I’m a big fan of thinking exercises, short activities that model (in familiar forms) the kinds of thinking students need to be doing when it comes to critical reading and writing. I had a surprising amount of success this semester with two exercises, one recently which I used on the last day of classes, and one mid-semester which I plan to use in the future as an introductory exercise at the beginning of the course. For all we talk about pedagogy in The Academy, I feel we don’t share enough of our classroom successes and failures—why reinvent the wheel, for instance, when you can borrow or modify someone else’s vehicle? Thus, procedures for these thinking exercises after the jump.

This exercise requires a music video, a handout of the lyrics, and a computer with a data projector to screen the video.

This exercise was done in a First-Year Writing course themed around literature; the class length was 75 mins. I teach college freshmen for the most part, but this semester I had a nice mix of freshmen, sophomores, and a few juniors and seniors. Of course, this meant that my lessons had to be pitched right at the center of the learning curve, so that it was accessible to everyone if at different levels of thinking. The music video exercise ended up doing this perfectly, which may be something to keep in mind if you have a wide range of deconstruction experience among your students. It’s important to note that this exercise was created specifically for literary deconstruction, but I don’t see why it can’t be tweaked to work on deconstructing narrative essays as well.

First, I selected a music video that students were likely to be unfamiliar with; since they’re steeped in music, they carry a lot of preconceived notions and associations with the songs they do know. I also wanted a video that lacked a clear narrative, since my students tended to focus on summarizing plot in their essays rather than taking a formalist approach to the material. Being a child of the 80s, I was torn between New Order’s “True Faith” or ABC’s “Look of Love” but opted for the latter in the end, as the images related more easily to one another than they do in “True Faith,” brilliant as it is. (My main fear was that it would be too difficult as an initial exercise, but perhaps it could be brought in mid-semester as added practice.) Prior to class, I remixed the lyrics to the song in a way that imitated a poem, so that students would be able to relate it visually to poetry we were reading and so their interpretations wouldn’t be colored by their familiarity with refrains, verses, etc.

In class, I looped the video on silent without telling them what it was and asked students to work in small groups (2-3 in each) to note what struck them without ascribing meaning to it. They were asked to relate it to other things they were reminded of, how the atmosphere made them feel: essentially, a reader’s response. This took place in roughly 15 mins. We reconvened as a class for 5 mins, during which I polled the groups for their top 2 observations. Students related “The Look of Love” video to Mary Poppins and A Clockwork Orange and noted how a sense of danger collided with otherwise whimsical and comical elements. I then asked groups to ascribe meaning to the video, still looped on silent. This took 15 mins, after which we reconvened for 10 mins. Students made claims about a connection between danger and happiness, about the ineffectiveness of religion as depicted by the flying nun, about sexism, about the seven deadly sins, and so on. Interpretations were wide, varied, and very creative.

Finally, I put the music on and passed out the lyrics. Students then refined their interpretations using the lyrics, and their location during the video, as a guide. The results were astoundingly successful. Students were able to notice tiny details about where the video lined up with the lyrics and thereby reach conclusions about the lack of power in the relationship (signified by the electric plug in the pasta), hopelessness (signified by gluttony), identity crisis, and much more.

To tie this back to literary deconstruction, I spoke briefly about how the type of thinking they had just employed was the same type of thinking expected of them in examining literature.  We then revisited a few poems we’d looked at earlier—Plath’s “Daddy” and Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”—and briefly deconstructed 1-2 stanzas of each.  This cemented student understanding of the exercise and of literary deconstruction as a whole.

Think I might keep this exercise on standby for the rest of my teaching career.