Not extinguished, just smothered

Here I am. The bush still burns, though it has no time for bushwhacking. You know you've been busy when.....

Sigh.

In the last few days, I've been gradually smothered by work, inspired by ideas, and stimulated to argument. It is all about teaching, really--and culture itself as pedagogy.

(For more on the business of popular and mass culture as pedagocial implements, read below.)

So now, having devoted my week to union meetings and academic talks and dinners, I have a stack of marking to do that horse couldn't jump over. And what am I about to do today? I'm going to the gym with the She-Woman to see what fresh tortures I can gleefully engage in. And then I'm going to watch curling. The Nokia Brier (which decides the men's national champion in Canada) is being played in Halifax this year and tonight is the championship game.

Hee hee! (Am I the only person you know who gets excited about curling?)

Thursday and Friday, I spent much time in the presence of a very humble, but interesting mind--a visiting scholar to one of the universities at which I teach.

The topic was the discipline of Cultural Studies and how one establishes a program in this field in a university. The speaker suggested that mainstream culture (he uses the term "popular culture"; I prefer the term "mass culture") acts as a pedagogical tool--that it, in fact, "schools" its audiences. According to his argument, Cultural Studies should therefore focus on this engagement (between mainstream culture and its audiences) as an object of study--not of popular culture itself as an object of analysis, but of the relationship of mainstream culture to people as the object of argument.

But many questions persist:

(a) Whose version of pedagogy are we dealing with here? What kind of teaching relationship exists between culture and its audience?
(b) What kinds of cultural relationships exist between audiences and aspects of culture they _don't_ engage in for pleasure, in their leisure time?
(c) How does pedagogy in a classroom work if you're assuming culture is already part of the experience of culture--does that make teaching a kind of counter or competing pedagogy?

Interesting, curious, and maddening questions.....

Posted by Bush Whacker at March 9, 2003 02:45 PM