Popular Culture and American Childhood (Fall 2011)

During the fall of 2011, I taught an introductory seminar in American Studies, titled Popular Culture and American Childhood. The students enrolled in this seminar came with a range of experience with the liberal arts classroom; some were freshmen in their first semester, while others were senior American Studies majors seeking to fulfill the major’s requirements, and still others had enrolled in the class looking to collect a class with a Writing Flag before graduating.

Screenshot of this course's central website.

From the start, as might be expected in a class dedicated to a subject close to students’ experiences, this course was characterized by lively discussion. I arranged the syllabus (see online version here) thematically, so that we discussed moral panics at the beginning of the semester, then moved into considerations of gender, then finally into the topic of space, place, and childhood. Students read a wide range of primary and secondary sources, as we surveyed Supreme Court decisions and Eminem; “princess culture” and G.I. Joe; backyards and video games.

Screenshot of the front page of the Archive of Childhood.

In this class, I tried several new (to me!) teaching projects involving digital tools. Throughout the semester, students contributed “objects” to our class website, The Archive of Childhood. The idea was for students to carry out analysis of primary sources from their own childhoods, connecting these sources to the themes we had been discussing in class. (I wrote about the Archive project on my blog, here; you can see a version of the assignment sheet that prompted the entries here.) Students were required to identify and use a few secondary sources to analyze their chosen contributions to the archive; this requirement meant that they had to think hard about where their contributions might fit into a larger set of concerns about childhood and culture. Students also used these assignments to start thinking about their final papers, as many of them took the primary sources that they addressed in their archive entries and expanded them into longer papers later.

In order to encourage a sense of ownership over their original research, I also taught students how to use the free records management and citation system Zotero. (See tutorials that I posted for student instruction here and here.) Although I eventually decided not to reprise this part of the course in its second semester, I learned a lot from this experience about the positives and negatives of incorporating a citation manager into a seminar.