This article is reprinted with permission of Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal On the Theory and Practice of Teaching. This article first appeared in the Teaching in Times of War I, Issue #72 (Spring 2005).
LaGuardia Community College (The City University of New York) is a New York City urban campus located in Queens about ten minutes by subway from Times Square. LaGuardia's logo says "The World's Community College" and this is more than just promotional: LaGuardia enrolls students from one hundred fifty countries, speaking a great variety of languages. Our international students are usually the first ones in their families to go to college (as are the American-born African American, Latino/a, and working-class white students), and often are from countries where the United States has interfered for political and economic reasons, such as Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Consequently, our students tend to be more open to analysis and criticism about The American Dream, the United States' control over the world, and the effects of United States' sponsored war on their own lives. This is not to say that LaGuardia does not have conservative students, but their life circumstances, as well as the experiences of their fellow students, make it easier to introduce and develop progressive political content than perhaps would be possible in a middle-class, predominantly white college or university.
LaGuardia Community College, at the same time, is on the cutting edge of progressive pedagogies and innovative technological experimentation. Our Center for Teaching and Learning1 annually offers a year-long seminar called Designed for Learning, which I and many of my colleagues have taken during the past four years. In addition, I have participated in the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP)2 for the past three years. With my interest in politicizing students, and my new knowledge of computer technology and Internet possibilities, I asked myself the following questions in conjunction with my work for VKP. These questions, although theoretical and for the purpose of helping me define my goals in VKP, have ended up informing my pedagogy and classroom politics for the last few years:
What do students do when receiving a large body of new material that conflicts with their currentvalues, class background, educational status, religion, and sexual orientation? How does the teacher present and encourage students to explore potentially threatening material that might require a reevaluation of student self-image or social/political position? How important can writing be to help students explore this new awareness? How valuable can electronic discussions be to help students understand that they are sharing intellectual and emotional conflicts common to many new students? How does the teacher maintain his or her own position on specific issues without unduly influencing the students as they come to their own conclusions? Where do students go to get information that will offer them an alternative view to what they already know or believe?
When the War on Iraq "broke out" in 2003 and then threatened to continue into perpetuity, I had the chance to join my ongoing interest in progressive teaching with my newfound interest and growing comfort with technology-enhanced pedagogy.
It is difficult, and perhaps even counterproductive, to teach about volatile political issues without a context. When I have done so in the past, I began to feel like a proselytizer, with student faces either uncomprehending or simply annoyed that I was straying from the lesson of the day. One way I have avoided this impasse is always to teach with a theme, no matter what the course is.3
My current Liberal Arts cluster at LaGuardia Community College readily lends itself to the subject of "Teaching in a Time of War." This cluster called "Truth, Lies, and Videotape" is part of the newly created Media Studies Program, with "Introduction to American Film" and "Media and Society" taught by two professors from the Humanities Department. In addition, the cluster includes my "Composition I" and "The Research Paper" components, which give me seven hours a week of instruction with these same students. I make it clear to my students in the cluster that, in addition to teaching them composition skills and research techniques, the goal of my two courses is also to balance out the powerful influence held by corporate media by presenting the challenges of alternative media. With this said, the students do not expect a "balanced" view but rather an additional view that they are not getting from their televisions or from newspaper headlines.
I have taught the "Truth, Lies and Videotape" cluster twice, first at the opening of the War on Iraq (Spring 2003) and then again last semester (Spring 2004).4 The first time around in the cluster, as the war was beginning, I wanted students to see how alternative media was giving quite a different version of public response at the beginning of the war than was the mainstream media. I wanted to find out what students already knew and felt about the war, give them alternative media information, and then see how this additional information changed or altered their original writings on Blackboard threaded discussions.5
My first threaded discussion of the semester made connections between the war and the students' own educations which, quite frankly, I had not predicted. Here was the assignment:
On Wednesday, LaGuardia is sponsoring CUNY Day, which will focus on trying to inform students about what is happening in the state of New York concerning higher education. As college students, this will be information you need to know as you continue your college career and try to understand the role that colleges play in this country. After hearing what is happening at CUNY Day, you will return to the computer lab, log onto Blackboard, and write at least one well-developed paragraph about what you heard and learned. Since we are now studying the theme of "class" in our Liberal Arts cluster, you might want to comment on how the CUNY Day discussions related to class, or even to "ethnicity" or "race," our previous two themes.
Fortunately for my class, a number of the CUNY Day facilitators were faculty union members who made numerous connections between the cost of war and the proposed tuition increases. Student responses to this first Blackboard threaded discussion showed the usefulness of war information related to daily and even academic life and contextualized the war on a very personal level. Here are two student responses:
Also while attending CUNY Day I learned just how expensive this war of ours really is. I learned that the government could send the entire LaGuardia campus to school at the same price they pay for a bomb they drop in Iraq. This troubles me because it makes me wonder just how much my country cherishes me and every other ordinary Joe that these increases and cuts will effect.
I think the main theme of CUNY Day is very important to everyone-money for education, not war. I come from Taiwan, so I know how the Taiwanese people think about the war. They are tired about media 24-7 reporting the war. They think it's not their business. However, after they found out that the Taiwanese government has to pay more than $4 million for the war, everyone started to be against the war. I think the American people should know the facts about how much it costs, too. Some Americans think everyone should follow Bush's lead and attack Iraq because the media teaches them to do so.
Such student responses represent the kind of personalized political connections I tried to make the foundation of my teaching about the war. As my students were fighting against tuition increases, and then also understanding the billions of dollars the Iraq War was beginning to cost, they truly were learning the cost of war.
The next Blackboard threaded discussion tried to open the students to the idea of alternative media and the differences in points of view about the war that it offered. Here is the assignment:
In class on Friday, I will give you several issues of The Independent, an alternative news source from the New York City Independent Media Center. This alternative news source is also available at www.nyc.indymedia.org. After you have chosen your free copy, peruse it at your leisure and chose one article you really were attracted to and felt you learned something from. Try to post your discussion on Blackboard over the weekend. In your threaded discussion, please write one well-developed paragraph and include the following:
- The name of the article, in quotation marks;
- The author of the piece;
- A brief summary of the article;
- Why you chose the article: what stood out, what new ideas or information you get, etc.; and
- Do you think this article would appear in the mainstream media? Why or why not?
Although students chose articles from The Independent relating to a number of political issues, the majority of students chose to write about war articles and aspects of the war they were unfamiliar with. Here are some samples:
In the article "12-year-old on War: What Did Us Kids Do To You?" by Charlotte Aldebron a 12-yr. old girl gives a speech on why the war in Iraq is so wrong. She speaks from the point of view of different Iraqi children around her age who suffered through the first Gulf War. One thing that touched me about the article was that she was giving names of all these kids. It made me feel like I knew them. She talked about a little boy that lost his father, kids being injured because of bombs. It was sad. What caught my attention was the title. I really wanted to know what the little girl in the picture had said. This article will never be seen in mainstream media because it talks about the damage the U.S. caused in Iraq 12 years ago and how it's all happening again.
"Homeland Insecurity: INS Steps up Registrations & Roundups" by Eric Schwartz discusses the new requirements of males sixteen and over who are from 18 predominantly Muslim countries. These men must register with the INS or face imprisonment or deportation. The INS calls this requirement the "Special Registration Program." During the month of January there were 125 arrests nationwide of men who registered. The article also discusses the 1,000 Iranians that were arrested in Los Angeles on Dec. 16. It says the detainees, as young as sixteen, were strip searched and forced to put on jumpsuits without socks or underwear. The immigrants were then thrown in freezing cells without benches or blankets. The article also says some of the immigrants were hosed down and kicked. I chose this article because the title stood out. Usually I see "Homeland Security" not "Insecurity." Basically the entire article was new to me. I didn't know immigrants were now being required to register with the INS. Also I didn't know how many of these men were arrested and why. I don't think this article would appear in mainstream media because it speaks badly of one of the new steps the country is taking when it comes to Homeland Security.
These samples represent some very important aspects of the war that students did not know: how wars affect the young and how civil liberties at home are being violated, two ideas about the war completely unreported by the mainstream media at that time.
My next Blackboard assignment asked students to respond to only one article from the alternative press and to look more deeply at how war is presented and who benefits from this presentation.
Read the article "The Press and the Myths of War" from the current issue of The Nation, an alternative media source we have looked at several times this semester. The article can also be found at www.thenation.com. I want you to relate this article to the title of our Liberal Arts Cluster - Truth, Lies and Videotape - by responding to the following questions:
- What does Chris Hedges say about war itself? In other words, how does he define it ?
- In what ways does Hedges say the press makes war look good?
- How and why does Hedges say journalists become participants in the war? and
- What were the main ideas in this article that interested you?
Here are some student responses:
I agree with Hedges because right now with the war on Iraq, we are using billions of dollars to destroy and then we go back and use another billion dollars to build it up again . . . . He said that when it comes to war everyone gets involved, the military and the press. The press makes it look like it is a good thing but it is not always the case. War all has to do with betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians. I found it interesting that people do get betrayed when it comes to war.
He says the truth about war is covered up by 'myths' that are told to us by the state, entertainment industry, and the press. The press is our primary source of the myths of war. The myths of war are stories that are told us to make war seem necessary or inevitable. Hedges explains that these myths are seductive and empower and ennoble us. He says the press turns war into entertainment and this is what gets so many people's attention.
When watching the news, you don't get all the footage or pictures you want to see. That is why I watch the Spanish news. There is less censorship in the Spanish news than the English news. When I watch the coverage of war on regular news, I feel like I'm watching a reality TV show.
Taken together, the student responses to Hedges' article revealed a range of understanding about the deceptive use of media to make war look good and provide entertainment, including the need to go to alternative, or even foreign, news services for a more complete picture. These increasingly sophisticated responses helped direct me to my next assignment on a very specific example of media cover up and manipulation, the Jessica Lynch rescue. Again, as in some of the previous Blackboard writing assignments, I wanted the students first to write about what they already knew and then to amend their thoughts in relationship to additional reading materials. Here is the assignment:
One of the big news items that circulated in the media early in the Iraq War was the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch by the U. S. Army. Please write for a few minutes about what you know or heard about this rescue. After you have written for a few minutes, I will give you two articles about the Jessica Lynch rescue. Then please write again about what you now think about the rescue.
Following are some "after" student responses:
It doesn't shock me that the whole incident was staged. The United States has been known to do things to take our people's attention away from what is really going on. They didn't want to seem like savages for killing innocent people in Iraq so they needed something to make them look good.
Wow, the whole heroic rescue of the Jessica Lynch story would have amazed me if it had not been for this cluster. For starters, as an American when I got news of the captured POWs it was heart wrenching. The story I heard of how she was captured in combat, according to the media "it was something out of a movie," exactly.
By this stage of the semester there was little doubt among students that the media manipulates, exaggerates, and even purposefully lies in its role as spokesman for the military-industrial complex. The students achieved this awareness not from class discussion, not from any lecturing on my part, but from Blackboard assignments that asked them to write about what they already knew or felt about the War on Iraq, to read alternative media sources to give them a more balanced view, and then to put together their own responses as they came to appreciate that there is vast world of information outside of mainstream media.
My second time around teaching "Truth, Lies and Videotape" was Spring semester, 2004. The War on Iraq was raging, and I began the semester wanting to see where the students were with the war, how the media was shaping the war, and how I could help the students see it from a more balanced point of view.
First days are always hard, especially when they can be three hours long with the same students, as it was with the cluster (7 hours a week in all). So, after introducing the Liberal Arts cluster, I jumped right in with two alternative pieces of media about the war to see how the students would respond.
"Independent Media in a Time of War"6 is a video of a lecture by Amy Goodman who talks about the need to challenge mainstream media in its presentation of the War on Iraq. The video opens with positive and supportive versions of the war from mainstream media and then goes on to alternate between these images and the images that would be necessary to present a balanced view of the war. Using CNN as an example, Goodman explains that CNN offers different war images to its domestic and its international audiences. Using the Marines' toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein as an example, Goodman says that the domestic version of this event was simply the statue falling and rising over and over throughout the day. On the international version of CNN, a split screen showed on one half the falling statue, while the other half showed graphic pictures of the civilian victims of the war. When asked why both sets of images were not available for the American audiences, CNN said the war images were "distasteful."
Goodman, of course, makes the point that if these war images of the victims were shown on a daily basis, American attitudes about the war might be redirected. Instead, Goodman says, Americans see video war games, presented by embedded reporters and analyzed by retired generals. As an alternative, she suggests mainstream news services put on their payrolls not only retired generals but also doctors (to describe the effects of the bombs) and peace activists (to show opposition to the war). Without these changes, a balanced view is impossible. To show the one-sidedness of TV news, Goodman says that in the week before and after the war started, CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS conducted 393 interviews which were pro-war and only three interviews that were anti-war. She says this type of coverage must be challenged. She goes on to describe the Pentagon's attack and killing of fourteen journalists at the Palestine Hotel, how the mainstream media did not respond to these attacks, and how the increasing concentration of media ownership can only produce bias and censorship.
The second video was "Military Myths: Roots,"7 a series of interviews with veterans and recruiters that divides aspects of the military into nine categories: recruitment, education, media, psychology, racism, sexism, sexual orientation, coming home, and alternatives. Veterans from both Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War speak about the promises and disappointments that the military gave them. Veterans of color and working class women and men represent the minorities and the poor who end up in the military and do most of the fighting. Each category about the military gives statistics that enhance how the military's promises of education, equality, and career advancement are not fulfilled.
Although I was waiting for the Blackboard assignment to give my students a fuller opportunity to respond to these two powerful videos, I did have time after each to ask what they learned that was new from these alternative sources on war. In general, students were surprised and shocked by graphic images of war victims in "Independent Media in a Time of War" that they had not previously seen, stunned by the control the media has over the war, and angered that they were only now finding out about these versions of the war. In some way "Military Myths" hit even closer to home since so many of my students have friends and family in the military, have themselves been in the military, or are thinking about enlisting. One student, however, found the video biased because her friend in the military had had a more positive experience. I agreed immediately that the video was biased against the military, but then asked the student if a 28 minute video by the military about recruitment would have been biased. She said "no," and I realized that we needed a serious discussion of such words as "bias" and "propaganda" and how all media products have a point of view. We returned to this discussion throughout the semester.
After this opening discussion following the viewing of the two videos, the written responses which took place over the next two days were additionally rich with insightful responses to what they had learned about the war. Here is the assignment:
On our first day of class in our "Truth, Lies, and Videotape" Liberal Arts cluster, we viewed two videos: "Independent Media in a Time of War" and "Military Myths: Roots." Each video tries to show how mainstream media creates a certain image of the military and war and how alternative views of these images are necessary in order for the viewer to receive a balanced view. Please write a paragraph about what you learned by viewing these videos that you did not know before. Also write a second paragraph about why you feel you did not know these things.
And here are some student responses:
In the "Independent Media in a Time of War" video I saw a lot of disturbing imagery, and a huge difference in the way the media presents war to Americans and the way war is presented in other countries. In this video Amy Goodman spoke out against the war and how journalists and the American media portray war. For example, in one part of the tape they showed what CNN showed the day Saddam Hussein's statue was ripped down, which was the statue being torn down by U.S. marines. Then they showed what CNN International showed, which was a split screen with the image of the statue being taken down, and several gruesome pictures of some of the innocent casualties of war on the other side of the screen. The fact that both of these reports were from the same news company, CNN, shows how the media is controlled and is sugar-coated here in America, as opposed to elsewhere in the world. They also talked about how 19 journalists died reporting on the Iraqi War. As an aspiring journalist all of this bothered me. I feel that Americans have the right to know what is happening from all perspectives, not just the American perspective. It is obvious that the reason that the media chooses not to show certain things is because it is their way of manipulating American society, and keeping people pro-war.
Since I spent a large part of my youth on military bases, I felt that I would be more informed than I was. I had no idea that recruiters were allowed to lie, that women were being raped, and poor neighborhoods were being exploited. I did not know how insufficient the protection from chemical or biological weapons for soldiers was. I thought that if we could afford sophisticated weaponry, then of course we would have sophisticated protection. I was also surprised to learn about the lack of psychological counseling. I remember on the CD a man saying that soldiers are returned to society after just two weeks of counseling. To think that our country is just putting people back into society after they served in a war without extensive counseling is shocking and cruel. Outside of certain circumstances, ordinary people cannot understand what it is like to have the responsibility of taking a human life, right or wrong. It must be crushing. The reason this information would be hidden is obvious to everyone. You cannot allow people to find out about the inequality a soldier suffers, or anyone for that matter, and expect to maintain the status quo. People will demand change. So if you block that information, and people remain uninformed, then it is easier to control the situation.
I was unaware that retired generals were on the payrolls of news broadcasts such as CNN and MSNBC to give a one sided story on military strategic positioning, advancements, casualties, reasons, and goals. I was also unaware that the government had control of nearly fourteen hundred of our nation's informative radio stations and that the head of the FCC was the son of Secretary of Defense Colin Powell. I had no knowledge of a major protest against the war in Iraq, or when the protest took place, or the magnitude of the protest. I believe we weren't given a mainstream review of these subjects because it would break a barrier of control that the government has over general public opinion. The nation's opinion on global current affairs originates mostly from television and radio. The government is aware that television and radio is a powerful tool and will push their influences to benefit their ideas to the mass majority that are not as informed as others.
I offer these extensive student responses to "Independent Media in a Time of War" and "Military Myths" to show how desperately students want information about the war and how useful specific data and statistics can be for helping them develop their writing on this very important topic. The students were connecting these videos to their own lives: the journalism student was disturbed by the death of journalists reporting the Iraq War in "Independent Media" and the "army brat" student was amazed that she had spent so much time around the military without knowing any of the statistics and data from "Military Myths." And considering that these videos and this student writing were occurring during the first week of the semester, I felt free to move ahead more quickly than in the previous semester and give students more alternative media, and particularly alternative websites, from which to view the war.
When possible, I tried to relate anti-war work going on in New York City with our class work. On the first anniversary of the Iraq War, March 20, 2004, I went to the Global Day of Action march and rally (as it turned out some of my students had attended as well) and brought into class the next day mainstream news coverage of the event. The New York Times covered the march on page 14, and that was only the march in Rome, Italy. To compare, we went to the website of one of the organizers of the march, United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace. org), to find that over 575 protests around the globe involving over two million people marked the first anniversary of the Iraq War with a massive Global Day of Action against War and Occupation. This dramatic contrast of the media treatment of March 20 did not go unnoticed by my students.
To help the students put all this into writing, I designed the following assignment using the External Links component of Blackboard:
Message from a Peace Marcher
On Saturday, March 20, hundreds of thousands of citizens from the United States and the world participated in protest marches against the Iraq War. Pretend that you were on one of those marches and explain what made you decide to protest against the Iraq War. Submit your message. Next, go to External Links and check out the websites about the war. After studying the websites, modify your message and elaborate on why you chose to join the marchers.
The three websites I asked students to study for this writing assignment were the following:
- Cost of War (http://www.costofwar.com) shows the ongoing cost of the Iraq War and how the money could be used for social needs;
- Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/) keeps track of the number of Iraqis killed or wounded in the war; and
- Win Without War (http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/html/new.html#censure) advocates alternatives to preemptive war against Iraq.
Students clicking on to Cost of War gasped as they saw how the thousands of dollars of war money flew by each second. Some students said "shit" and "damn" as the website showed how this money could be spent on such domestic and international needs as preschool, kids' health, public education, college scholarships, public housing, world hunger, the AIDS epidemic, and world immunization. Let's see how these websites helped them write their "Message from a Peace Marcher" Blackboard assignment:
I attended the anti-war march on Saturday March 20 as a means of expressing my views on the Iraqi war. For a year now this SENSELESS and PURPOSELESS act of violence has been allowed to continue and as a concerned citizen it's time for a change. This march is one of the most meaningful forms of protest since those of the Civil Rights Movement. We all know there's no definite evidence linking Iraq to the 9/11 tragedy; their possession of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear gases is false. This now poses the question "What is the purpose of the Iraqi war?" Let me enlighten you on the impact of this senseless war. As of November 11, 396 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, over 2,200 have been wounded and there are an average of 35 attacks daily on Americans. This war endangers our nation and security by creating enemies rather than alliances. In Iraq the American soldiers are unprepared and vulnerable, the country degenerating into chaos and the Iraqi people embittered and hostile. One of the most shocking pieces of hidden information was the cost of the war. The war costs over billions of dollars and STILL growing. This money could be used to send 50,000 people to college, improve public education and its facilities and public housing. Each household, unknowingly, gives $1,529 to fund the stupid war. The only results of this war are fear, insecurities, deaths, anger and hate. 'We don't do body counts' says US Central Command on the Iraq Body Count website - of course not, there's too many to be counted especially of the Iraqi people.
I wanted to be a part of the march on Saturday because I think this war in Iraq is pointless. There are a lot of young innocent soldiers dying for nothing. American casualties in Iraq are increasing daily and President Bush never attended a single funeral or memorial for soldiers killed in Iraq. I don't think he even cares about his people. And also why use the United States money to kill other human beings. Right now the cost of war in Iraq is $107,574,680,000 and is still counting up fast. You know how many people you could help with that much money? If there wasn't a war, where do you think that money goes? We could use extra millions for pre-schools, kids' health, public education, college scholarships, and public housing. I think Bush planned this before he became a president, to finish off his father's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. He did it for their own good, not for us. Two of my brothers are going to the army and I wouldn't want them going to that stupid war. You know what? We should send Bush to one of the combats in Iraq and make him realize how unnecessary this war is. To the fallen soldiers "R.I.P."
From these two student samples, it was clear to me how much more detailed and convincing their writing about the war could be if given some of the contemporary, fast-paced, and clever websites designed since the Iraq War began. As I pursued these anti-war website assignments throughout the semester, I wanted to be sure that students' knowledge of alternative media was both entertaining and could be carried home with them after the semester ended. To that end, I gave two final Blackboard writing assignments. One was the following:
In your Blackboard discussions, many of you have commented on the control and power mainstream media has over us. In my responses to you, I have agreed with you but also suggested that there are numerous sources of information from alternative media. For this Blackboard assignment, take a look at the External Links, numbers 6 through 10. You will need your sound on to enjoy these. First, take a look at all five of the websites and choose the one you like the best. In your Blackboard response, specify which website is your favorite and,most importantly, why you chose to write about it.
By clicking on External Links, students found the following five websites:
- Dishonest Dubya (http://www.kaicurry.com/gwbush/dishonestdubya.html)
- The Lord of the Right Wing (http://flash.bushrecall.org/)
- Same-sex marriage (http://www.markfiore.com/animation/agenda.html)
- The last presidential election (http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html)
- Our history of association with the Iraqi government (http://bushflash.com/thanks.html)
The following student responses to these five websites show the range of information the sites gave and the creative understanding students took from them.
First of all I got to say that all the websites that I saw were really good and now that I saw them I have different opinions about Bush and politics. The first cartoon I saw about Bush pissed me off because he is one big liar and to think I wanted to vote for him (please let's get him out of the office NOW). Then that other one about Florida's voters being felons. I mean that is just very low and stupid so does that mean we do not count. And the last and the one I liked the most was the last one about how we helped Iraq get weapons of mass destruction and yet the U.S. got surprised when Iraq attacked Kuwait.
Well, after reviewing the sites I chose the anti-samesex marriage cartoon site because as a homosexual male this topic may eventually become an issue in my life, if somewhere down the road I meet the right person and want to get married. I would most definitely want all of the rights that opposite sex marriage unions get. Honestly, at this point in my life marriage is the last thing on my mind, and I'm not necessarily sure that I'd even want to get married, but I think that for those people who do want to get married, they should have every right that straight people do. Isn't this the country where everyone is supposed to be equal? I think what the cartoon was trying to convey is that same sex couples are just as normal as straight couples. That's why they show the two males at breakfast eating at the table, with the "Home Sweet Home" poster and the couple's portrait. I (and every other human being gay or straight or bisexual) should be entitled to the union of marriage.
As with previous student responses, these two students were enlivened by the websites: one wrote with genuine anger about the disenfranchisement of Florida voters in the last election and the connection of the United States with Iraq and weapons of mass destruction; the second "came out" as a gay student.
My goal throughout any semester of the "Truth, Lies and Videotape" Liberal Arts cluster is not only to help students build composition skills and research techniques but also to help students understand themselves and their world better by becoming more media literate, especially alternative media literate, and for the last two semesters, war literate.
Let me conclude by returning to the series of questions I posed at the beginning of this essay. LaGuardia Community College students, and I suspect all students, want to know the truth about their world, its power relationships, and its oppressions, especially if these realities so directly affect the students' lives as in a time of war. Over my years of teaching, my need to politicize students increasingly has grown, but my desire to directly confront students with threatening material has diminished. Instead, as a language teacher and specifically a writing teacher, I allow the printed material of the alternative press or the controversial website to convey my message against war. The new technologies of the internet and such interactive methods of writing as Blackboard threaded discussions provide the excitement that helps keep students engaged. My role is to provide antiwar materials, create appropriate and hopefully creative and stimulating assignments, and let students work through their new ideas through writing. I am by no means removed from the classroom, but I am learning to allow my role as a writing teacher and a media teacher to introduce and develop progressive political content.
Notes:
1. LaGuardia Community College's Designed for Learning website is http://faculty.lagcc.cuny.edu/ctl/dfl
2. For more information on VKP, see Larry Hanley's "Educational Technology and Academic Labor in Radical Teacher No. 63. Also see VKP's website at http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/about/.
3. In Basic Writing courses, I have centered a theme around the quilts of Faith Ringgold and the political activities her quilts represent (see RT # 64, Fall 2002, 44-45). I prefer teaching Composition courses within LaGuardia's Liberal Arts clusters, learning communities with theme centered interdisciplinary marriages of four courses, two of which are always Composition I and The Research Paper.
4. Had these two semesters not been taught during "A Time of War," I would have taught my usual focus in the cluster centered on the themes of ethnicity, class, gender and race as compared and contrasted over a kind of "Then and Now" hundred years difference in the United States as revealed in E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime ("Then") and Virginia Cyrus's anthology Experiencing Race, Class and Gender in the United States ("Now"). How media helped to shape these four themes, both "Then and Now," is of crucial importance to the cluster. With the addition of "Teaching in a Time of War," I taught the same material, if perhaps in less time, and added the ways that the Iraq War related to the themes of ethnicity, class, gender and race, and the ways mainstream media distorted the war and alternative media exposed it.
5. Blackboard is an educational computer technology on which all components of any course can be posted. So far, the only parts of Blackboard that I use are the Announcements, Discussion, and External Links sections. I post assignments on the Discussion Board, students write responses, and then I can respond to each student and students can respond to each other.
6. "Independent Media in a Time of War" is produced by Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org). For more information, all 1-212-431-9090 or visit www.democracynow.org.
7. "Military Myths: Roots" (28 minutes) can be ordered from The War Resisters League (www.warresistersleague.org).