Thinking Visually: Using Visual Media in the College Classroom

A FEW YEARS AGO, as a new professional on a new campus, I was asked to teach a first-year seminar. I must admit that I found the prospect daunting. I believed that teaching an extended orientation course that focused on adjustment issues would require very different skills from those I had developed in the traditional academic culture of graduate school. As I obsessed over how to tackle this unique class, I realized that I had two supports that would help me proceed: theory and visual media. Let me explain.

Though new to this course, I had enough teaching experience to know that all students are not the same. This is particularly true of first-year students, who arrive on college campuses with different levels of college preparation, different expectations, different levels and kinds of support, and different challenges. Recognizing this fact, I pulled out my old texts and found myself re-reading David Kolb's theory of learning styles.

Kolb identified four primary learning styles, each associated with a specific type of learner. The four categories are convergers, divergers, assimilators, and accom-modators. Convergers prefer concrete things. They are good problem solvers and don't like ambiguity. These learners like discussion, particularly if there is a direction and a goal associated with it. Divergers, on the other hand, are very people-oriented. They tend to be creative and imaginative, and they see a range of options. They like brainstorming and relating information to personal experiences, so novel pedagogical approaches that require them to be reflective are ideal for them. Assimilators are excited by ideas more than by people. They like to be challenged to think. They tend to like to make sense of something after being exposed to a wide range of perspectives. These learners like discussions focusing on concepts and ideas. Accommodators are doers. They like taking chances and seeing things through. They prefer trial and error and are good at adapting to new conditions. Deanna Forney notes, in Using Entertainment Media in Student Affairs Teaching and Practice, that accommodators respond well to case studies and small-group discussions. These four learning styles exist on two continua from active to reflective and from concrete to abstract. Therefore, it is important to create classroom experiences that engage learners across these continua. Patricia Jensen and David Kolb note that conversations that allow feelings as well as ideas are likely to engage all learners.

With theory now in hand, I turned to my second support, visual media. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that using visual media comes very naturally to me. Prior to my current career as an educator, I studied film and worked in the film business. Therefore, recognizing the power of visual media to convey messages is second nature to me. For example, as a teaching assistant in an Introduction to Film course many years ago, I had the students discuss the films they viewed in class. I asked them look beyond their immediate reactions to discover how the filmmakers affected an audience's reaction. On a basic level, they needed to deconstruct the elements of the film (for example, script, camera movement, lighting, focus, music, costumes) to see how each contributed to the film's affect or effect. The best feedback I got from this method was when one student told me that I had ruined movies for him. He could no longer passively watch a film as he had in the past; now, he was an active viewer, analyzing each frame as he watched. By the end of that class, I witnessed students speaking about film in a deeper, more complex way.

Now, flash forward to my current situation with new students, a new campus, and a new course. Almost immediately, I recognized that visual media, once again, could be the key to opening up my students' thinking. I toyed with the idea of using media other than film or television. Many recent novels (for example, I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, Moo by Jane Smiley, and Straight Man by Richard Russo) represented life on American college campuses; however, I did not think that they were ideal for this setting. I felt that new students were not as comfortable talking about books as they were about films or television. I believed that students regularly talked about recent movies or television shows with friends but that books were identified (unfortunately) as belonging to the domain of the classroom. This view might hinder discussion rather than encourage it. Also, the length of a book meant that we could probably read only one or two during the semester, which would limit the number of topics and view-points to which the students could be exposed. Film and television were more flexible, immediate, and familiar, so students would be more engaged.

Furthermore, film and television have, with some regularity, turned their attention to representing the life of college students. As educators, we may take issue with the content conveyed in these entertainments (for example, in National Lampoon's Animal House, Higher Learning, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Felicity); nevertheless, they cover a wide range of topics and perspectives on the college experience. In addition, using these visual media constitutes a novel classroom approach that encourages discussion, critique, and personal reflection, which is ideal for engaging all learners.

ISTARTED MY CLASS by showing scenes from Felicity, a series that focuses exclusively on its protagonist's college experience from the first year of college to graduation, and by showing a campus-produced video called 720 Minutes at USC, which was created as a recruitment tool for the University of South Carolina. These video clips served two primary purposes: exploration of adjustment issues and exploration of expectations. The Felicity clip mirrored the issues my students were facing in their first year, thus providing them an avenue for discussion of their own adjustment concerns. 720 Minutes at USC offered a very specific glimpse into our campus and allowed us to untangle the notion of expectations and how visual media can contribute to the formation of expectations. In addition, there was a third benefit to using these clips. I felt that without these examples, students would have been hesitant to talk about personal issues with the class, which at this point was a group of relative strangers. The conversation about the videos allowed the students to begin to break down some of the barriers between classmates and relieve some of their anxieties.

I used the Felicity clip first to encourage the students to discuss their adjustment to college life. It is important to remember that not all students respond in the same way; I certainly experienced that in my classroom. Students who preferred sticking with facts (convergers) may have felt less interested in the aspects of the discussion that dealt with feelings, but they seemed to enjoy dissecting the scene and how the fictional students were portrayed. The more people-oriented students (diverg-ers) responded to the feelings of the characters rather than the technical aspects of the production, such as editing, writing, lighting, or music. Divergers were the ones who linked the fictionalized stories to their own experiences. Students who enjoyed thinking through ideas (assimilators) sparked to exploring the intentions of the scene—what ideas were being expressed and how the creators of the series depicted those ideas in ways that went beyond just dialogue. The assimilators wanted to dig deeper. Finally, some students, the accommodators, seemed to just like this new pedagogical approach, tending to be the first to speak and engage in the exercise.

With students responding in different ways to the material, it was critical that I welcome all comments, regardless of their orientation. It was also important to not let one person dominate the discussion. If a person who responded only to ideas dominated, the feeling students' eyes would glaze over. Likewise, if the “feelers” dominated, then I might lose the thinkers. I attempted to avoid a onesided discussion by calling on the quieter students to share their insights, and I tried to keep the discussion moving by having all views presented.

I used 720 Minutes at USC to explore the concept of expectations and how they can affect the college experience. This fast-paced video cleverly depicts twelve hours in the life of a group of college students as they wake up, rush to class, meet with peers, talk to professors, and return to their residence halls to eat and study at the end of the day. After I played the tape for my first-year students, I asked them how our campus was depicted. They started talking about very basic elements of the video, such as where the students lived and where they had classes, but quickly shifted to discussing how the production elements (such as editing, music, visuals, and dialogue) created a view of the University of South Carolina. This discussion led to a number of other topics: What expectations did the video create in viewers? How did their own experiences compare to what they saw on the video? Soon, we were talking about their expectations about college and how those were different from what students actually experienced. The video seemed to offer students in the class an easy way to talk about adjustment because the discussion was not ini-tially personal. Students began by talking about the technical aspects and ended up discussing themselves. After the class meetings, the students wrote reflection papers. Their reflections tended to focus on how the class offered them a safe place to be themselves. I also saw that the films allowed conversations to take place, which, in turn, allowed students to feel at home. Films and videos provided the material to create that haven.

THROUGHOUT THE SEMESTER, I used video clips to discuss a range of topics, such as feeling overwhelmed about starting college (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Undeclared); alcohol and partying (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch); diversity (Boy Meets World, Higher Learning); test-taking anxiety (Felicity, Boy Meets World); and student-faculty interactions (Moesha, Felicity). In fact, television and film were rich with examples on topics I wanted to address. I felt that the approach was working, because I sensed excitement at the beginning of each class as the students anticipated what I would show. The groans, laughs, and cheers when I introduced a clip seemed to get louder each week as the students got used to watching video clips as an introduction to whatever topic was to be discussed.

After watching and analyzing videos throughout the course, the students, for one of their final assignments, were asked to select any film set on a college campus, write a three-to-five-page paper, and then present their findings to the class. The paper included three parts: (a) a brief plot summary, (b) a summary of how college was depicted in the film, and (c) an analysis of how the film's representation was like or unlike their own college experiences. I wanted the students to be able to make the connections between the story, the way the story was told, and their own experiences. The students said they enjoyed being able to choose their own film, and in some cases, they surprised me a bit with their racy choices (for example, Road Trip and National Lampoon's Van Wilder). I was introduced to some films that I continue to use in the classroom, and I discovered that even the most sophomoric films provide very provocative and powerful messages about college. I learned a lot from my students' choices, and I believe that the students also learned something: how to think analytically (which was one of my primary course objectives). I saw that many of the students could now provide a more detailed film summary than they did in early class sessions. I read more thoughtful explanations of how the college experience was depicted in a film. All of the students, not just the divergers, seemed able to access their own experiences more easily in later papers than they had been able to early in the term. The richness of their papers proved to me that the films and videos had engaged all of the students, regardless of their learning preferences, and pushed them to use and develop their analytic skills.

At the end of the course, students turned in all their written work in a portfolio and wrote a final reflection paper that summed up their experience in the class. Some students were able to see their development over the semester. Most took with them a deeper understanding of the college experience. One student wrote that he had gained “a better understanding of what I needed to do this year and the years to come as I gain my education.” The lessons learned were about more than film or college success skills; they were about personal growth, and videos and films had helped them get there.

The next time a series or movie set in college is showing, don't discount it out of hand as mere teen entertainment. See it. Realize that it may help open doors for your students, their needs, and their understanding in ways that no book could.