In spring 2021 the idea of “lenses” will play a more central role in RWS200. Each unit will provide students with a “lens” that gives them a way of examining target texts and writing about some aspect of their cultural and/or personal context. The lens can be an explicit framework we give them, or it can be a model text that students can use as a guide for examining other texts. Since each unit teaches students to use a lens for analysis, they can also apply this to topics that matter to them, or to their own lives.

Our hope is that this approach will a) give you and your students more flexibility, b) allow you to use a number of short, engaging texts (rather than a few long texts on a single topic), c) give students more choice and flexibility in the writing they do.

Here are some examples to illustrate the approach.

Example Lens 1: Narrative & Argument. We have a set of short texts that examine the way narratives persuade and shape how people understand the world.

• The first text, Todd May’s “The Stories We Tell Ourselves,” claims the stories people tell about themselves in conversation are deeply rhetorical – they are crafted to create a persona, position the speaker, and persuade an audience.
• The next text, Johann Hari’s “The Cause of Addiction,” claims the stories we tell about addiction help shape drug policy, and we need new, better stories.
• Another text, Seagal’s “Tales from the Cutting Room Floor,” suggests the stories found in reality TV shows like Cops and American Detective cultivate distorted, racist understandings of crime.
• Colin Stokes, “How Movies Teach Manhood” is a 20 minute TED talk. Stokes claims the stories that surround us in popular culture have a subtle but powerful persuasive force, influencing the way we think about gender roles and identity.
• Finally, Joaquin Castro’s “Latinos Love Hollywood, but Hollywood Hates Latinos,” claims Hollywood movies tell stories that distort, demonize, or ignore Latinx people.

All of the texts just mentioned are short, and we have developed teaching materials for some of them.
You could discuss some of these texts in unit 1, then ask students to write a paper that examines or compares the arguments they make about narrative, and also invite students to write about the narratives that matter in their personal or cultural lives.

Example Lens 2: Dangerous, Demagogic, Authoritarian Arguments. We have some materials and short texts that explore authoritarian and demagogic discourse. One particularly useful resource is the work of Trish Roberts-Miller. Roberts-Miller describes the key rhetorical features of demagogic and authoritarian rhetoric. (One feature of this rhetoric is the use of fallacies, so this can be an opportunity to teach fallacies).  You can supply students with common “target texts,” such as George Wallace’s speech on segregation, or language used by more recent extremist groups, including the manifestos of mass shooters. You could also give students fictional texts to analyze, or let students pick their own text to analyze.  

Example Lens 3: Analyzing Gender, Race, and Class.  We have a set of texts that provide frameworks for analyzing gender, race, and class. Most of these texts focus on some aspect of contemporary popular culture.

• Gender: The documentary (and transcript) The Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture provides viewers with a "lens" for understanding patterns in advertisements. It argues advertisements use a small set of cultural "codes" to represent masculinity and femininity, shaping how we think about gender. The documentary is from 2009 and examines traditional broadcast and print media. But since 2009 we have seen huge changes in the way people consume media. This video could be used as a lens to look at social media - for example, at male and female Instagram stars. Student could use it to examine the patterns in their social media feeds. For more info see our wiki content from fall 2019. We have teaching materials for this documentary, as well as a folder that contains other texts on gender.
  
  
• Race: A study by Darnell Hunt, Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA, called “Race in The Writers’ Room: How Hollywood Whitewashes the Stories that Shape America,” could be used by students to examine how race is represented in the popular texts they consume. Similarly,
  the activist group “Color of Change” just published a study called “Normalizing Injustice: The Misrepresentations that Define Televisions Scripted Crime Genre.” The categories and concepts from this study could be used by students to investigate how crime and race are represented in the TV and movies they watch. There is a study titled “Latinos in Film: Erasure On Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,200 Popular Movies,” that could be used as a lens to explore Latinx representation in pop culture. The following could also be used: “How Latinos Can Win The Culture War,” Some other texts on Latinx representation can be found in this folder.
  
  
• Class and Inequality: in spring 2014 we did a unit on class and inequality. You can view some of the materials on this web page.