This Course at MIT

Reflecting on Student-Led Presentations

Student-led presentations are important training tools given the importance of oral communication skills in many workplaces today. In addition, since the class was not a research-oriented course, the presentations small groups provided for the class each session on the assigned topic for the week were an opportunity for students to practice their information-seeking and information integration skills. I pointed them to initial sources, and then set them loose on the subject.

Students’ presentations sparked many conversations in class about how to define what “counts” as political participation. Scholars have traditionally studied voting as the main form of political participation, which necessarily means overlooking the kinds of political activities in which people too young to vote have engaged. This class reflects the newly developing consensus that we need to revise our scholarly understandings of the meanings of political participation, past and present.

In this context, one theme that kept cropping up in class was the link between cultural and political expression. In the 1920s, the word “flapper” referred to a hair and fashion choice, but it had political connotations as well. Similarly, the mostly non-white Americans who sported Zoot suits in the 1940s were targets for violence, not merely because of their fashion choices or musical tastes, but because of the political associations with these cultural choices. So students presenting on rap music considered the extent to which cultural expression, in the form of rap music, “counted” as political participation. Many enjoyed listening to rap music before, and came away understanding it as the latest in a long line of young peoples’ cultural artifacts with political meaning.

Augmenting the Curriculum with a Visit to the MIT Museum

Visiting the MIT Museum allowed students to learn about the history of political participation among MIT students, and to look at primary sources.

Curator Deborah Douglas pulled out a variety of ephemera – posters and flyers – mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. We had the students brainstorm what they thought these materials were about. We supplemented those with more posters, photographs from the period of campus and off-campus protests, and other campus materials, like the year book, student newspaper, and other university publications.

It was interesting for the students to learn about the kinds of political materials produced by earlier generations of MIT students – such as the popularity of silk-screening in the campus fraternities – and to rethink their initial assumptions about poster content in dialogue with other materials. We talked about how history gets written, and how writing history depends on who saves what. We speculated about how future historians will write the history of the current generation, in light of the fact that so much is happening online, rather than on paper.

Teaching Strategies that Made the Class Engaging

Professor Light made class sessions highly interactive. At the start of each class, she wrote a series of questions on the board to get our minds thinking. This strategy also made it easier for me to organize all of our readings according to topic and political participation technique.

I thought Professor Light’s emphasis on not necessarily reading every word of a 60-page text made it easier for me to engage with the material. Overall, I felt I had a good handle on the readings, but didn't feel the pressure of having to know all the ins and outs of every passage. It made the high volume of reading and wide breadth of topics manageable, and helped me understand the bigger picture shaping the movements at the center of our readings.

Additionally, Professor Light showed a video of a movie from the "Flapper" era, along with a modern series on racial inequalities across school districts. These multimedia presentations helped me internalize the course material. In general, she made a three-hour afternoon lecture very bearable and actually fun, because she combined different mediums (book chapters, pictures, movies) and let class discussions flow naturally.

Also, the in-class student presentations were great. They were casual enough to not be stressful for presenters, and involved very interesting topics that were quite relevant to, but also very different from, the readings. Finally, students had the freedom to structure their presentations however they wanted to, which made the experience more interesting for everyone.

Visiting the MIT Museum

Our field trip to the MIT museum illuminated a resource that all MIT students have right down the street. "Youth political participation" can seem far-removed from the present MIT student's life, and political activism can seem like a phenomenon of other times or other places. By seeing real photos of MIT students from the 1960s holding up signs and gathered in front of our very own student center, we learned about demonstrations and movements that were literally close to home. Seeing crisp posters, some with scrawled words of response, others printed on old type-written lab paper, also made what we learned feel more tangible and memorable.