While official course response forms are in process, I wanted to open the floor for any thoughts as to what should change – or not change – in next year’s offering of this class. I’m especially interested in what readings you think should be kept or are less relevant, and your thoughts about speeding up the timeline to give us a week post-season 5 to read more analyses of the show and reflect on the series as a whole. Thanks!
4 thoughts on “Suggestions for next year”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
My suggestion regards paper topics. I think that my favorite part about this class was the fact that everyone came from diverse disciplines: economics, geography, history, American studies, literature, etc. There are so many ways to read the show, and I really enjoyed listening to people’s different insights. I learned a lot from my peers in this class.
That said, I would suggest that the paper topics be more flexible, allowing us to engage issues that especially interest us. It’s certainly good to have one micro-level paper and one macro, or meta, as we had this year, but I found the last paper topic especially to be too specific and therefore a little limiting. I’ll think a little bit more about examples of questions I think would be stimulating, but I just wanted to respectfully express my opinion about that. I still enjoyed writing papers for this class, but I think the talent in this class could make fascinating connections through alternative analyses and produce brilliant, maybe ever publishable, papers.
I think that Ben hit the nail on the head in terms of our exceptionally diverse demographic. While I truly enjoyed reading the books that you assigned, I think that or discussions were sometimes stymied by them. I felt that on many occasions our class discussions became overly opinionated or at least emotionally charged. Some of the most engaging discussions that I had with regards to our class took place right after it. While that says a lot about how engaging your curriculum was, often it was so much so that many of us (and without question myself) entered discussions with stronger opinions than theoretical or factual backgrounds. It seemed that The Wire’s ability to comment upon so many different aspects of American society sometimes outstripped our abilities to react to it as scholars. Our discussions that centered around context assignments were by far the most engaging for me because they often challenged my preconceptions without leaving me room to wiggle my way into rationalizing their findings so as to make them fit within my worldview.
I would suggest assigning more journal articles from a wider range of academic disciplines and dropping one or two of our books. This might have helped to ground some of our more opinionated discussions.
Minor complaints aside, this class was one of the most stimulating and informative that I have ever had the privilege to take. I think that Film and Media Culture it easily the most relevant way to study society given the increasingly profound impact of networked society in providing context to just about everything that people think about.
I think that we all contributed to The Wire’s viral assault on this campus. It frequently found myself drawn to a conversation in a party or a dinning hall about the show (many times with people who didn’t even know that their was a class being offered on The Wire) and engaging in serious arguments over the show’s various implications.
This class was genius. I learned something from every one of you that I had the pleasure to participate in it with.
Jason, thank you so much for fostering such a dynamic learning environment.
Sincerely,
Ernest
Only a minor thing that I hope that the class will see more of in the future is special guests. Whether it is other professors in the school interested in the show, or people related to the show directly, the classes where they attended were made that much more interesting. Other than that, this class was a pleasure to take and I don’t believe it can offer much more.
Just a few minor thoughts:
I loved all three of the books that we read, and I’d hate to see any of them dropped from the course. The articles were good, too, but the casual references to big spoilers were a bit irritating. One benefit of speeding up the viewing a bit would be to move some of the more spoiler-intensive readings farther toward the end of the series. I think it’s important to keep at least one episode for most class meetings, though, even through the end, since three-hour discussions would get really old really fast.