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beccaelizabethIt is probably a sign I spent far too long in college but when I daydream about joining Starfleet I aspire not to ship's Captain but to teacher at the academy. My utter lack of qualification for such a role would only be a problem in the real world, so, I get to just dream.
And quite a lot of the appeal is the idea of finding (reboot) Kirk in college when he's an arrogant little shit who is not as good as he thinks he is yet and just getting a chance to demolish his arguments and make him learn to at least fake thinking my way. But it's also just the chance to get hold of whole generations of young minds and crack them open long enough a thought might get in before the parts where I end up yelling at the TV and having long meta about how wrong wrong wrongity wrong they are.
Using an English degree for this maybe might be a little tricky.
But there's some stuff that starship captains and SHIELD agents both kind of need to study. Like the kind of course that holds a mirror up to your prejudices and makes you realise you've been systematically programmed to jump, well, probably wrong, but definitely in accordance with the dominant ideology. Great power should at least be aware of the history of the discourse framing their great responsibility. And while I kind of want to drop a sociology textbook on certain parties from a height, that's possibly not the most effective thing (unless you want to knock them out, it's a very thick book). So a course where they think they're watching TV for credit but they're really going to have to think about privilege and colonialism and how their society is screwed up about class and ethnicity and gender and sexuality, that's maybe more helpful.
... kind of generally. If I had any talent for teaching at all I'm sure I could get enthusiastic about teaching cultural studies to just about anyone. It's like learning to pay attention to the programming language and see the Matrix. Your TV will be annoying forever, but it probably beats being oblivious. Somehow.
ANYway
Subjects specific to explorers and people dealing with weird? Well how do you even train for that stuff? Genre awareness is not the answer, especially given the hazards of being wrong genre aware, but a bit of practice applying the standard toolkits of your trade to non standard problem sets should be handy. You'd need to partner up with other disciplines, it's not an intro course, it would follow on from earlier training. So then you take your mixed class of future soldiers and engineers and investigators and so forth, and you take scenarios pulled straight from your favourite fiction, and you run them through them. Because it's all very well saying people were never trained for gods and monsters, but if you do RPGs long enough you learn that a lot of that gods and monsters stuff is special effects. Like, it matters if the enemy are undead or robots or ninjas with puppets, but it's not like it matters matters. You've still got to approach it with the tools and skills available, pull apart which things are dangerous and which parts are opportunities, and reach an end point your particular career track considers desirable. And it's like how the CDC can use zombie apocalypse as a frame for basic disaster preparedness, or how you can use vampires as a hook to build story about anything from drug addiction to political intrigue and brainwashing: the mechanisms match well enough, the patterns of behaviour, the necessary responses, so calling it a weird name is basically just a way to grab attention and wipe/rewrite your assumptions. Like, standard movie monsters come with some stock tropes, but so many people have done Our Monsters Are Different that you really need to be ready for anything, so it's mostly a way of saying your first need is to figure out the rules.
Defamiliarisation and a large body of literature exploring possible outcomes: ways to approach non standard problem sets and learn the real flexibility of your particular skill set. Science fiction for the win.
It's also handy if you have a body of classified knowledge (say, SHIELD files) and a population you want to teach who happen to be either uncommitted to the career track or a tad bit young to be getting security clearance, or both. You can try and convey the same lessons learned and get their minds a bit wider yet only use data that's in public already, and officially fictional. You can gather a few different yet similar stories and see how the differences play through. Get them to think about how small differences in assumptions or rulesets can lead to big differences in outcomes.
It would matter a lot which genres you draw on though. Like, if you grow up with Star Trek you're going to be ready for first contact, but if you grow up reading horror? Oh, you're going to be ready to jump a little differently.
And then there's all the different ways to raise topics in science ethics, or just plain ethics. Start with the fiction, follow through on the impact. It's not like the real world is short of examples, but the ones that are still real close are real charged too, and people have a lot of pre existing opinions on the validity of certain options or their acceptability and how it changes depending on the targets. Science fiction has always had fun highlighting the improbable, ridiculous, and just plain wrong, by making it aliens saying it about each other. Without the underlying years of ideology a lot of things just look pretty daft. Defamiliarise, change the frame, dismantle the discourse, and make space for students to think and do different.
I don't know, what's the one thing from your learnings you'd want to convey to, say, superheroes in training, or SHIELD agents, or Starfleet?
Or what courses would they teach that you'd really like to study?
I'm off to read SGA fic. freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose has a few thoughts on these lines.
And quite a lot of the appeal is the idea of finding (reboot) Kirk in college when he's an arrogant little shit who is not as good as he thinks he is yet and just getting a chance to demolish his arguments and make him learn to at least fake thinking my way. But it's also just the chance to get hold of whole generations of young minds and crack them open long enough a thought might get in before the parts where I end up yelling at the TV and having long meta about how wrong wrong wrongity wrong they are.
Using an English degree for this maybe might be a little tricky.
But there's some stuff that starship captains and SHIELD agents both kind of need to study. Like the kind of course that holds a mirror up to your prejudices and makes you realise you've been systematically programmed to jump, well, probably wrong, but definitely in accordance with the dominant ideology. Great power should at least be aware of the history of the discourse framing their great responsibility. And while I kind of want to drop a sociology textbook on certain parties from a height, that's possibly not the most effective thing (unless you want to knock them out, it's a very thick book). So a course where they think they're watching TV for credit but they're really going to have to think about privilege and colonialism and how their society is screwed up about class and ethnicity and gender and sexuality, that's maybe more helpful.
... kind of generally. If I had any talent for teaching at all I'm sure I could get enthusiastic about teaching cultural studies to just about anyone. It's like learning to pay attention to the programming language and see the Matrix. Your TV will be annoying forever, but it probably beats being oblivious. Somehow.
ANYway
Subjects specific to explorers and people dealing with weird? Well how do you even train for that stuff? Genre awareness is not the answer, especially given the hazards of being wrong genre aware, but a bit of practice applying the standard toolkits of your trade to non standard problem sets should be handy. You'd need to partner up with other disciplines, it's not an intro course, it would follow on from earlier training. So then you take your mixed class of future soldiers and engineers and investigators and so forth, and you take scenarios pulled straight from your favourite fiction, and you run them through them. Because it's all very well saying people were never trained for gods and monsters, but if you do RPGs long enough you learn that a lot of that gods and monsters stuff is special effects. Like, it matters if the enemy are undead or robots or ninjas with puppets, but it's not like it matters matters. You've still got to approach it with the tools and skills available, pull apart which things are dangerous and which parts are opportunities, and reach an end point your particular career track considers desirable. And it's like how the CDC can use zombie apocalypse as a frame for basic disaster preparedness, or how you can use vampires as a hook to build story about anything from drug addiction to political intrigue and brainwashing: the mechanisms match well enough, the patterns of behaviour, the necessary responses, so calling it a weird name is basically just a way to grab attention and wipe/rewrite your assumptions. Like, standard movie monsters come with some stock tropes, but so many people have done Our Monsters Are Different that you really need to be ready for anything, so it's mostly a way of saying your first need is to figure out the rules.
Defamiliarisation and a large body of literature exploring possible outcomes: ways to approach non standard problem sets and learn the real flexibility of your particular skill set. Science fiction for the win.
It's also handy if you have a body of classified knowledge (say, SHIELD files) and a population you want to teach who happen to be either uncommitted to the career track or a tad bit young to be getting security clearance, or both. You can try and convey the same lessons learned and get their minds a bit wider yet only use data that's in public already, and officially fictional. You can gather a few different yet similar stories and see how the differences play through. Get them to think about how small differences in assumptions or rulesets can lead to big differences in outcomes.
It would matter a lot which genres you draw on though. Like, if you grow up with Star Trek you're going to be ready for first contact, but if you grow up reading horror? Oh, you're going to be ready to jump a little differently.
And then there's all the different ways to raise topics in science ethics, or just plain ethics. Start with the fiction, follow through on the impact. It's not like the real world is short of examples, but the ones that are still real close are real charged too, and people have a lot of pre existing opinions on the validity of certain options or their acceptability and how it changes depending on the targets. Science fiction has always had fun highlighting the improbable, ridiculous, and just plain wrong, by making it aliens saying it about each other. Without the underlying years of ideology a lot of things just look pretty daft. Defamiliarise, change the frame, dismantle the discourse, and make space for students to think and do different.
I don't know, what's the one thing from your learnings you'd want to convey to, say, superheroes in training, or SHIELD agents, or Starfleet?
Or what courses would they teach that you'd really like to study?
I'm off to read SGA fic. freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose has a few thoughts on these lines.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-10 10:09 am (UTC)A few years ago he settled on a four-semester cycle for his section of PHYS441. The official registration website lists the four classes "Sociology of Scientific Discovery", "Current Problems in Science", "Practical Crisis Problemsolving", and "Scientific Ethics", but he still calls them "How People Have Fucked Up The World Recently", "How People Are Fucking Up The World Right Now", "How You Too Can Avoid Fucking Up The World", and "Why Not Fucking Up The World Really Matters". Kim, the departmental administrative assistant who is still the only person who knows everything about everybody, has learned his shorthand; his syllabi are filed under what he considers the courses' real titles.