Cultural Studies: the post-mortem

I have lost so much sleep this semester worrying about my Cultural Studies class. I designed the course as an investigation into "Making Culture": a 2nd-year course in a new program at one of the universities at which I teach. Cultural Studies is a discipline that ultimately examines the structures of power and the way knowledge is constructed and circulated, through forms of culture ranging from television and advertising to watercolours and foreign films. It takes as its objects of study as much how the things we watch, see, and hear influence our thinking about the world as it does what we watch, see, and hear. The field is simultaneously fascinating and complex. It puts the everday under scrutiny. But to do so, Cultural Studies highlights how complicated our relationships are to the things we often take for granted about our culture(s) and, further, it pushes us to consider what is also missing from our taken-for-granted lives, the things we never get to see or are exposed to on very negative terms.

Understanding how culture is made (as, say, a piece of art is literally "made," but also as cultural categories for understanding art are conceptually "made") is, in short, a difficult enterprise. It requires learning complex concepts and acquiring language that itself may not be "everyday" language.

My students think my course has been too hard, the readings to difficult and the bar set too high. I've agonized through the term about how to make it better, not easier, but accessible. I've held study groups, given exensions for those who have struggled and explained things in great detail. The result is that many of the students have risen to the challenge. Some have written brilliant papers and exams. But there is also a number of students who have consistently put things off too long and not completed the exam. For these, I don't know what to do. They're smart students. They get the material when we discuss it. They just refuse to believe that they're getting it, no matter how much positive affirmation I provide.

So I'm torn: between thinking I did the job well and that I let them down.

And torn up.

I don't know how much of this problem is my fault. Perhaps the course should have been easier. I don't know. But I was enlisted to deliver this course--a course that had not even been designed or taught before--in a new program. No one else among the full-time faculty at the university was prepared to teach it. No one provided any feedback on the course outline as it was unfolding.

Now, I get to suffer from the fallout--fallout because my course was too hard, because I've had no support from the faculty. because I made them read "theory."

In the end, the marks for the class will not be low and in the end, the students will have learned something. I guess this is the main point of teaching.

Somehow, though, I still feel like I've failed them.

Posted by Bush Whacker at April 18, 2003 02:52 PM