Designing a Pop Culture course

[Sabrina_Fried]

This sounds like an awesome idea. What kind of assignments are you planning to give? Maybe you could actually have them write fan fiction or create their own fan comics.

Depending on how crafty the students are, maybe a cosplay assignment?

[Sabrina_Fried]

See if you can find a TV show called Fanboy Confessional. It's Canadian but you should be able to find it out there somewhere. Only a handful of eps but they talked about the Zombie Walk phenomena, cosplay and fur costumes, LARPing, all kinds of stuff I think you might find appropriate.

There might be region coding involved, and I can't really tell because I'm Canada (wow, I don't get to say that very often!) but it looks like you can view Fanboy Confessional online at Space's official website: http://www.spacecast.com/fanboyconfessional.aspx

[Matt]

Depending on how crafty the students are, maybe a cosplay assignment?

I'm wary about scaring them off with a concept they're probably quite unfamiliar with. Maybe in the future but certainly not the first time I run it.

Of course, I have to convince the school's curriculum board to approve it first. The English Faculty loves the idea, mainly because we'll be reading more and introducing concepts they do in literature courses later on, but the english head didn't think the board would tick off on it ... mainly because it'd be too 'out there' for more conservative people.

Which annoys me since they have such electives ... well, one of them is going out for a bicycle ride. Hrm.

[Iangould]

Maybe you could choose a specific pop culture "brand" - like The Avengers or Buffy and follow it through all the different media and the associated phenomena like fan-fic and cosplay.

[Matt]

I don't think I could stretch it out that long, honestly.

I'd rather do snapshots of different brands and titles and keep it really fast paced.

[StoneGold]

I don't think I could stretch it out that long, honestly.

I'd rather do snapshots of different brands and titles and keep it really fast paced.

Crap, I want to make a joke about keeping it under an hour, but I'm just guessing you haven't seen the last episode of 30 Rock.