The power of integrating pop culture into college instruction

By Ani Bundel

San Diego Comic Con is greatest recognized for its main fandom moments, the Marvel panels, the cosplay, and the superstar appearances. However, as this 12 months’s con has proved, the conference doesn’t want Hollywood. One purpose is its lesser-known, unsung panels that occur within the bowels of the conference middle, within the lodge ballrooms subsequent door, and most significantly, across the nook on the San Diego Public Library.

These training/comics panels cowl every part from censorship in comics historical past, present political points like how drag bans have an effect on cosplay, and every part in between. So whereas Hall H was closed down with zero panels on Sunday, July 23, issues have been virtually leaping on the library, with an enthusiastic crowd longing for a dialogue on college programs targeted on pop culture, how schools are discovering methods to enchantment to the fandom communities, and what they’ll do to enhance.

Prof. Ed Catto of Ithaca College led a panel of lecturers to debate how a lot the panorama has modified, and what they’ll do sooner or later. They included Syracuse’s Chris Wildrick, SUNY-Cortland Dr. Christina Knopf, University of Washington’s Rob Salkowitz, University of Maine Dr. Billy Obenauer, current MBA graduate Bailey Day, and freelance educator Darlynne Overbaugh. Wildrick kicked off the panel noting how a lot the mainstream culture has modified, and that when he first began instructing comics-based programs, he was seen as an oddity; these days, when a tour group comes via his “History of Cosplay” course, not solely are the scholars into it, the dad and mom additionally nod alongside, as if that is par for the course.

Dr. Billy Obenauer talked about how utilizing comics within the classroom can stimulate imaginations and be a great way to achieve college students the place they stay. From telling children that the correct approach to deal with him (Dear Dr. Obenauer: Correct, Dear Batman: Wrong however Acceptable) to utilizing the imagined forms that should run superhero collectives to get his enterprise college students to drawback resolve, it’s a approach to make studying enjoyable and get children to faucet into their very own creativity.

Recent graduate Bailey Day completely agreed that her expertise as an MBA pupil at Ithaca, utilizing comics to stimulate creativity, was an excellent approach to be taught. As somebody who got here from a theater background, she’s conscious that succeeding in a enterprise diploma calls for inventive options, despite the fact that most assume that the humanities don’t have anything to do with enterprise. She felt that the extra college students have been uncovered to the humanities, the higher they’ll be to achieve enterprise (with or with out actually making an attempt). She championed Itha-con, one of the oldest conventions on college campuses, as nice for increasing the horizons of college students.

Salkowitz and Obenauer each agreed that college students are the rationale they’re there, and that even when a manner of instructing appears unusual, if it reaches the scholars, the college gained’t care, so long as it really works. Dr. Knopf reminded the viewers that it doesn’t matter what works the scholars are analyzing, Batman or Shakespeare, so long as the scholars be taught to investigate. After all, Shakespeare was as soon as pop culture, it’s all a matter of timing.

As for the way lecturers can combine pop culture into their very own instructing, Overbaugh introduced a bunch of books to supply these within the room that she’s discovered helpful in incorporating pop culture into their instructing. The panel turned into an viewers engagement dialogue with the varied lecturers within the room. She wound up telling a number of of the lecturers within the crowd to come back speak to her afterwards one-on-one about the way to use pop culture of their numerous fields. That’s as a result of for many lecturers, this actually is about figuring out your viewers, determining what speaks to them, and the way their topic intersects with their pursuits. After all, isn’t that what’s instructing is all about?

Miss any of our earlier SDCC ’23 protection? Find all of it right here!