viz.

Image Credit: You Tube

H/T: Noel Radley

In the Fall of 2007 at Pitzer College, Professor Alexandra Juhasz embarked on an adventurous pedagogical experiment in teaching new media through new media.   Her course, which focused on You Tube, attempted to provoke critical thinking in her students about You Tube through class assignments in which students composed vlogs and wrote commentary on others’ videos.  As she has documented in a series of academic inquiries in the International Journal of Learning and Media, her blog and on You Tube itself, Juhasz concluded that You Tube’s rhetoric of democratization and viewer-empowerment belies the essentially corporate nature of the medium and the mediocrity of its output.  Juhasz’s discussions of You Tube and pedagogy also show the challenges for instructors who may find the public spheres of new media to be uncomfortable, exhausting and resistant spaces for pedagogical work.

In her article in the International Journal of Learning and Media, Juhasz writes, “by reifying the distinctions between the amateur and the professional, the personal and the social, in both form and content, YouTube currently maintains (not democratizes) operating distinctions about who
seriously owns culture.”  Against proponents of You Tube who argue that it offers the radical potential for punk style DIY interventions into mainstream culture, Juhasz stresses the corporate structure and emphasis on popularity in the website’s search functions as mitigating against radical experimentation or critique. 

Image Credit: You Tube

Juhasz is also refreshingly honest about how difficult the class was to teach because You Tube is not designed for academic learning or critical inquiry.  In her final You Tube video presentation for the class, it is clear that she is physically and mentally exhausted from the semester.  Right now, I’m winding up my own new media assignment in which I asked students to create podcasts.  While this is only a fraction of the investment Juhasz made in teaching new media, my three-week unit gave me a glimpse into some of the tensions, frustrations and pedagogical self-questioning that she discusses. 

Image Credit: You Tube

Although there are many benefits to teaching new media such as the contemporaneity of the subject, its import for rhetoric, and the empowerment it gives students to comment on their own cultural environment, there are also many difficulties that Juhasz details in her writing.  Students may be less familiar with the media and technologies than we assume, they may encounter the topics with less intellectual rigor and the corporate structures of these new media may inhibit the work academics are trained to perform.  That said I still believe that sites like You Tube are important subjects of inquiry and tools for teaching public writing but I think it is also useful to consider the challenges and limitations of using sites such as You Tube as pedagogical tools.  I am looking forward to continuing to learn innovative ways to incorporate new media into the classroom and would love to hear more from my colleagues about how they have experienced and mastered these challenges.