Roger Saul

KevJumba and the Adolescence of YouTube

This article considers the significance of YouTube as a pedagogical space from which young people can play participatory roles as theorists in their own constructions as popular cultural subjects. Drawing upon the public profile of ‘KevJumba,’ a teenager who makes videos of himself on YouTube, the article suggests that representational practices of adolescents on YouTube can serve an important educative function. They can do the work of disrupting conventional constructions of adolescence in popular culture, of demonstrating that adolescents can be savvy critics and skillful negotiators of the social constructions made of them, and of highlighting how external controls inform the presumed autonomy that online practices self-expression offer young people. Paying attention to the popular cultural practices of adolescents on spaces like YouTube can offer a contemporary educative venue from which to contemplate how young people do the work of defining and contesting their place in the popular imagination.

Education and the mediated subject: what today’s teachers need most from researchers of youth and media

Abstract This article suggests that in our current historical moment of pervasive, mediated self-making, researchers of youth and media are well positioned to make a vital contribution to the lagging perceptions and vocabularies that educators often draw upon in seeking to understand their students, and to energize a debate that has thus far only taken place on the peripheries of educational practice. Along these grounds, what marks this current media moment as different than earlier ones, especially for young people, is that increasing numbers of them are, in very public ways, enacting the post-modern presumptions that social constructionists have long since asked educators who work with them to consider. To the extent that these processes of redefinition are occurring in mediated spheres and that educators are, for reasons of disciplinary and professional constraint among other factors, unable to fully engage and learn from the mediated spheres of their students, researchers of youth and media have a particular opportunity with respect to informing educational thought and policy in this regard.

When critical stances become scripted: Impediments to resonant dialogue in the education classroom

This essay, a speculative work, suggests that educational encounters of critical theory and pedagogy are today too often hampered by an emerging form of schooled reproduction in which university learners perform critical stances in order to garner recognition rather than for reasons of intellectual or political commitment. It suggests that the performance of these stances contributes to discursive conformity and threatens the vitality of the critical university classroom. It then pursues a strand of argument that considers two emerging, interrelated paradoxes of critical classroom practice, each indicative of how scripted critical stances can function as impediments to resonant educational encounters. The first, referred to as the ‘cultural capital paradox’, suggests that where expressions of critical theory and pedagogy are prized, a danger lurks that students may perform criticality simply to garner approval. The second, referred to as the ‘linguistic formalism paradox’, takes up the politics of language usage and positions some of its current contestations as impediments to the sustenance and success of the critical dialogical sphere.

Teaching Duquan Weems: Fallacies of the Hero-Teacher Construct as Seen in The Wire

The construct of the lone heroic teacher is a dominant trope in Hollywood’s depiction of teaching and learning. In film and on television, hero-teachers have long been projected as pseudo-saviors to those students most in need—the poor, the oppressed, the dispossessed. In 2006, with the coming of HBO’s fourth season of The Wire, a compelling narrative was added to this televisual landscape. It challenged familiar narratives precepts in presenting a much more complex, nuanced, and realistic depiction of pedagogical work in struggling North American schools. Within the broad sociological sphere mapped by The Wire, where, between 2002 and 2008, the fictional series explored the interwoven workings of one city’s civic institutions—its political class, police force, drug trade, dockworkers union, newspapers, and education system—this chapter focuses on one aspect within the latter. It takes up the relationship between one teacher and one learner—Mr. Roland Pryzbylewski and Duquan Weems, or “Prez” and “Dukie”—and explores how its workings prompt consideration of a series of social issues that are often obscured in popular and professional discourses about the teaching-learning relation. The chapter suggests: that notions of effective pedagogy are impoverished in cases where the social forces enveloping teacher/learner relationships are cast aside in favor of ahistorical narratives of pedagogical development; that the very notion of the fully actualized liberal humanist teacher is one the teaching profession as currently constituted could never tolerate among its members; that liberal humanist teaching ideals may in some circumstances function as useful conceits even in spite of their shortcomings; and that a transformative pedagogical relationship must ultimately conceive of education as a socio-cultural relation that extends beyond schooling spheres in order to address inequities within it.

Adolescence and ClockTime: Two modern concepts intertwined, revisited, reconsidered

This article engages the intersecting sociologies of adolescence and time, two concepts that in their modern, universalized iterations are born of a proximate historical moment. It suggests that conceptual studies of being young – in this case, studies of adolescence, but also, broadly conceived, of childhood and youth – can be deepened through inquiry into the definitional orthodoxies of time. Brought about in large part by the new temporal relations of subjectivity, sociality and community endemic to life online, new approaches to the scholarship of time have of late blossomed in cultural studies. The article asks, Can new orientations to time – that concept so foundational to definitional notions of adolescence – complicate contemporary understandings about what it means to be young? And can new orientations to time re-energize scholarship focused on documenting the various terms by which adolescence takes form as a social construction, particularly as global imperatives to managerialize and over-determine young people’s lives intensify?