One of the challenges that we want to take on head-on in this blog is the problem of conversing with students (and with each other as law professors for that matter) about the law as a tool of and manifestation of power. What is it that we’re really after when we want to teach about the authority of law and how it mediates power relationships? How can we best convey the terms of such issues? Or, is this a worthwhile inquiry at all? I think that this issue lies at the heart of this blog project.
As you’ve read from Professor Jena Amerson’s post last week about Teaching at the Speed of Light, our concern revolves around the problem of teaching to Millennials. As she put it, our issues and questions revolve around the problem of “how best to get their attention” in light of their living almost their entire lives in the Internet age.
Yet, there’s a content component to this issue too. There is a lot to be said about communicating content in a way that teaches how to think critically about the nature of the world and the nature of legal relationships. This awareness ideally makes a student conscious of the problems of using legal power and how that power can be usurped and transformed. In a perfect world, law schools would enable a student while learning the law to gain this critical facility. Thus, such students would be conscious of questions like “to whose advantage a particular judicial ruling works?” and “to what ends does a particular opinion or legal principle serve?” and would be able to articulate a view about the nature of the rules she studies.
To me, the question is how do we teach our students about the politics of law (without, of course, making the course about some form of critical theory itself). This, of course, is a question that professors have struggled with during each generation of American legal education. This struggle often reflects the ideology of the professor, the ideological splits present in the Supreme Court and the lower courts at any given moment, and the politics within a given educational institution. To this enduring debate, I am suggesting that there may be a new layer of questions related to how we discuss the politics of law with the Internet generation.
I hope your answers to this question fill this blog. As a first pass answer, let me suggest that the radical democratization of media that the Internet age represents provides us with a new teaching opportunity. One of the defining characteristics of this period is that anyone with a computer and a webcam can contribute to any debate they wish. YouTube and the blogosphere allow anyone with the capability to be an opinion maker. Indeed, Wikipedia, has allowed “the masses” to help with the production of knowledge. This is the world from which our students come; this is the challenge that we face as teachers.
One recent example of this phenomenon can be found concerning the so-called Ground Zero Mosque Controversy. I recently blogged in another forum about the interesting battle of YouTube videos going on between the Ground Zero Mosque Rap!!! and the country video, We’ve Got to Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero. Here, we have two different takes on this controversy. One represents the moneyed propaganda of special interests. The other video represents an apparently grassroots effort. The two attempt to persuade and motivate their audiences to at least think a particular way about their positions. I raise this not to take a position on the controversy, but to draw an analogy: that technology allows a path for anyone, including students to take a stand about current issues and to exercise their critical facilities. Indeed, it may be an apt approach to encouraging their critical and analytical skills at the graduate level..
Our project with this blog is, in part, to comment on our experiment concerning whether the collaborative and democratic construction of knowledge through blogging and social media can effectively function as a teaching tool. The learning forum for our students to this end is a blog we created for our students called Thoughts on Citizens United. In that space, our students, along with others who will contribute, are taking on substantive question of how to construct an understanding of this landmark case. There, we have asked students to contribute thoughtful blog posts regarding Citizens United to build their knowledge about it and how it relates to issues of corporate governance, election law, constitutional law, legal theory, and other legal topics.
Our premise is that by encouraging students to utilize their own agency and creativity in reading and commenting on the world they see, and thereby taking informed public positions (in a way similar to that I saw in the YouTube videos) they can, for themselves, create the knowledge that they seek. We invite you to observe, participate, and comment on this experiment.
(An afterword: related to the issue of democratic access via the Internet is the challenge faced by those people who, due to poverty, do not have basic access to the Internet? Note that these people may largely be people of color. How should we consider their rights to participate in the radical democracy of the 21st century? How are their legal relationships affected by the fact that they are “off the grid.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment