Thursday 19 March 2009

This is a simulation

Huge swathes of Baudrillard today - I enjoy his work, but the students are getting restless. Some understand him, some don't and won't, however much we try. Potlatch, symbolic exchange, simulacra and hyperreality are tough concepts - but education isn't about providing nice chunks of digestible fare: it's about provoking students to explore the ways we conceptualise existence, even if - especially if - it leaves you defamiliarised and nervous.

2 comments:

dot said...

even though i think i understand the majority of baudrillard's thesis (mainly these from lectures) for some people it is sometimes hard to concentrate during lectures... baudrillard is not 'so very interesting' for lots of students if you don't think deeply about his theories and what he actually says... i'm afraid that it is sometimes the matter of constantly hearing 'this is a simulation' about almost everything, or finding 'reality' actually nowhere around - it makes one confused and often makes student think that what B. says is absurd. most of my collegues just don't care about it because they don't understand. and they don't even try to understand. i think that many of us need to be more encouraged during the lectures - sometimes they just seem too boring, so if you already don't care much, after this you don't care at all.
but, anyway, it is still students' fault if they don't care - if they decided to study, they should care, or quit

The Plashing Vole said...

I take your points - there are certainly alternative ways to teach/demonstrate these ideas and it's the job of a good lecturer to engage students' interests, on the understanding that students are prepared to engage in return.

I think there's also a wider educational problem: schools and increasingly universities are being encouraged to consider education as a matter of information transmission rather than as a site for exercising one's capability for abstract reasoning (which is much harder to assess). Thanks to this, students are reluctant to discuss rarefied conceptual ideas because they don't provide clear, quantifiable outcomes.