POP Goes the Classroom
By Kathy Chin Leong, Continental
At the University of Southern California, recent grads Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago are practically celebrities. Last year, these young legends earned their master of fine arts degrees in interactive media, a.k.a. video games, and immediately inked a three-game development deal with Sony Computer Entertainment America. No doubt, Chen, 25, and Santiago, 28, are happy campers, or more precisely, happier gamers, in this cyber rags to riches story.
“It’s a dream come true, definitely,” says Santiago, who also holds a BFA in theater from New York University. “My parents are supportive. I think they are happy I didn’t become an actress. ”
Video games – along with movies, TV shows, and rock music – are all part of what’s called pop culture, which Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, defines as “all the stuff we consume for entertainment by choice, instead of by assignment.” Before 1970, few universities would have considered mainstream entertainment a bona fide subject for academic study, but now pop culture is weaving its way into college curricula everywhere. Even academicians are on board.
“[Pop culture] is part of our American experience,” Thompson says. “We should not shy away from it, but let it illuminate us and see what it says about us as a country.”
New Divisions
Tracy Fullerton, an assistant professor at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, expected flak after the school launched the Interactive Media Division (IMD) for graduate students in 2002. But she says USC faculty members have embraced the IMD, and USC is one of the few schools in the nation that offers both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in interactive entertainment.
“This department gives students an opportunity to make games about different subjects, and we emphasize personal experience and innovation,” Fullerton says. One IMD student, formerly a medic in Iraq, created a simulation game based on his tour of duty.
Chen’s goal was to create a different type of game genre, and together with Santiago and a handful of classmates in the program, he did. The result was an online business, ThatGameCompany.com, and a game called Cloud, which features a little boy who can fly through clouds. The game caught Sony’s attention when it received more than 600,000 downloads and started winning awards in the game industry.
A few states away, comic art is the pop culture phenomenon that inspired a new degree program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design – students can earn a bachelor of fine arts in the subject. This year, the Fulbright Program, the federal government’s premier scholarship organization, awarded a fellowship to MCAD professor Frenchy Lunning to travel to Japan to study the comic art style known as manga.
A Spoonful of Sugar
According to Fred Turner, an associate professor of communication at Stanford University, high culture and pop culture are blurring, even in the more traditional fields of study. Now, he notes, one of the keys of career success is knowing how to critique pop culture and harness the new media. “It is the new social literacy,”” he says. “It is absolutely imperative we study [pop culture].”
The bonus: Courses that incorporate pop culture entice students to enroll. Last spring, when King’s College posted the course South Park and Philosophy, the classed filled to capacity rapidly, confirms Kyle Johnson, associate professor of philosophy at the Wilkes-Barre, PA., liberal arts college. In Johnson’s course, students spend Monday watching an episode of the adult cartoon that raises a specific topic, such as euthanasia. On Wednesday, Johnson and the class discuss one side of the moral argument. On Friday, they tackle the opposite side.
“The feedback I got in person (from students) last spring was very positive,” Johnson says. “They learned a lot, tested their boundaries and conventional opinions, and South Park made it easier to be interested.”
“In a way it’s a bait, but a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” says Bill Irwin, also a King’s College associate professor of philosophy and editor of The Simpson’s and Philosophy: The D’ oh! of Homer and Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery.
University of California at San Diego computer science professor Joe Pasquale would agree. He says the response to his class The Science of Casino Games has been overwhelming. “Whenever I offer this class, it immediately fills up,” he explains. “I am always asked to offer additional sections, which I generally do.” According to Pasquale, by playing Texas hold ’em in class, students are learning to apply probability theory. “I teach a very mathematical class,” he adds.
Apples in Haystacks
Professions that may have once appeared ho-hum are also getting a new lease on life thanks to pop culture. For example, colleges are churning out more forensic scientists than ever before due to the popularity of the CSI franchise. Prior to the show’s debut in 2000, few colleges offered degrees in that field. Now they are commonplace.
Meanwhile, the Korean soap opera craze is flooding age-old foreign language departments with enthusiastic attendees, and colleges are reporting that they are adding more classes in Asian studies. John Duncan, chair of the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California-Los Angeles, estimates that the number of students seeking to learn Korean, Japanese, and Chinese has doubled during the past five years.
When the university hosted a 10-day workshop on modern Korea, more than half the enrollees reported that they signed up because of their interest in Korean TV and movies, reports Duncan. He’s confident that as Asia grows as an economic power, high enrollment numbers will continue for a long time.
“Korean is hot because of pop culture, but five years from now there will be pop culture from China,” he says. Even if it’s the result of a fad, Duncan believes this boost in student interest is a positive.
Professor Lunning of MCAD puts it this way: “Suppose a student becomes an anime fan, finds out he wants to learn Japanese, and goes into Asian studies and then art history. If the lollipop leads to the apple, isn’t that what we want?”
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