Teaching Tool: Blogging a Mass Killing - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.
My first experience with blogging’s potential as a teaching tool occurred last week. I am teaching a class on blogs to English majors this semester, and I asked them to blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama’s address during the memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood, in Texas. I gave them about 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they’d written. I figured we’d brush up against the limits of blogging, with its inherent pressure to process and post as quickly as possible. Even though I have a thoughtful bunch of students, I didn’t expect to hear much worth saving.
I was wrong.
The first several students reacted to the murders on an emotional level. Some mentioned their grief at learning that one of the shooting victims had been pregnant. Others wrote more like reporters, recounting highlights of what Obama had said.
A handful of students wrote things that stand out sharply in my memory. One young woman had family members in the military. She wrote a prose poem that started every sentence with “I hate.” One line I remember in particular. “I hate that my brother lost six years of his life in the Army.”
A young woman who is Muslim had to be persuaded to read her post because she considered it controversial. She raised questions with an eye toward understanding this horrific event in a larger historical perspective. An even more cautious student refused to read anything, noting that she had friends in the Army and didn’t want to publish anything stupid. A young man who was proud of his Italian heritage and yet was also proud to be American wondered how the accused killer, a U.S. citizen with a Muslim background, could shoot his fellow countrymen and -women.
The last student, who noted that he had no experience either with violence or the military, posted a confession of sorts: “I have never witnessed the horrors of a murder. To the best of my knowledge, neither has anyone I know. I cannot approximate nor rationalize nor understand the emotions involved, and pretending otherwise seems false. So I am detached.”
Hearing these students’ reactions, shared with each other, made the experience of watching President Obama far more meaningful than it would be if I had done it in my usual way: by myself or with my family. When the female student who had relatives in the military and the male student who felt detached addressed each other, civilly, I felt as if the class was giving voice to the widely divergent views that exist in our country, as well as to the sorts of confusing contradictions that sometimes occur inside our own heads.
Is this what blogging at its best offers us as a society, the chance to put the various slivers of reaction to any complex problem side by side? Or is the process I stumbled upon simply a standard educational model of requiring students to think, write, and then discuss? Was 10 minutes too short a time to process a reaction to such a complicated situation? Or is 10 minutes longer than we usually get?
Categories: Teaching, Social-Networking
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