Pedagogy of the Obsessed

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© 2005 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp. 238–241)doi:10.1598/JAAL.49.3.7

Pedagogy of the obsessed James Trier

Trier is editor of the Media Literacy Department. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

M E D I A L I T E R A C Y

According to my dictionary, the roots of the wordobsess reach back to the Latin verb obsidere, whichmeans to sit before, besiege, or occupy. Onemeaning of the noun obsession is the fact or stateof having an idea fill one’s mind continually (andoften obtrusively). In this column, I describe anobsession that has had a hold on me for manyyears. Simply stated, I have been obsessed by howwhat Debord (1967) theorized as “theSpectacle”—or what most people now refer to asour media-saturated world—endlessly createsand circulates a plethora of “media culture texts”(Kellner, 1995) that tempt me with their potentialfor being taken up as “public pedagogies”(Giroux, 2003) in my work as a teacher educator.For years, I have been interested in many kinds ofmedia culture texts—films, songs, television pro-grams of all kinds, advertisements, websites, com-ic books, video games, “megaspectacles” (Kellner,2003), and more. But my obsession appeared andtook hold of me through my engagement withwhat I refer to as “video texts,” which are mediatexts that I am able to obtain or capture in a videoformat. Let me explain what might be called themoment of origin of this obsession that shapesmy pedagogy. I won’t be able to write all that Iwish in this column, but that is the nature ofobsessions—there’s always more.

The objects of my collectionObsessions manifest themselves through com-pulsions, which are acts one repeats to control an

obsessive thought, image, or agitated psychologi-cal condition. For years, I have been compulsive-ly collecting video texts. By collecting, I mean thatI either buy a video or record something fromtelevision onto a videotape. Though I have col-lected video texts for many different purposesand projects over the years, I will focus in thiscolumn on one particular category: video textsthat offer representations of teachers, students,and schools. I limit my discussion to this one cat-egory because these were the video texts that Iwas most engaged with during the period whenmy obsession began.

As I have explained elsewhere (e.g., Trier,2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003a), a central aspect ofmy teaching and research involves designingprojects around these video texts that offer rep-resentations of teachers, students, and schools.These projects, which typically entail articulatingvideo with academic texts, engage preserviceteachers in various critically reflective inquiries,analyses, and explorations involving social theo-ries, identity formation, multiliteracies, andmore. I consider these projects to be enactmentsof what Luke (1997) identified as a “key aspect ofpostmodernist theory relevant to a media andcultural literacy,” which “is the elimination of thehigh culture–low culture distinction that hascharacterized the study of popular culture andculture industries since the 1930s” (p. 23).

The first kind of video text that I begancollecting is school films, which I define as films

that are in some way, even incidentally, about aneducator or a student. Some well-known schoolfilms are Mr. Holland’s Opus (Cort, Field,Kroopf, Nolan, & Herek, 1995), The BreakfastClub (Hughs & Tanen, 1985), and DangerousMinds (Bruckheimer, Simpson, & Smith, 1995);some lesser known films are Drive Me Crazy(Bernstein, Shestack, & Nutter, 1999) andFoxfire (Lure, Manulis, Marsh, & Haywood-Carter, 1996). Some more obscure films areZero for Conduct (Vigo, 1933) and Torment(Molander, Sjostrom, & Bergman, 1944); somerecent films are Mean Girls (Michaels, Rosner, &Waters, 2004) and Elephant (Wolf & Van Sant,2003). I have about 120 such films in my collec-tion, and new releases of films appear everyyear, which I eventually acquire. I also havemany documentaries about education, such asWiseman’s classic documentary High School(1968) and his High School II (1994) made yearslater, a Public Broadcasting Service programcalled The First Year (Guggenheim & Schachter,1999), and dozens more.

I also have collected the television seriesBoston Public (Kelly, 2000–2004). The series isset in an urban school, and what makes itunique compared to other television programsset in schools is that the main focus is muchmore on the administrators and teachers thanon the students (though the students play keyroles, too). The program was cancelled in 2004,though the entire series is rerun on variouschannels from time to time in both the UnitedStates and Canada, and I have video copies ofall 66 episodes of the program. In addition, Ihave hundreds of miscellaneous videos that of-fer representations of teachers, students, andschools, from animated programs, such as TheSimpsons (Groening, 1989–present) and SouthPark (Parker & Stone, 1997–present) to newsstories (e.g., breaking news coverage of schoolshootings) to commercials (e.g., school set-tings). I have collected hundreds of these mis-cellaneous video texts, and they make up abouthalf of my current total collection of over 1,000video texts.

The (imagined) origin of an obsessionSometimes we find something we have not beenlooking for (but are thankful when it appears),which happened for me at the library in theTeacher Education Building at the University ofWisconsin in Madison, where I was a doctoralstudent. One day I noticed, resting on a table inplain sight, a dual-deck videocassette recorder(VCR) hooked up to a small television. I had notnoticed this VCR before I began collecting videotexts, but, upon seeing it, I had the epiphany thatthis simple machine would have a radical effecton my pedagogy (i.e., my collecting of videotexts, the way I used them in my teaching, and theprojects I would subsequently design around andfrom them).

The dual-deck VCR was easy to use: In onedeck you insert a tape that you want to recordfrom, and in the other deck you insert a blankvideo. Then you duplicate however much of theoriginal that you wish onto the blank tape. As sim-ple as this editing function sounds, though, it hashad important effects on my practice and theoriz-ing by enabling me to make what I call “video-compilations” (Trier, 2003b) and “videocollages”(Trier, 2003c), which are essentially videos that Icreate by bringing together selected footage frommany videos. (I also think of them as juxtapositionvideo texts.) For example, I designed one video-compilation (i.e., scenes imported from one ormore school films) to explore how violence hasbeen represented in school films set in inner citiesby juxtaposing dozens of scenes of violence fromsuch films as Blackboard Jungle (Berman & Brooks,1955), Lean on Me (Twain & Avildsen, 1989), ThePrincipal (Brodeck & Cain, 1987), and TheSubstitute (Eisenman, Steele, & Mandel, 1996).Another example is a videocollage (i.e., footagebrought together from a variety of sources, not justschool films) that I made to explore the issue ofbullying by bringing together scenes from schoolfilms, documentaries, news coverage about schoolshootings, and documentaries that interviewed


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students who had perpetrated such shootings. Ona very pragmatic level, these juxtaposition videostransformed what had been a cumbersome andtime-consuming process of using video texts.(Simply imagine what it was like for me and mystudents when I was showing 20 scenes from 10videos by having to use the 10 separate movies: anenervating experience of insert, play, fast forward,stop, too far, rewind, play, eject, insert anothertape, play, fast forward, and so on.)

Pleasures and new terrainsSo how did my discovery of the method of makingjuxtaposition video texts lead to an obsession withvideo texts in general? Suddenly, the hundreds ofvideos already in my collection seemed to fill mymind with reminders of all the projects I had pre-viously imagined and was now capable of doing. Ibegan a frenetic period of experimentation, pur-chasing my own dual-deck VCR and spendinghours each day making dozens of experimentalvideo texts, which I have used in a variety of criti-cal projects with preservice teachers. The titles ofsome of these video texts (and the films I appro-priated segments from) suggest a few of the criticalissues I sought to address: Discourses andLiteracies (Educating Rita [Gilbert, 1983], SchoolTies [Jaffe, Lansing, & Mandel, 1992], The PaperChase [Paul, Thompson, & Bridges, 1973], DriveMe Crazy [Bernstein et al., 1999]); SordidFantasies: Racialized Representations of “InnerCity School” Students (The Principal [Brodek &Cain, 1987], Lean on Me [Twain & Avildsen, 1989],187 [Davey, McEveety, & Reynolds, 1997], TheSubstitute [Eisenman et al., 1996]); The Good, theBad, the Unmarried; and the Repressed:Examining Representations of Female Teachers(The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [Cresson, Fryer, &Neame, 1969], Rachel, Rachel [Newman, 1968], Upthe Down Staircase [Pakula & Mulligan, 1967]);and The “Werking Klass” (Pretty in Pink [Shuler &Hughs, 1986], Little Man Tate [Rajski, Rudin, &Foster, 1991], Good Will Hunting [Bender & VanSant, 1997]). Though I have experienced muchpleasure in making these video texts, certain

problems accompany the process. The main prob-

lem has been an even more compulsive drive to

record the explosion of television programming to

which I now have access. I am not only a longtime

cable-TV subscriber but also a digital video

recorder (DVR) subscriber, which enables me to

tape multiple shows at any given time, store them

on the hard drive, and then record them to video-

tape when I can manage to keep up. As new peda-

gogical situations arise, I discover more reasons to

continue to make video texts, record more pro-

grams, design more pedagogical projects, and con-

tinue the entire dizzying cycle.

In recent years, I have been collecting a

wider range of media culture texts, mainly be-

cause my obsession has had a new terrain to

traverse—that of English education in a Master of

Arts in Teaching program—and in a future col-

umn I will describe where my obsession with me-

dia culture texts has taken me in that discourse.

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The department editor welcomes reader comments. E-mail [email protected]. Mail James Trier, University of North Carolina at ChapelHill, School of Education, Peabody Hall, Rm. 201F, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

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Pedagogy of the Obsessed