Examining Afro-Japanese Encounters Through Popular Music

The following lesson plan introduces a class-wide collaborative creative project that requires students to select songs to be compiled into a class Spotify playlist. Originally delivered in an online format at Rikkyo University’s Global Liberal Arts Program in Tokyo to a class of Japanese students in the fall of 2020 as part of the course “Afro-Japanese Visions: Past, Present and Futures,” this specific assignment asked students to imagine that they were leading a cultural exchange event to introduce Black British artists and culture to the Japanese public as part of the UK’s Black History Month celebrations through their curated Spotify playlist. In particular, this assignment aims to use popular music to encourage students to consider how contemporary Japanese society represents “blackness” as well as connecting this to wider historical Japanese interactions and intimacies with African diaspora populations

Teaching (with) Popular Music: Editor’s Introduction

Introduction to the special issue "Teaching (with) Popular Music

Learning about Music Fanzine Cultures: Making a Music Fanzine in the Classroom

In this article, I present a lesson plan taken from one of the sessions of an undergraduate module titled Music, Technology and Everyday Life. The lesson plan is on Music Fanzines. Students are introduced to key scholarly themes around zine-making during a one-hour lecture, and during the seminar they work towards the production of their own music fanzine. Through this process, students are encouraged to reflect on the practice of zine-making from the perspective of the participant, in close dialogue with scholarly literature, and learn about music culture by becoming part of music culture.&nbsp

Editors' Notes

This issue of Teaching Media Quarterly presents four lesson plans that explore relevant topics in media studies today: political humor and perception of politics, participatory culture and misinformation, news literacy, and critical analysis of post-production color technologies

Teaching Political Humor: Entertainment, Exaggeration, and Echo Chambers

This three-part lesson plan aims to deepen students’ understanding of how humor impacts public perceptions of political events and political players. The activities are designed to work with current events or issues preoccupying the political-cultural landscape at the time of class instruction. The lesson plan is adaptable for online instruction. The first and (optional) second lessons focus on the functions of political parody and draw heavily from Jason T. Peifer’s (2013) analysis of Saturday Night Live parodies of Sarah Palin. Peifer’s concepts of parodic reflection, refraction, and creation are easily translatable to parodies of contemporary political figures, like Donald Trump, and help students analyze the critical distance that makes parody humorous. The third lesson explores the circulation of humor and how late-night comedians create echo chambers that amplify select perspectives

Digital Color Technologies: Color grading, restoration, archives and criticism

In “Digital Color Technologies: Color Grading, Restoration, Archives and Criticism,” Jennifer O’Meara zooms in on film aesthetics and film color by exploring the trends brought by the new post-production color technologies. The lesson plan, designed for a 2-hour class period, covers the unit of “digital data, archives, and aesthetics” in a Digital Theory and Practice course. The lesson facilitates students to approach film and digital color analysis through a critical lens and can be adapted for a variety of critical media studies, visual studies, and digital studies courses. During the lesson, the instructor will offer an hour-long lecture, covering topics of analog and digital color grading, racial dynamics of color technologies, black-and-white media, digital restorations and color analysis tools, and digital color appreciation. After the lesson, students are expected to complete a practical task of creating a color palette, which will become part of their digital portfolio

Teaching News Literacy During a Pandemic:: Adapting to the Virtual Learning Environment

This lesson plan is based on a collaborative teaching project between the co-authors that was implemented for an online community, over the course of a week in the fall of 2020, in response to the specific teaching and learning challenges presented by the pandemic. The online news literacy program was adapted and expanded from previous iterations of a one-day, in-person workshop, integrating specific pedagogical and engagement strategies for a much broader and more diverse learning community. The authors detail their approach to news literacy from a critical media and information literacy (CMIL) framework and how the program's content and activities were distributed and scaffolded across five days of online engagement

Memes and the Spread of Misinformation: Establishing the Importance of Media Literacy in the Era of Information Disorder

Sulafa Zidani and Rachel E. Moran in “Memes and the Spread of Misinformation: Establishing the Importance of Media Literacy in the Era of Information Disorder” aim to equip students with the skills to tackle misinformation and participate in online conversations critically and ethically. The lesson does so through introducing core concepts in media literacy and participatory culture, such as “user-generated content,” “memes,” and “information disorder,” and facilitated student activities to examine their everyday social media consumption. Students will learn to identify the characteristics of culture and technology, connect user-generated content with the spread of dis/misinformation, and apply learned theories by remaking a meme or a different form of user-generated content to serve a different informational purpose

Teaching Political Celebrity and Fake News in the Age of Trump … through Hindi Cinema

To avoid the pitfalls of teaching political celebrity through an example that hits “too close to home,” I teach celebrity politics by showing the 2010 Hindi-language political thriller Rann, written and directed by Ram Gopal Varma. Through scenes of how footage is edited to make the incumbent candidate look guilty, scenes of how fake news footage creates the day’s headlines, and scenes of how the politicians rhetorically manipulate both their cronies and the average citizens, Rann presents an opportunity to witness and discuss the effects of fake news, media influence on elections, and celebrity politics without overtly discussing contemporary American events (although it is quite rewarding when students make comparisons to contemporary American politics on their own during discussion). The lesson plan encourages students to think critically about the relationship between celebrity, news media, and politics. Students contemplate the role emotions play in political decisions (both by voters and lawmakers) through a consideration of affect and melodrama. Ultimately, students are encouraged to be savvy consumers of political news and information by understanding that the media aim for ratings rather than clear presentation of political platforms and that our fears and anxieties, which the media and the spindoctors of political campaigns prey on, can influence our voting decisions

Teaching Celebrity: Editor's Introduction

In this special issue, Teaching Media Quarterly provides instructors with resources for teaching celebrity in the classroom. This introduction demonstrates the importance of doing so and briefly introduces the issue's lesson plans