Teaching Seinfeld

A couple of weeks ago, USA Today‘s pop culture blog featured a guest author, Denise Du Vernay, a lecturer in Humanities and Communications at Milwaukee School of Engineering and co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (she also tweets). For her guest spot, Du Vernay posted a column entitled “I Teach The Simpsons to College Students — and Here’s My Syllabus.” The brief write-up includes a full syllabus for a composition course on The Simpsons, but it can certainly be adapted, Du Vernay points out, for “an upper division literature, humanities, sociology, political science or even creative writing equivalent course.”

While I don’t really care for The Simpsons, I’m a big fan of incorporating popular culture into the classroom. Ever since I was “forced” to teach rhetoric courses as a graduate student, I have inundated my syllabi with pop culture. For instance, my former writing students and I have covered the ins and outs of

• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• beauty pageants
• movie posters
• The Colbert Report
• Chappelle’s Show
• South Park
• Harry Potter
• Adbusters
• Psycho
• depression-era photography
• Barbie
• Bowling for Columbine
• a plethora of advertisements
• the local and national news
• To Kill a Mockingbird (the film)
• the American western
• the Men’s Movement
• Bringing Down the House, and
• film noir.

Exploring those shows, movies, topics, etc. with students, most of whom had never thought critically about popular culture in their entire lives, was loads of fun (eh, the essay grading, not so much). But I have to admit that one of the most joyful, entertaining, hilarious, and satisfying rhetoric classes I have ever created and taught was on Seinfeld.

So in the spirit of Du Vernay, who so graciously shared with the world her course on The Simpsons, I have posted my Seinfeld course for a similar purpose: so that “people who can’t envision how to effectively use objects of contemporary pop culture to teach the course requirement” will perhaps be inspired to do so. Imagine what fun you and your students would have!

Seinfeld: Sitcom, Game-Changer, A Show about Something

PS. I’d say that roughly 60% of my students had never seen an episode of Seinfeld prior to taking my course, and some of them had never even heard of the show (*gasp*). But that didn’t stop them from wanting to watch, wanting to learn, and ultimately creating phenomenal portfolio projects.

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