Teaching Future Shock Science Fiction Amidst a Global Pandemic

Garret Castleberry

Biography | Notes

Keywords: Science Fiction, Future Shock, Pedagogy

The following is a narrative teaching report designed to walk educators, scholars, and science fiction enthusiasts through the development process of an experimental curriculum design set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 global pandemic. I will begin by establishing a context for the course design and provide a brief description of the university infrastructure that the class was designed for. Next, I will discuss the creative influences that helped shape the unique direction of the class, including the methodology for selecting, identifying, and assigning course readings and media screenings. This report will then offer a brief description of key assignments designed to address safety concerns amidst a period of uncertainty regarding in-person classroom engagement. I offer a rationale for how traditional classroom duties were modified to limit in-person seat time while expanding departmental strategic planning. Finally, I discuss key outcomes experienced as we sought to provide educational opportunities for students enrolled at a minority-serving institute at the literal crossroads of Middle America. I conclude with an examination of the implications and learning outcomes that emerged from teaching this hybridized curriculum design structure amidst a period of heightened social anxiety. While imagined as future-oriented science fiction dystopias, these prescient films and this teaching project resonated prophetically with the course’s situational present. It was a project science fiction future that felt eerily present with faculty and students.

I teach at a small private university at the borderlands of America’s breadbasket, the Deep South, and the American Southwest. Our state, once identified as “No Man’s Land”, exists ideologically as one of the last “frontiers” but also a site of neocolonial pain. We’re an outpost of sorts, struggling to embrace progress. And yet, not unlike the Mega Cities in Judge Dredd, our state demographics demonstrate diaspora inward toward concentrated metropolitan zones. Once fertile farmlands are now incapable of sustaining life without increasingly costly technological manipulation of water, fertilizer, and the towering machines that make farming possible. Our university houses a quaint physical campus, but economic inflation and consumer demand prospered our online college at a more competitive rate. Administrative and faculty collaboration thrusts the curriculum design process to the breaking point to meet twenty-first century market demands. In an age of accelerated change and heightened demands for immediacy and instant gratification, we fashion lean, mean fast-track learning machines that provide traditional (a near-obsolete term) and non-traditional students alternative options that compliment complicated lifestyles.

The Communication course Special Topics in Media Studies was designed as an oblique entrance point to several rotating themes suitable for academic industry. The previous year I taught a semester-long Special Topics course under the banner “Introduction to Film Studies”. This 16-week course was broken into five three-week “units” with each unit tackling a specific film genre, with a single week allocated at mid-semester for a “one night only” B-Movie Drive-In Double Feature. While that course was a dream come true for faculty involved, the bulk of curriculum clearly led to observable student burnout in a class primarily occupied by student athletes and Communication majors. Burnout was articulated primarily through nonverbal expressions of rejection: drifting off/falling asleep during films, frequent exits during class, apathetic and dismissive posture, and eventual written/oral end of course evaluation data that the class “lasted too long”. Upon reflection, I redesigned the class for the following fall semester, scaled it down to a single film genre focus, and offered it on a Tuesday evening schedule for five consecutive screening weeks, with a sixth week set aside for final project presentations. Once again, we emphasized twin themes of Film Studies and Genre Studies, but this time, we altered the genre focus toward an entirely new and controversial direction, that of future shock science fiction.

Future Shock borrows its name from the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book. A sociologist and public intellectual, Toffler wrote a best-seller primarily because his range of observations about rapid social change tapped into a vein of public anxiety. Around this same period, science fiction cinema gained traction with increasingly mature stories that ranged from allegorical to downright fearful. While sci-fi produced many sub-genres since it first emerged, future shock sci-fi represents a narrow conversation interested in reading certain dystopic cinema as both artistically daring but also politically charged. Cable channel Turner Classic Movies (or TCM) aired a “Spotlight” series hosted by Chicago film critic Michael Phillips in September 2013. As a month-long host, Phillips provided intros and outros to a curated list of what he calls Future Shock films. The deliberate naming of future shock is important in establishing its credibility, let alone its criteria for inclusion. Sensing future shock’s atmospheric resonance now set against a real-world pandemic, I set out to uncover this sub-genre’s origins, its expansive reach in popular culture, and its theoretical implications not just as entertainment but as parable and possible harbinger of things to come.

Synergizing Genre Themes and Weekly Screenings

The provisional or brainstorming phase is among the most creatively rewarding elements when approaching a new course design. Cultivating ideas for the Special Topics focus on Future Shock Science Fiction Film first incubated as thoughts on paper, in a leather-bound journal used for film notes during media screenings. The process graduated to white board organization, where core tenets in Toffler’s future shock theorization were matched against accessible films eligible to show at an ideologically conservative institution. At this stage, I invited an enthused colleague (and Chair of the considerably larger School of Business Leadership) who, like me, loves film and took graduate courses in film and literary criticism. As a university advocate and supporter of our media focus with the comm program, this colleague served as a sounding board to test predictive strengths and weaknesses of the course design. Subsequently, the same colleague demonstrated further solidarity by sitting in on our course screenings and then joining me for the asynchronous lecture podcast recordings.

I reduced a list spanning dozens of speculative future shock texts down to ten, and then five. Films were not eliminated from consideration due to a lack of genre potency as future shock sci-fi or because of inferior quality. Rather, films were separated so that each week’s feature could represent and reflect a different theme resonant in our growing understanding of future shock cinema. Ultimately, it felt prescient to move chronologically through the film selections so that a conversation about evolving genre cycles (and cultural conditions) could accompany our understanding of how these occasionally disparate films worked together. The final slate allowed the course to represent four decades across fifty years. I screened the following films weekly in this order: Soylent Green (1972), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), and The Hunger Games (2012). The enrolled students, the business school chair (a film aficionado and co-host of our Special Topics lecture-cast), and myself as course instructor gathered for five consecutive Tuesdays in September, seven years to the month that I first gained insight into reading select science fiction films as Future Shock.

The five films featured occasional thematic overlap regarding their Future Shock conventionality, but each represented a master theme which was incorporated in the syllabus, lecture, and the digital learning platform. Coinciding with the chronological screening list, the following themes were cemented both for their generic as well as theoretical potency: Eco-Warnings, Post-Apocalyptic Threats, Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance Culture, and Matriarchal Saviors. These five topics allowed us to introduce unique lenses with which undergraduate students could begin to process media differently while learning how to apply course readings as well as their own critical insights. Class would begin each week with announcements, followed by a mini-lecture introduction to the film screening, which was simulcast on Zoom and later curated into a Future Shock video lecture playlist on YouTube. Mini-lectures comprised bridging context between film media and assigned readings and then highlighting the core future shock tenets identifiable while screening the film.

(Curriculum) Designing the Future

The Future Shock Sci-Fi film course was designed to introduce students to five distinct themes derived from Toffler’s Future Shock book (1970), specifically outlined in Alexander Grasshoff’s Future Shock documentary short hosted by Orson Welles in 1972. Identified themes did not simply constitute “sci-fi” or “dystopic” genre conventions, but instead must correlate to intersecting tenets highlighted through Toffler’s longform social theorization. The Turner Classic Movies “Future Shock Spotlight” series that ran one evening per week in September 2013 inspired the conceptualization for this genre offspring. Spotlight host and film critic Phillips collaborated with TCM to curate a select array of dystopian near-future features, tales that spanned from speculative science fiction to far-flung post-apocalyptic menace. Films ranged from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) to George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). TCM, known for its classical film preferences, even jumped ahead temporally to include Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent satire Total Recall (1990) and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). While TCM’s televisual branding strategy typically de-emphasized film theorization, this curated film list allows audiences space to speculate narrative and generic throughlines. From TCM’s limited film slate, I thus expanded upon their filmic categories to include features that met one or more of the criteria outlined by the Future Shock documentary and book. In the following sections, I describe two thematic assignments and one multimedia pedagogy strategy intended to cocreate an immersive learning environment for students enduring the heightened journey of an accelerated course cycle. A large percentage of these students were in their first semester of an accelerated learning pace, which constitutes a process that implores expediated rigor and adaptive effort.

Survival Journal: Students were tasked with keeping a weekly survival journal, but rather than limit their creative output to written communication, students were encouraged to consider organizing their thoughts into a vlog-style multimedia journal. The vlog mimics a typical convention in recent science fiction, the video journal left behind by a missing, thought dead, or deceased scientist. The educational value of the exercise obviously involves preparation, and the results produced variable creative approaches that also provide demonstrated labor that is assessable in ways that align with program and course outcomes. For example, one student sat at a desk to record his vlog, hand-written notes and course textbooks clearly visible onscreen. He spoke into the camera at length, working through his processing of the readings against how they related to the hardened themes presented in each week’s future shock film.

Another student embraced the spirit of breaking the fourth wall, which occurred whenever they would offer self-deprecating meta-commentary about their inexperience filming themselves or suggest a lack of familiarity with genres like science fiction. As a qualitative and critical scholar with career experiences in public speaking education and speech/debate coaching, facilitating a learning environment with multimedia requirements also involves the constructive process that grants students independent spaces to build competence (and hopefully confidence) through individual repetition and eventual reflection. Because students are required to post their independent vlogs to our Desire2Learn (D2L) platform—among the most common practices to offset seat time minimums in online, a/synchronous, or hybrid learning cycles—the assignment instructions encouraged constructive criticism among participants. Whereas post-screening wrap-up talks sometimes pressed students to share opinions that still needed time to process, the vlog provided an outlet for them to articulate their reactions to each week’s assigned media text. This practice also helped to support introverts in the class that typically would cede their floor time to outspoken voices in the classroom.

Future Shock Genre Analysis: At the end of the course, students crafted a genre analysis essay using the theoretical tenets that they accumulated through the combination of readings and screenings. Given the undergraduate emphasis, students were further taught the “D.I.E.T.” formula (describe, interpret, evaluate, theorize) as a way for novice writers to organize arguments. Straightforward analytic tools like the D.I.E.T. method assists returning adult students in particular, (i.e., older adults returning to college after a substantial break) and has shown value with ESL students that lack full fluency with the English language. A final project was also assigned to mark the end of the course and gather mild qualitative feedback of the effectiveness of the accelerated seminar, its structure, and any points of resonance with class participants. These assignments were designed to satisfy broader needs of marginalized students as economically distressed, identifying as a minority, returning as an adult learner, or navigating college while personally managing mental health concerns. The genre analysis paper demonstrates student competency at close reading mass mediated texts while a closing roundtable discussion promoted a combination of media analysis, digital communication competency, and reflexive response to the course experience. With these criteria collectively shaping our class identity, it became pivotal to navigate the sci-fi film list and curate pre-screening commentary with careful consideration for how these old and new film media might trigger our own future shock.

Supplemental Lecture: In addition to providing live mini-lecture lead-ins to film screenings, another goal with the Special Topics in Media Studies course is to not only address academic concerns regarding seat time but also speak to rapid shifts in time sensitivity, aka attention spans. We currently face a unique period in Higher Ed history. No matter the age or demographic, adult attention spans exhibit rapid decline across student demographics, pressing educators to expand the conditions of their pedagogical preferences. This is a qualitative, ethnographic observation over fifteen years, but shared experiences on this topic continue to grow, as does research into tools that might help us combat increased shifts in practice and preference.^[1] In our media studies courses, where intentionally grappling with long-form media texts represents a fundamental requirement, two solutions emerged. First, I sought to provide students with an asynchronous lecture that can be accessed digitally and sped up or replayed, “sampled” or skipped over. Cohosts and I record episodes with a minimum two-voices dialogic format, which attempts to democratize the educational process, rather than classical monologues that align with the information-deposit banking model found in traditional education. This pedagogy embraces the co-creation of knowledge through pluralized cross-readings. In what some consider a losing battle over control, our program’s goal is to place course materials in the hands of students and give them an opportunity to grow in knowledge and experience in asynchronized opportunities of their choosing.

Second, under unprecedented national conditions, I looked for solutions that could limit in-person seat time in a period of considerable social concern. As the COVID-19 global pandemic surged , tensions within Higher Ed emerged. No single solution proved optimal. Experimental measures were necessary at all institution s. Our campus brought back workers in phases based on sensitive criteria like age, health risk, previous medical history, and willingness to serve. We maintained universal virtual meetings, mapped out directional floor plans on campus, erected a COVID response team, and implemented an incredibly stringent set of criteria for holding on campus classes: full-semester classes were hybridized with virtual options; class sizes were reduced considerably; technological capabilities soared. Early mandates included 100% mask participation, hourly room sanitation regimens, and aggressive contact tracing and quarantining procedures. The social conditions established criteria to consider new expressions of educational engagement.

As a result, we modified the students’ final project from an in-person roundtable discussion to a Zoom panel that allowed those present to see each other’s faces fully for the first time. We arranged for the Zoom recording to serve as the “season finale” to the asynchronous lectures that were formatted into Future Shock episodes for the Special Topics in Media lecture podcast. Students were able to speak to films, course themes, and share experiences at a time when so many had been made to stay still, stay home, and keep quiet as the virus raged onward.

Course Readings: Three scholarly texts were chosen as a comprehensive primary reading list. For the lead text, I selected Keith M. Johnston’s Science Fiction: A Critical Introduction.^[2] Johnston builds his argument by answering the question “What is Science Fiction?” in Unit 1, comprising a trio of formative chapters on genre, close reading, and conventionality.^[3] The author then takes the readers on a journey through science fiction history, charting four different cultural eras that span two decades each. In Unit 3 , Johnston examines the efforts to commercialize science fiction to demonstrate the genre’s mainstream appeal. Because Future Shock functions as a sub-genre of science fiction, several filmic texts identified for course screenings correspond with Johnston’s critical introduction to the genre.

As the sole carryover from the previous course that I taught on film, I re-introduced Rick Altman’s Film/Genre^[4] as a tool to teach the historical association between what film genres are, how they work, and why they function as a significant part of the Hollywood Studio ecosystem between creators, producers, distributors, and audiences. Film/Genre is considered a seminal work, and students have expressed approval of Altman’s transparency as a media theorist. Aiming to enhance information literacy amidst an accelerated course cycle, the third and final book selected for the course was Laurie Ouellete and Jonathan Gray’s Keywords for Media Studies^[5]. This book provided a rigorous backdrop for students looking to gain familiarity with the wider web of theoretical terminology in media and cultural studies. The book is formatted as a multi-author anthology that tackles core tenets in media studies concentrated into reader-friendly encyclopedic entries.

Outcomes and Conclusions

The pandemic resulted in a mixture of outcomes, some predictable and some not. Students responded to the films with intense reactions both during live screenings and within their survival journal reports. As the primary instructor, it remains exciting if not increasingly common to introduce media that students have no familiarity with. No one in the class had previously viewed Soylent Green or A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Only one or two had screened Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and the distance between those screenings and ours was at least twenty years. We had outbursts in several places as tensions grew in Soylent Green, with one student exclaiming calamitously upon their realization about where the plot was headed moments before its iconic twist-ending.

Predictably, A.I.’s slow pace and melancholic tone did not sit well with some. It s intense depictions of broken familial promises and technologized childhood endangerment led one student to self-report an overwhelming feeling of devastation. On a contemporary note, despite its longer runtime Minority Report proved to be a relatively “safe” crowd-pleaser, while the most recent film in the slate, The Hunger Games, triggered a walkout from an older adult that could not tolerate sitting through exaggerated depictions of violence against children. For a group that I early on identified as majority-introvert, they gained confidence in their written, verbal, and digital communication skills, culminating in a rousing Zoom roundtable. While the conditions of the pandemic drove hundreds of millions of people further apart, this amalgamated class of marginalized voices found strength in community, coming together, and growing as (mass) communicators and critics, socializing around the Future Shock margins of science fiction.

Notes

Biography