For the last several years, I’ve been trying to incorporate new assignments and activities that encourage students to think of the work they do in my courses as having real impact on their lives outside of the classroom. I’m trying to work against their tendency to sit through a course as if they were a mere “repository” for information– Professor puts it in, they regurgitate it on command, and then all is forgotten at the end of the term– a model unfortunately encouraged by the laser-focus on “testing” in primary and secondary education. I want my students to have learned something at the end of the semester, obviously, but I also want them to have something to say. I want them to be producers and evaluators of knowledge, not just temporary storing-houses for it.
I’m also trying to encourage (okay, force) students to proactively undertake the social and political responsibilities that come along with being an educated person in a grossly undereducated, deeply unjust, and actually dangerous nation like ours. At a small Catholic university with a significant student demographic of DACA students, first-gen students, and working-class students, it is sometimes difficult to convince them to take ownership of their place in that ambiguous thing we call “the academic community.” (Mine is not a R1 university.) But, my students know very well that the education they are receiving is something many of their parents don’t have, a lot of their friends won’t get, and most of the people from their communities couldn’t dream of. I try to remind them of this often.
My strategy of late has been to frame this project of ‘taking responsibility for your education outside of the classroom’ as a kind of obligation to “pay it forward.” Last year, I introduced my Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades (ERG) which, among other things, requires students to seriously evaluate the advantages/disadvantages they arrive in the classroom with, the extent to which their academic achievements are actually “merited,” and how measures of academic achievement could be most justly distributed in a highly-competitive learning environment that exists on an uneven playing-field. You can read my full account of ERG here, but one of the most surprising (and rewarding, for me) outcomes of that experiment was that students independently devised plans that bequeathed credit to “future generations” (i.e., students in the same class the following semester). I think the “pay it forward” message is getting through.
So, this semester, I introduced a new assignment: the “Postmillennial Public Service Announcement.”
Students in my courses this semester– an introductory-level ethics course called “Contemporary Moral Issues” and an upper-division Philosophy course called “Technology and Human Values”— were given the option of creating a “Postmillennial Public Service Announcement” video in lieu of taking the Final Exam. (Whenever I introduce new pedagogical devices into my courses, I always make them “optional” for the first semester so I can work out the kinks!) My basic idea behind this assignment was to give students the opportunity to take what they had learned over the course of the semester and offer some educated, informed advice to their peers (and/or people younger than them) in the medium postmillennials access/consume most for “information.”
[NOTE: The youngest “millennials” are post-college-aged (22), and the oldest millennials are pushing 40yo. Students in college/university now are “Gen Z.” This year’s freshman class was born in 2001. I suspect the “Gen Z” generational moniker will change soon, so I used “postmillennial” in my assignment to refer to people aged 7-22yo.]
Before getting into the specifics of my Postmillenial PSA assignment, I want to head-off one potential criticism of it, namely, that every student may not have the tools necessary for completing it available to them. The first time I required students to create a short-film for a course was way back in 2012 (see here). Today, almost every student carries around in their pocket a smartphone with higher-quality filmmaking capabilities than professional filmmakers had a decade ago. Students today are not only far more aesthetically attuned to how images are best employed and manipulated to communicate– this is the Snapchat/Instagram generation we’re talking about, after all– but they’re decades more tech-savvy than students even 5yrs ago. I think there may remain some (rapidly diminishing) reasons to worry that not all students have a smartphone, so I designed this assignment in such a way that it could be done without one. Every Mac and PC comes equipped with super user-friendly video editing programs, also available for free via Google, and students can use images/video from the web to complete the assignment. Every college/university has computer labs. So, in sum, every student can do this assignment.
Here’s the assignment for the lower level “Contemporary Moral Issues” course:
CONTEMPORARY MORAL VALUES “POSTMILLENNIAL PSA”: Students enrolled in this course have the option to create a short video “Public Service Announcement” (PSA) in lieu of talking the final exam. A “PSA” is a message in the public interest that is disseminated with the objective of raising awareness or changing public attitudes and behaviors towards a contemporary moral, political, or social issue.
Over the course of the semester, we will have considered several contemporary moral, political, social, and technological issues. Some of them will seem unimportant to you, but at least one (hopefully more) will be something that impacts your life and well-bring directly. Students who opt to submit a PSA will create a short video for a “postmillennial” audience (i.e., people who are now between the ages of 7 and 21) that directly answers one of the following questions:
- What do I value and why?
- What is the most important emergent technology today and why should postmillennials know/care more about it?
- What is the most important contemporary moral issue and why should postmillennials know/care more about it?
- What philosopher should postmillennials read and why?
And here’s the assignment for the upper-division “Technology and Human Values” course:
TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN VALUES “POSTMILLENNIAL PSA”:
Students enrolled in this course have the option to create a short video “Public Service Announcement” (PSA) in lieu of talking the final exam. A “PSA” is a message in the public interest that is disseminated with the objective of raising awareness or changing public attitudes and behaviors towards a contemporary moral, political, or social issue. Your PSA must address the importance of being informed about at least one of the emergent technologies that we have discussed this semester.
What follows are the minimum requirements I set for the Postmillennial PSA assignment. I will admit in advance that I made several on-the-fly adjustments to these requirements and I made more than a few exceptions to them as I met with students about their projects.
- Videos must be between 1-2 minutes long (for narrative PSA’s) or 2-4 minutes long (for music video PSA’s). Only original music/lyrics are allowed in music video PSA’s.
- Narrative PSA’s must include a minimum of seven jump-cuts. (A “jump-cut” is a video-editing term, which indicates an abrupt transition from one scene to another.) Music video PSA’s must include a minimum of five jump-cuts.
- Videos must be shot in horizontal orientation. (If you’re using a smartphone, TURN IT SIDEWAYS!)
- Videos must directly, substantively, and correctly reference at least one philosopher that we have studied in this course. Bonus if it includes a picture of that philosopher.
- Videos must include a “title card” and credits. These do not count toward the time-limit restrictions.
- Videos must be uploaded to a site that is viewable by the public (i.e., YouTube or Vimeo) and they cannot be password-protected.
- Videos must be well-conceived, well-edited, engaging, and informative.
- Videos must be styled for, and obviously targeted to, a postmillennial audience.
Just a couple of other notes: (1) Students were required to let me know at least 3 weeks in advance whether or not they were opting to take the Final Exam or create a Postmillennial PSA, and there was no reversing that decision, and (2) Students were required to speak with me in person about their intended PSA project before beginning it, mostly just so I could veto ideas that were impossible or terrible.
As is the case with all pedagogical experiments, students turned in some real duds for this assignment. But, overall, I was really impressed with what they produced, and I think I have a pretty good idea about how to tweak/clarify the assignment next semester. Anyway, here are some of my favorites:
From the Contemporary Moral Issues course, a PSA on the importance of philosopher Marilyn Frye (by Riley Chafin):
From the Contemporary Moral Values course, a PSA about the emergent technology of in vitro meat (by Emilee Hawkins):
From the Technology and Human Values course, a PSA about the Da Vinci Surgical System and how it may transform the healthcare system (by Heidi Stonecipher):
From the Contemporary Moral Values course, a PSA about the importance of John Stuart Mill (by Maximilano Gallizzi):
From the Technology and Human Values Course, a PSA about augmented reality (by Joseph Smith):
From the Technology and Human Values class, a truly hilarious PSA from the perspective of our future robot overlords on why we should not fear them (by Zachary Yancy). I don’t want to play favorites but this video is so brilliant in so many ways, not least of which is the fact that Yancy used only “stock” photos of humans and a robot voice-over for narration. Okay, whatever, this is def my favorite:
From the Technology and Human Values course, a PSA on the addictive influence of social media (by Kiana Lashay):
From the Contemporary Moral Issues course, a PSA about drones (by Abbey Criswell):
From the Contemporary Moral Issues class, a PSA about immigration reform (by Matthew Nguyen):
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FWIW, I teach more than 100 students per semester. I have at least a dozen more really excellent videos that I could have shared. After only one semester, I’m already persuaded that this is an excellent assignment. There are still some kinks to work out– I welcome your suggestions in the comment section below!– so I will probably keep this as an “optional” assignment (i.e.,alternative to taking the comprehensive Final Exam) for now, but I’m very happy with it’s inaugural run.
As I tell my students on the first and last day of my courses:
“Right now, you are are pursuing a tertiary degree in what is still one of the most free and envied educational systems in the world. In this class, you sit in a safe, climate-controlled, and technologically-advanced room for three hours a week and are permitted to talk about ideas. For almost 75% of Americans and 93% of the global population, what you are doing will never be possible. Of the 7 billion humans living on the planet right now, you are literally the “elite.”
Twenty years from now, humanity will be looking to YOU– the taxpayers, the job creators, the Senators and Congresspersons and Mayors and City Councilpersons, the activists, the scientists, the engineers, the doctors, the lawyers, and the “educated select” of the general workforce– to make the world a better place. One hundred years from now– if and only if humanity still exists– people are going to wonder how and why YOU did (or didn’t) do what was necessary to make things better.
DO NOT take your privilege for granted. Earning an advanced education is not about grades, even less about your job prospects or your future earning potentials. It is about assuming a set of responsibilities– to learn, to educate, to share and explain, to improve and advance, to protect and to serve– that the overwhelming majority of human beings will simply never have the adequate tools to assume.
PAY IT FORWARD.”