An Academic Plan of Sorts . . .

What have you learned from the previous assignments in this course?

Many things! Notwithstanding many years working in the media, I was a theory-novice, without any real grounding in the foundational literature. This was, in fact, the first time in my multi-tiered education that I had to review so much professional literature of any sort (yes, even law school). And I had never created a blog or any web-based presence for myself, and it was sort of liberating to get over the self-consciousness of putting myself ‘out there’ to be scrutinized and judged. It helped that I thought it would remain under international radar, but now I just wish someone would notice it!

Has your work on the literature review helped you to create a future reading or viewing list?

Definitely! I also discovered, ex post facto, that much of the material I read corresponds to the required reading of a closely related class Shannon and Peter previously taught (Media Education Lab). This would be a must-class for me, though I didn’t see it listed in the course guide, raising the question whether there are other possible offerings I overlooked.

Have any exercises revealed strengths or areas of weakness that you’ll need to develop? What resources are available that will assist you in that development?

I’m sort of stuck in an unholy limbo, between, on the one hand, an aversion to theory/ structure/ empiricism, a desire to act more instinctively, without burdensome, stifling social constraint, to be more adventurous, dangerous . . . And on the OTHER hand, a muscle-memory reliance on safe, methodical, custom and practice, which often feels like boring mediocrity. Is this the classic existential struggle between art and intellect?!?

Apropos nothing, I was reflecting on the course, thought about Richard Sennett and “The Craftsman,” and was reminded of a wonderful tune . . .

What are your existing talents? How will you draw on those talents, or use your time here to cultivate new ones?

Does the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” sound familiar? I’ve done many things but don’t really feel I’ve developed any true expertise. I went to law school, worked in business affairs briefly, supervised a number of film productions, produced a few myself, became a school teacher -- all meaningful in their own way, and combine for an interesting and fairly unique perspective, but I’ve always been a generalist with a rather low threshold for boredom. I really want to zero in and focus on something singular for a while, craftsman-like, to become highly competent, perhaps even a ‘specialist.’ I fear I may be fighting nature a bit here, given my history and, ahem, mature age, and I just may have to accept my faux-Renaissance Man tendencies (or, perhaps, ADHD). On a serious note, my greatest hope is that the Masters program structure will provide the time and space I need to learn the nuts and bolts of documentary craft, as well as the theoretical framework and intellectual discipline to develop a secondary school curriculum based on something more substantial than my gut and ‘hunch.’

What are you here for?

Ontologically and cosmically speaking, good question. However, articulating a clear purpose and specific set of goals for the Masters program is not much easier. As mentioned earlier, my original intention was to gain a background in documentary film, and research and develop a secondary school curriculum and create accompanying promotional materials. I’m not sure that’s entirely the case now. I do have other goals and ideas, though they are somewhat hazy at present . . .

What do you hope to achieve by the time you’ve completed the MA program, and immediately after? What courses will you need to take in pursuit of those goals?

At an absolute minimum I will leave the program with a completed documentary in tow, for which I’ll need to load up on production project courses. Beyond that, I hope to have a fully fleshed-out proposal for some sort of school curriculum, though I am revisiting just what sort of shape and form it might take.

What will guide the selection of your courses? What pragmatic concerns, or financial or time limitations, will influence your course selection?

Apart from my now muddied raison d'être for being here, the New York vs. Los Angeles question now looms large for me. I’m beginning to feel a bit uneasy about the workability, and advisability, of taking production classes online. I know the program has been conceived to facilitate this, but I’m not sure that’s the greatest value for money, especially since the on-site school resources are not available for my use. Given that documentary production -- actual, physical production -- is one of my two main goals for attending, I really need to think about relocating to New York sooner than later. Then, of course, there’s the “financial limitation” of rapidly dwindling economic resources, meaning I will almost certainly need to work upon arrival in New York. I haven’t approached her yet, but I’d love to explore the possibility of working with Carol Wilder on the “Media First” project.

What’s your time line? Will you be taking a full, nine-credit course load every semester?

My stab at a time line . . .

Will you be working, or do you plan to do an internship, volunteer, or get involved in student activities that might require a significant time commitment? How might these activities inform your course selections?

Work?? Who has time to work?!?! Actually, I will be doing some sort of work during the program, but more than likely it will be related and flexible. As mentioned before, I would like to investigate New School’s “Media First” project run by Carol Wilder. I’m aware that the university has frozen hiring for the time being, though I’d like to persuade Carol to consider me as ‘on deck’ when funds loosen up again. She mentioned in her lecture that the program hadn’t made a lot of progress yet, and I think I have a unique skill set and range of experiences that could be an excellent fit. Who knew the Academic Plan would also serve as a job application?!?

Examine the course offerings in other graduate programs throughout the university. Do any of these programs offer courses – courses that aren’t offered in Media Studies – that speak to your interests?

I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but did find a few classes that sound interesting and worth investigating:

• Theorizing Visibility: Witnessing, Showing, and Granting Regard in the Visual Media (Political Science)
• Truth Productions: Historical and Cultural Frames (History)
• Media, Advocacy, and Social Marketing (Milano Management & Urban Policy)
  

I’m also interested in art history, film history, acting, and screenwriting. I’d like to explore the possibility of taking one or more graduate level classes in these areas, especially when I become resident in New York, though it doesn’t appear the Media Studies schedule will allow for too much cross-fertilization. These may have to be purely for my enrichment . . .

Do you plan to complete a thesis? If so, what topics or projects are you considering? What courses would allow you to better explore those topics and/ or develop the skills or methods you’ll need to employ in the execution of your thesis. How might you use your coursework to advance your work on your thesis? How will your thesis impact your degree completion timeline?
To thesis or not to thesis, that IS a question . . . I am of two minds on this. With respect to the school curriculum I’m developing, a thesis may serve as evidence that I do have some expertise on the subject and generally know what I’m talking about. On the other hand, a thesis would not be the best professional format for such a presentation, meaning I’d have to also create additional, perhaps extensive multimedia materials along the lines of a grant proposal and support for the inevitable public ‘dog-and-pony’ shows. Nevertheless, I’m sure it would be a very useful exercise for me to go through the thesis process. But there are also more practical issues. I don’t know if it’s feasible in terms of program structure limits (not to mention my time and money) to pursue both a thesis and a production project. I’ll need guidance on this as well.

American Education in Crisis: Rebuilding Rome

Being in public education today has something of a Nero-like feel to it. Rome is burning to a crisp while our inimitable leadership is perched aloft in the Tower of Maecenas watching the enchanting inferno below and belting out their edu-speak version of the Fall of Ilium. It all looks so glorious and heroic from on high, but get down in the streets, where the twisted smoldering wreckage of their deeds have crippled the empire, and it is only then shockingly apparent how misbegotten has been their steerage.

Melodrama is always risky business when making a grave argument that seeks a momentous solution, but so titanic is the need for systemic education reform that it demands the use of every rhetorical tool in the arsenal. We must persuade people to action. Actually, “titanic” is an apt double entendre to describe the current state of the problems facing institutional secondary education in the United States. For all the time, effort, and intellectual and monetary capital expended over a century on defining and shaping a public education system, from the days of Dewey to the largely discredited No Child Left Behind initiative, collectively our schools are a pastiche of dissonant and often competing-purposed entities, lacking any coherent unifying principles, and worse, little relevance to the constituents they purport to serve. By and large, our students are disinterested in what we want them to learn, and in the ways we want them to learn it.

A review of much of the scholarly and lay literature from the past decade unearthed some kernels of hope that there are kindred spirits who see the conflagration for what it is – a social catastrophe that requires a complete re-imagining of the concept of “education” and the nature of a “school” – but the bulk of it is otherwise dismaying. It isn’t that many in the field aren’t trying. But after decades of unheeded clarion calls for “paradigm shifts” and bottom-up retooling, rehashing and reworking the same arguments and proposals, the fact is that we do no better than apply band-aids to a system that is crumbling under the weight of its own anachronism.

Our national approach to meet the dire challenges of squeezing a 21st century reality into a 19th century educational model is to rely on high stakes testing, uniformize teaching and content standards, and link funding to objective test performances. State and local responses to such inflexibility are often just as extreme and problematic, as those with the responsibility to make schools work are forced to experiment with untried programs, or haphazardly adopt piecemeal strategies without the time or money to consider how or even whether these efforts are reconcilable with anything else the schools may be doing. The story of school reform at the grass-roots level is, essentially, to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

There is an old saw with which we who have worked in large public school districts are distressingly familiar, to wit: administrations always add responsibilities and programs; they never subtract. The result is that, like modern Europe built upon the foundations of ancient Rome, we continue to legitimize and layer on to an already tenuous structure without fully examining whether there is any defense for shoring it up in the first place. And in the estimation of this writer, propping up the existing education structure is indefensible.

The sadly ironic truth mostly overlooked in the public and academic discourse concerning education, is that we generally know what works, and why. This may come as a surprise to (and elicit some dubious skepticism from) many who are otherwise invested in the industry of education reform. The literature is largely in agreement that “youth do their best work when engaged in activities that are personally meaningful to them” (Jenkins), though one could rightly anticipate that many outside the profession might arrive at the same conclusion ipso facto. If the issue of student ‘motivation’ is the common thread throughout the literature, it is the failure to adequately address or account for the phenomenon of motivation that is so glaring when one reads the scholarly works. Rather, most of the research tends to first acknowledge the widespread ‘macro’ problem, followed by a ‘micro’ analysis and/ or proposal. It is disappointing to say the least when researchers who appear to understand the severity of the problem, who empathize with the aspirations of those who would seek to tear down the old model and revolutionize our approach to education, make a sharp detour and instead focus their precious time and resources on something comparatively ‘small’ in scope. Studying the impact of, say, a “Project Look Sharp” (Scheibe) or the “CityWorks” curriculum of the Constitutional Rights Foundation (Kahne) in an effort to make some generalizations about how we might activate student engagement in civics and service, has merit as far as it goes, but such de minimis explorations do nothing to reinforce the scale of the problem, and in fact undermine the efforts of those who are calling us to arms by unintentionally suggesting that it is possible to arrive at a solution by continuing to apply first aid to a terminal patient; reading many of these studies feels akin to a bucket brigade trying to put out the fire while Rome is consumed by flames.

The goals of most of the recent research are ambitious, while the results are unapologetically modest; for example, rethinking what constitutes ‘citizenship’ in the 21st century, and arriving at a conclusion that “engagement and information-seeking begins with motivation,” without a satisfactory explanation of the latter (Bennett). Lyman, in a comprehensive literature review of his own, describes MIT as “home to a movement called constructionism in opposition to instructionism,” where students appear to be ‘motivated’ to learn by designing and building using various computer technologies, yet concedes the evidence and documentation on what exactly constitutes ‘motivation’ is sparse: “How and when do kids realize they are not consumers of culture or learning, but develop a sense of agency to create their own cultures?”

Perhaps the most extensive investigation of the literature was conducted by Zaff and Michelsen, in which they surveyed 60 studies on civic engagement. Like others, they identified examples of promising practice but observed that methodological defects and limited samples require caution and circumspection about making any broad inferences: research has not yet uncovered a reason for why motivation and civic engagement are linked, and there is an almost complete absence of longitudinal evidence of whether adolescent civic engagement persists following school participation in such programs.

Pearce and Larson also consider the elusive nature of motivation, and argue that teenagers who do engage in service and civic activism programs do so when they experience enjoyment, satisfaction, and/ or idealism, but, again, leave unanswered how these responses become activated.

We’ll return momentarily to ‘motivation,’ but first a digression. Much of the literature dealing with education reform concerning motivation generally and civic engagement specifically, tends to use the language of sociology and psychology: ‘affinity spaces’ with respect to informal and formal learning environments; ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’; ‘social capital’ and the relationship between its abundant presence and communities being more likely to achieve their goals. These concepts are all brought to bear on understanding just what it is that differentiates passive from proactive teens when it comes to school engagement (e.g., Kahane, Putnam, and others who claim that students who develop trust in and knowledge about their institutions will enter the broader society with greater social capital, resulting in civic and political engagement). But for all of these assertions and tiresome reliance on jargon, there is still no conclusive finding that definitively explains why some students are interested in history and civics, and why others could not care less. The closest we have to a ‘rule’ is that “personal relevance” is the “strongest predictor of civic outcomes,” and this emblematic observation from Kahane: “[O]bviously more work is needed to test the staying power of these shifts and their consequences once students graduate . . . Our data . . . do not permit more than speculation on the underlying causes of these relationships.”

Virtually every expert agrees that ‘motivation’ is the missing link in school and civic engagement, yet they are also almost universally loathe to declare victory without more empirical evidence from whence this mysterious phenomenon derives. This is not at all surprising given that, with few exceptions, most of the investigatory work on establishing these connections is framed with the same narrow perspective, asking the same limiting, circular questions of old, rooted in a world-view that bears little relationship to the one in which their subjects reside. Our academic institutions, as well as those who study them, are using outmoded benchmarks and frames of reference, the methodological equivalents of using the quality of one’s penmanship to judge the efficacy of education in the Information Age.

The basic problem with most of the data and the proposed solutions that arise from it, is twofold: proposals that are too numerous, disconnected, ad hoc, and haphazard at best, can find no purchase in any systematic approach to overhauling a failed institution so central to the health of our society; this is not camel-building. But the far greater problem with our approach to date is that we are asking the wrong questions at the outset. By far, the largest governmental initiatives to support, encourage, and foster the development of civic engagement emphasize community service, character education, and ‘traditional’ American history teaching. Thus we ask, ‘What can we do to stimulate interest in these activities? How and why does a young person become a political actor? What motivates one to act?’, or as Buckingham puts it, how do we move students from viewing “politics as a spectator sport?”

It would seem to be self-evident that for a society to sustain itself and prosper it must have a fairly clear and articulable notion of what its goals are with respect to civic education policy and programs. This is not so in the United States, nor has there ever been a consensus about the purpose of an education. And while we have been wringing our hands for a century over whether an appropriate educational experience is about inculcating ‘good’ citizenship among the elite or training factory workers or pacifying the middle and working classes, technology has eclipsed our imagination and hijacked the conversation. It is no longer relevant to simply ask what and why we should teach our children, a debate that can never be resolved. The real question we should be posing as we come to grips with our brave new world: what do students themselves want out of their education, and what makes us think we can make them learn what we want them to learn?

Which brings me back to ‘motivation,’ but in the context of what we do know about adolescent behavior, and a fossilized education model that harbors perilous consequences for our democracy.

We do know that technology has reshaped the human landscape in ways that were unimaginable, and only the futurists among us can speculate what else is in store, or how quickly it will manifest. We know from the scant but growing literature that our children are so much further progressed than adults in the understanding and use of this technology, and it is nearly impossible for creaky monolithic institutions like our mainstream schools to keep up. In this regard, let us employ some common sense even if the empirical data is lagging. Media of every sort is inextricably bound up and interwoven into our children’s lives – there is no retreat possible – and we would do well as a maturing society to recognize and acknowledge the fact of new media’s intrinsically motivating effect on young people. It is naïve at best, ignorant and dangerous at the opposing end of the spectrum, to believe we can ‘quarantine’ from or ‘immunize’ against exposure, and equally fruitless to insist that schools can realistically serve their students by stubbornly resisting the technological tsunami whose crest only rises with hyper-speed. Schools as they exist today are inherently second-class, shadowy ‘Bizarro’ worlds that cling to a distant past but that bear little resemblance to the world actually inhabited by teenagers.

Some scholars and commentators have embraced youth culture as it is, rather than what they believe it ought to be, and understand the urgency for re-envisioning schooling from the foundation up. Henry Jenkins, at the forefront of the movement to persuade educators and government that the very nature of American society is morphing before our eyes, towards a predominantly “participatory culture,” rightly argues for the need to shift our focus in academia to the “new media literacies” as a new paradigm for education, though he, too, qualifies and mutes his enthusiasm by agreeing that “more discipline-specific research is needed.” There are also those who write forcefully about the need to incorporate media and media literacy as a “pedagogical approach” rather than a “separate content or skill area” (Scheibe), or adopting “transdisciplinarity” as a way to integrate media across the curriculum (Galician). Steps in the right direction, but they do not go far enough. Others, like Michael Schudson and our own Liz Ellsworth, speak more to the necessity of radicalism when it comes to rethinking our educational institutions.

To be sure, there have been a number of high profile experiments in the redesign of traditional school curricula, such as Montgomery Blair High School’s Communication Arts program in Maryland, and the Communication Arts High School in San Antonio, where media study and production are embedded throughout the curriculum. But these remain notable exceptions, and highlight the unfathomable absence of similar programs nationally.

The position most reflective of my own is that expressed by Elliot Eisner in a presentation he gave to the Dewey Society at Stanford University in 2002. It is radical, it is profound, and it is one whose time has surely come:

“I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for . . . The public’s perception of the purpose of education supports the current paradigm. We need to sail against the tide. Our destination is to change the social vision of what schools can be. It will not be an easy journey but when the seas seem too treacherous to travel and the stars too distant to touch we should remember Robert Browning’s observation that “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” . . . And as Dewey said in the closing pages of Art as Experience, “Imagination is the chief instrument of the good.” . . . Imagination is no mere ornament, nor is art. Together they . . . might help us restore decent purpose to our efforts and help us create the kind of schools our children deserve and our culture needs. Those aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching for.”

In the final analysis, most of the literature skirts the most profound issues, or misses them entirely, choosing instead to focus on symptomology rather than pathology. In the meantime, our national education infrastructure teeters at the brink of irrelevance and disengaged students drift further and further, finding little meaning in the experience to sustain their interest. Occasionally events may interrupt the decline and precipitate a surge in civic engagement and participation – witness the unprecedented response to the 2008 presidential election – but unless our staid educational institutions respond in a similar, bold manner, their shriveling relevance will only accelerate, and the youth that has been so under-served will continue to discover alternate channels and pathways to learning, and ultimately cultivate new institutions that respond to their needs.

Perhaps the revolution in education is destined to unfold in this way, for the flames surround us even now and Nero can be heard clearly in the distance.

[Bibliography on request]

A Craftsman-like Conclusion

The range of Richard Sennett's intellectual curiosity and knowledge is breathtaking. This sprawling, simultaneously macroscopic and microscopic examination of the "enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake," is basically his rumination on the critical importance of honoring and dignifying society's workers, and the very real sociopolitical dangers implicit in failing to do so.

The narrative is sort of a loose dialectic with his former teacher, Hannah Arendt, book-ended by his observations that it is the exaltation of intellect over labor that leads to irresponsible science (like development of the atom bomb) and unchecked political power. Rather, all human beings -- Animal laborens as well as Homo faber -- have the capacity to understand their circumstances and make wise, informed decisions, and thus to govern themselves -- though working 'craftsmen' (in the broadest possible context) in particular because of the deliberative and reflective nature of the craft process, one in which success requires grappling with difficulty, ambiguity, and resistance (as evidenced by the estimate that it takes roughly 10,000 hours to develop any kind of expertise): "People can learn about themselves through the things they make . . . [M]aterial culture matters."

Archaic and Classical Greek philosophy and mythology, open platform Linux communities, CAD, medieval guilds and gold assaying, Renaissance 'originality' and Cellini's sex life, violins, Adam Smith and David Hume, Zen Buddhism, Diderot's Encyclopedia ("only the rich can afford to be stupid"), Voltaire, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, robots and replicants, Ruskin's Lamps of Architecture, brickmaking and stucco, culinary instructions for cooking chicken, the technology of dissection and screwdrivers, Christopher Wren and urban planning, "Frankenstein," Hobbes on the nature of imagination ("nothing but decaying sense"), John Dewey (who "believed in . . . learning one's limits"), social Darwinism, cell walls and membranes as metaphor for ecological boundaries and borders, scientific squabbling over HIV, Japanese television, Wittgenstein's house-building obsession, psychoanalysis, childhood play, Calvinism, standardized testing -- just some of the subject matter Sennett uses to make and illustrate his arguments. I'm exhausted.

There are many recurring broad themes in the book, especially the concepts of salutary failure and material consciousness/ awareness, all supporting his principal argument for the reunification of Head and Hand, the connection between which has been unwinding since Aristotle favored the architect over the artisan, the medieval workshop of personal sacrifice and obedience gave way to Renaissance authorship and celebrity, and the contemporary self-absorbed 'look-at-me' culture elevated individual over collective achievement. Because the hand influences the mind, to ignore or demean its part in the human experience is to perpetuate the division and lack of 'wholeness' in society.

I'm very interested in Sennett's discussion of vocation (life 'adding up' to the personal conviction that one is 'meant' to do a particular thing, that it's not just a "random series of disconnected events") versus career. He doesn't seem to take a definitive position on it, but makes the deterministic point that organizations and institutions that recognize the existence of an intrinsic vocational drive are likely to engender greater loyalty and productivity. A bit cynical for me, given my grandiose (though mostly secular) view on the profoundly important role that 'purpose' plays in our life's work, whatever it is. I'm more sympathetic to his argument that motivation (read, "relentless" and "obsessive") is more important than talent/ ability in the craft equation.

Sennett identifies himself as a member of the 'pragmatism' school of philosophy -- "making . . . sense of concrete experience" and the quality of that experience -- and likens many of his craftsmanship themes to Dewey's "socialist" writings a century earlier ("Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art."). Dewey, John Ruskin, William Morris were all socialists. For Sennett, "[g]ood craftsmanship implies socialism," that is, workers having shared, collective experiences.

In the book's most compelling summation argument, he maintains that human relationships generally can benefit immeasurably from the craft process: "Material challenges . . . are instructive in understanding the resistances people harbor to one another or the uncertain boundaries between people." Socialism or not, this is a brand of idealism that seems to be finding a new footing in our culture, a recognition that "modern democracy demands too little" of its citizens, and that if we pay attention to the details -- and to each other -- and work deliberatively, patiently, collectively, then we can find responsible solutions to the profound problems facing our society.

A final point about 'ethics' and craftsmanship. Central to pragmatism (and Sennett's thesis) is the effort to end the means-to-an-end approach to modern work. The process matters; taking pride and/or enjoyment from the work is itself justification for doing it. However, the fact that workers may be freed from the ends-means relationship does not imply that they should not be asking searching questions about what they are doing throughout the process. On the contrary, pragmatism demands it, and craftsmen are the ones most likely to have cultivated the skills to make these inquiries before and during the process. As Sennett points out, we don't have a crystal ball to foresee all the material and ethical consequences of our individual or societal decisions, but it is only through the practice of craft that we can train ourselves to look forward and imagine the myriad possible effects of our work.

If any part of Sennett's work resonates with me, it is his excoriation of ends-justify-the-means. Most of history's darkest periods may be ascribed to such short-sighted, selfish cynicism. It's a sort of collective sociopathy, infecting whole cultures and civilizations. Perhaps the oversimplified bromide of 'personal responsibility' contains more wisdom than we realize, and that broad shifts in consciousness really can have their genesis in individuals. Bottom line, integrity is all we really have . . .

Intellectual Biography

I would call myself a “career career-transitioner,” that is, one whose restless trajectory through the working universe is a determined and deliberate pursuit in search of one’s true place in it. There are naturally contrarians that would see the helter-skelter of my C.V. in less soaring terms, but they do not know the whole story.

After a seriously misspent youth in New York and New Jersey, I left the east coast for golden California in search of something elusive, though it clearly involved fame and fortune. I had a vague notion that, because I starred in my high school play, it logically followed that I would become a celebrated actor and make my way around Los Angeles in a limousine like everyone else there.

When I arrived, at 17, I discovered there were a few hurdles I’d first have to get over to achieve stardom. As I was contemplating the fast track to Hollywood nirvana, it occurred to me that it probably wouldn’t hurt to take a college class or two in preparation for the extremely unlikely possibility that I wouldn’t have my own prime-time sit-com in due course. I was more than a little apprehensive about returning to school. I did not possess an especially solid academic foundation for higher education inasmuch as I left high school prematurely (dropping out, some call it), and to this day I understand I hold the dubious record for least number of classes attended in school history (it’s good to be the best at something, right?).

In spite of this inauspicious scholarly beginning, I somehow found my way to UCLA, where I received a political science degree and graduated with honors. This came as quite a shock to my friends and family, but not nearly as much as it did to me. Thus, after becoming the first person in my family to graduate from college, I decided to push my luck and collect a law degree while I was on a roll. As if that wasn’t enough parchment for wall-hanging, I also began an MFA program in film production at UCLA, though that process was cut short when I left the country for an affair of the heart in Sydney, Australia. One marriage, one son, and, characteristically, many jobs later, I returned to Los Angeles.

I worked here and in Australia in the entertainment industry in something called “business affairs,” and for a few years dabbled directly in film production. In addition to my executive support work on a variety of film and television projects, I also produced a couple of undistinguished films, had a brief co-production partnership with my teen idol, David Bowie, and accrued a box full of press clippings. All of this amounted to a big ‘so what’ for me. I spent nearly two decades feeling completely disconnected from my work, and though it would be dishonest if I did not admit that many aspects of working in media were satisfying, at a deeper and soulful level I was totally alienated from the process.

That changed when the most improbable thing that ever happened to me, happened to me. I became a schoolteacher. This unpredictable and ahistorical turn of events left me with the distinct feeling that there really must be something to the concept of ‘teacher-as-calling,’ that the profession chooses us. Ten years on, teaching has become more of an avocation than a job. It’s certainly an adventure. As any teacher will attest, the occasion for calling one’s ‘calling’ into question arises frequently in education; it ain’t easy. Yet whenever crisis or reflection seems certain to dim (or doom) my enthusiasm for the work, something inevitably happens to validate my choice and confirm that it was a very good decision.

All of that said, a large part of me is still very much anchored in, and hankers to be more directly involved in media. Documentary and narrative film under girds my teaching. I am a voracious student and consumer of media. I have continued to remain connected to that community in a variety of ways, including by way of old relationships, memberships in professional associations such as the International Documentary Association, attendance at festivals, markets and trade shows, and my own personal writing, development and production activities. I also teach film and direct theater occasionally. I never really left my old world entirely behind.

Still, my previous working experiences in media left me disillusioned, and I could not readily identify a place for myself within it. And yet I seemed to always have a sense that I was destined to return to media in some manner.

Ultimately it has been teaching that revealed a new direction for me, and for once my potpourri of employment seemed to be working in my favor. I have had an unusually wide variety of teaching experiences – middle and high, urban and suburban, private and public, traditional and charter, diverse and homogeneous, large and small, single gender and co-ed, parochial and secular, and as an administrator and school developer.

From the outset of my career shift I saw my role as a teacher in terms of ‘mission,’ but it was only with the benefit of this big-picture view of education that my particular purpose began to come more clearly into focus. Over time I saw that no matter what the philosophy, size, locale, gender, political ideology, socio-economic status, or public/ private status of the school, one thing was consistently true: the mass ignorance of history and abject lack of interest in current events was surpassed only by the abysmal quality of their instruction.

This worried me. Deeply. I’m not the first person to observe that our national report card on American history intelligence is an embarrassment. And don’t get me started on world history. David McCullough, historian and Pulitzer-prize winning author of John Adams and Truman, has long recognized the dangers associated with our ignorance of history: "I don't think there is any question that students in our institutions of higher learning have less grasp, less understanding of, and less respect for American history than ever before. To our shame we're raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate." Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, shares McCullough’s deep concern: "Americans of all ages have a dangerously poor understanding of American history.” But Cathy Gorn, University of Maryland professor and Executive Director of National History Day, puts her finger directly on the pulse of the problem by linking the crisis in history and civics education to flawed and outmoded instructional methodology: “There is a crisis in learning in American schools . . . History education gets little attention from reformers and policy makers . . . As a result, while no child may be left behind in math, history remains even farther behind. How can we ensure that students leave school historically literate? We must revise the way in which history is taught and thus learned in America's classrooms, so that teachers engage their students in a meaningful study of the past.”

Our collective national ignorance is staggering. A recent Zogby poll revealed that Americans are far more likely to know the planet that Superman is from than the name of the planet nearest to the sun, can name two of the Seven Dwarfs three times as accurately as they can two of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, can identify the latest “American Idol” winner over the name of the latest Supreme Court appointment, 2 to 1. And while 42% of Americans can name the three branches of the U.S. government, twice as many know all the names of the Three Stooges.

I just couldn’t dismiss the implications of such widespread ignorance without considering the consequences. David McCullough again: “For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential if we are to hold onto and sustain our freedom.” But Thomas Jefferson said it best: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be.” And so, I had a personal epiphany. I could combine my love of teaching, background in film and television, and commitment to public service and social justice by creating a high school program dedicated to these objectives.

There is a critical need for a secondary school program aimed at nurturing a deeper awareness of our nation’s history and institutions, fostering an abiding and lifelong interest in contemporary issues and public service, and providing 21st century communication skills to facilitate effective participation. It struck me that the union of civics and media studies is a unique opportunity to stimulate students’ engagement in crucially important issues that concern them and provide them with the tools to do so meaningfully, so that they may intelligently and effectively engage in the public debate.

It now seems clear that my meandering journey has led me inexorably to The New School Media Studies program. My time here will provide the space and opportunity to more fully develop my ideas, to establish a much-needed theoretical and statistical foundation for the project, and ultimately to create a compelling formal proposal. We have but to look around the world today – we don’t need CNN to tell us – to see that such a program is desperately, urgently needed.

Research plan in the making . . .

I'm still unclear about what exactly I want to learn/ discover, so of course it follows that it's rather hard to design a research strategy. I'm developing a curriculum for a high school program and needless to say it would be a great boon to my efforts to implement it if I had some precise, concrete data to prove my assertions about why it's so fabulous and indispensable!! I'm going to post more details soon, but here's the basic plot taken from a working draft of my proposal document; essentially, the argument for the program. I'm looking forward to reactions after I roll out the rest of it!

"Proposal and Design Plan for a New High School Program

The Challenge: The concepts of public service and informed participation are essential to a democracy.

Yet, study after study indicates that young people in the United States today lack a fundamental understanding of their own history and, consequently, their role in a democratic society. This ignorance of the workings of democracy translates into apathy and low voter turn out. The transformative events of September 11 in particular underscore the need for informed young men and women to be involved in civic life. The next generation of leaders needs to understand how their voices can influence the public debate, and to understand the power of a democracy. Beyond understanding, young people must also acquire the skills to express how they feel about issues that concern them so that they may intelligently and effectively engage in the public debate.

That there is an alarming problem is not at issue, nor is the general consensus that failure to address the problem aggressively holds potentially dire consequences for our nation. Some part of the problem must be ascribed to the manner in which history and the social studies are generally taught.

To that end, we propose a new kind of school program. One that will reinvigorate the teaching of, and interest in, American history and its institutions, and inspire lifelong public service and participation."