Politics in fiction and film: An interdisciplinary approach to an abstract topic

The Promise and Potential Pitfalls of a “Learning-Centered” Approach to Creative Social Inquiry: Lessons Learned from an Undergraduate Seminar on Authoritarianism through Literature and Film

“…The FYS was a welcome chance to incorporate a range of disciplinary lenses in the form of autobiography, literature, film, popular culture, and news reporting. Such an approach mirrors the shift toward interdisciplinarity in college teaching, as political science curricula and political scientists at many institutions are drawing increasingly on perspectives from history, economics, sociology, and the arts and humanities (Bostock 2011;Burgos 2008;Krukones 1989;Lieberfeld 2007;Pappas 2007).…”

“…Next, turning to content and delivery, I decided to bring to life what might otherwise seem abstract academic subjects and research topics by exposing students to the very issues that scholars study as they appear in common cultural formsnovels, memoirs, films, and popular media (Bostock 2011;Buss, Redburn, and Cheney 1981;Deets 2009;Funderburk 1978;Irvine 2008;Krukones 1989;Lieberfeld 2007;Neuse 1980). Whereas in a discipline-based seminar, students read and analyze scholarly articles to gain an understanding of the issues and debates, in the FYS, I wanted to bring students closer to the creativity of social science by presenting the social, economic, and political complexities of life under authoritarian rule in a visual, imaginative, and therefore more immediately accessible way (Dreyer 2011;Marion 1988;Soper 2010).…”

“…Suggestions for incorporating a range of teaching methods-from active, cooperative, and experiential learning (Archer and Miller 2011;Bergren 2011;Huerta 2007;Occhipinti 2003;Wolfe 2012) to community-based and service-learning (Gorham 2005;Harris 2010;van Assendelft 2008), multimedia, blogging, and podcasting (Lawrence and Dion 2010;Rackaway 2012;Roberts 2008), simulations and debate (Glazier 2011;Omelicheva 2007;Omelicheva and Avdeyeva 2008;Oros 2007;Shellman and Turan 2006;Wedig 2010;Werning Rivera and Simons 2008), and popular culture (Beavers 2002;Centellas 2010; Van Belle 2012), such as fiction (Cnaan 1989;Downey 1984;Krukones 1989;Pappas 2007;Rogers 1976;Taylor 1977), film (Bostock 2011;Sunderland, Rothermel, and Lusk 2009;Valeriano 2013), comedy (Beavers 2011;Buss, Redburn, and Cheney 1981;Funderburk 1978;Lieberfeld 2007;Marion 1988;Teten 2010), reality television (Dreyer 2011), and music (Soper 2010)-can be readily applied and adapted to new or existing courses. Collectively, such works not only form a rich repository of innovation and best practices but they also serve an important persuasive function: encouraging teache...…”

Toward a Collaborative Model for Interdisciplinary Teaching: Business and Literature

“…Although some models of interdisciplinary courses suggest that one person coordinate a series of modules, team taught by faculty from different disciplines (see Krukones, 1989, p. 61), our model recommends full integration. Our model also adopts Stanley Fish's perception that an individual cannot be interdisciplinary (1989), for each person must develop expertise in a specific discipline.…”

Film in the Spanish class: contrasting representations of Franco's Spain inEl andénand¡Bienvenido, Mr Marshall!

“…[20] For discussion of this theme in anthropological, sociological, and historical literature, see Wilton Martínez (1992); Peter Crawford (1992); Michael Krukones (1989); Jeremy Stoddard and Alan Marcus (2006). Jonathan Godwin (2003), whom we follow here, provides an experimental study of student reactions to anthropological films, which confirmed the fear, outlined by Martínez (1992), that student responses (both positive and negative) to film in the classroom are inevitably dependent, sometimes alarmingly so, on mediatized stereotypes, in the way forecast by critics from Adorno & Horkheimer (1979) onwards.…”