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Williams, Bronwyn T. Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 211 pp.
It is a fact of life that students watch television. Most likely, students watch more television than read. We’ve all seen the statistics: by the age of 18, the average teen has viewed about 200,000 violent acts on television. By the end of elementary school, a child has seen 8,000 murders on TV. More Americans can name the Three Stooges (59%) than can name any three Supreme Court justices (17%) (Herr). These and other statistics imply the imminent (or present) death of literacy, which sends chills down any compositionist’s spine. We have often mourned this loss with comments like “they can’t write because they haven’t read anything! All they do is watch TV” (qtd. in Williams 2). This link between television and the loss of literacy is, as Bronwyn Williams argues in his book Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, a fallacy. The frequent complaining about students and their television-viewing habits “begins and ends with hand-wringing and despair”: in other words, our complaints get us nowhere with reaching our students.
Williams, in Tuned In, explains how composition teachers can use our students’ obsessions with CSI and Grey’s Anatomy can be useful for the classroom—and not just as something to write about. When television is used in the classroom, Williams explains, it is most often as “a diversion” from the usual teaching of literature or as a topic that helps students become more motivated (3). As Williams observes current pedagogy, noting the hierarchical divisions between print literacy and visual:
For teachers of writing, mass popular culture in general and television in particular are often the enemy against which we battle in the name of writing, rhetoric, literature, and the essay. We see our jobs as enticing students back to the one true faith of print literacy. We rarely think about the nature of the visual and cultural literacies they possess as a result of their long viewing histories in any ways other than, perhaps, as a source of material for them to criticize. (3)
Williams explains that we must give up our thinking of television as the enemy which we rail against with writing. Instead, he asks, how can we use television to our advantage? Williams is correct when he asserts that televisual literacy is a fact of our students’ lives (4). Rather than ignoring this ever-present fact, Williams suggests we mine our students for the expert visual literacies they have mastered over the years of watching television shows and advertisements. Williams reminds us that “television is something students know, that they feel confident about, that they are sure they can talk about with authority” (2). Because of this, Williams believes composition teachers need to nurture that authoritative voice through writing, rather than stifle it with writing.
Tuned In explores the unrealized fact that something our students are expertly literate in—television—can aid them in understanding how to communicate through writing. Rather than take the predictable route of being a “how-to” book about teaching television, or even developing a cultural/critical studies writing course, Williams’s book explores our assumptions behind using (or not using) televisual literacy in the composition classroom. As Williams explains, “the goal of this book is to make writing teachers more aware of and responsive to the ways that television is already influencing their students’ writing, and to show teachers how to draw upon certain critical discursive abilities their students possess, but that have generally been dismissed and ignored” (13). Rather than battling against the “intellectual wasteland” of television and other popular culture media (2), composition instructors need to acknowledge and embrace students’ literacies and experiences, making their knowledge work for their writing.
Why do our students prefer Family Guy over F. Scott Fitzgerald? Some might assume it is because television is easier, and assume the couch potato stereotype. In fact, Williams asserts that our students choose televisual texts over print texts simply because they have more experience with the medium, not necessarily because it is “easier” than print (12). In the recent book Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson similarly argues that contemporary television is actually quite complex, as many popular programs (like 24 or The Sopranos) rely on a highly detailed back story and multiple plots and subplots. The stereotypical couch potato is not equipped to handle programs like these, as their complex stories ask much of the viewer to interpret, analyze, and remember from week to week. Williams takes Johnson’s argument further and applies it to literacy studies. The reader of Tuned In may also make the connection between Williams’s arguments and those of James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Both scholars take reviled texts (television and video games, respectively) and find the educational value in them, and argue the ways in which these alternative literacies are formed can help struggling students in the writing classroom.
Perhaps one of the biggest strengths of Tuned In lies in its methodology. Williams relies most heavily on the voices of his students to draw his conclusions about televisual literacy and how it can aid student writing. He notes that “too often student views are conspicuously absent from work that addresses issues of mass popular culture and student writing. [. . .] For me it was politically important in this project to let students have their say [. . .] rather than simply treating them as ill-informed dupes of dominant ideological forces” (7). Williams designed a reception study to explore the television viewing habits of fifteen students of first-year composition. Through a process of interviews, television viewing, and discussion, Williams asked the students about their experiences with and critiques of television. As the methodology is structured to focus on the student, the reader of Tuned In sees the potential for using visual literacy within the writing classroom, as the reader can understand the students’ opinions on the topic. As an empirical researcher, Williams expertly paints a clear picture of composition students today through his ethnographic work.
One minor complaint is Williams’s in-depth review of the literature on television and its division from print literacy. While this is expected, as this study came out of his dissertation work, the reader may find it necessary to skim some of the first chapter, as it explains in great detail how television has been reviled in the academy. This is an acknowledged and experienced fact; as such, the reader does not need to be persuaded on the issue in such detail.
As a scholarly text, Tuned In contributes to the increasing body of research on alternative and popular culture texts in composition studies. However, the work does more: instead of merely serving as a “how-to” guide for incorporating visual literacy into the classroom, Williams chooses the less-traveled and more interesting path—that of spending a great deal of time building theory about literacy and about our students’ experiences. The fact that Williams relies so much on the voices of FYC students indicates their importance to our work—and implies where our focus should be. Williams gives us great insight on contemporary students, allowing readers of Tuned In to reconsider their assumptions about their students’ literacy skills. Williams asserts, “in the field of composition [. . .] we have an ethical obligation to practice and teach the communicative forms that are in the center of our culture, as well as the valuable forms that exist on the margins” (187). If we broaden our definition of what counts as “literacy,” Williams argues, we can better meet our students’ needs.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
Herr, Norman. “Television and Health.” The Sourcebook for Teaching Science. 28 Oct. 2007 http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html.
Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead, 2005.
Williams, Bronwyn. Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2002.
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