship to his message based on my own experiences and observations at two different Ivies in the past two years.

Amidst the thick, grey fog that I often feel I am fighting my way through when I hear about the politics and bureaucracy of the academic world (i.e. applying for faculty positions, the expectations of publishing, the competition for grants and funding, the pressures of tenure), my professor's reassuring words provided a small, but guiding light--a possible path for a way out of the fog, or at least the reassurance that there is something on the other side of the blurry mess that I too often find myself in.

I'm now realizing that this post is still rather vague as to what I mean by hegemony and the dominant discourse, as well as what my personal experiences and subsequence understandings of academia have been thus far, but there are more posts and more time for the that, and I'm sure they'll come sooner than later as I'm gearing up for the second year of my doctoral program. I know I'm going to need multiple outlets to let off steam, express excitements and frustrations, and share interesting/thought- provoking/troubling/inspiring articles, memes, and other social-networking-related activities in the months to come. So gear up, I hope you're ready, and I hope I'm ready too.