These attached four pages are essential for the course to make sense. I suspect that they will not make for easy reading. I wrote the piece trying to explain the method that I had developed to a prospective audience of other professors. This class becomes the fourth class where I have tried to use this method. I want you to read this article so that you can think along with me as you try to form your own impressions and findings about culture as found in films. Coming to grips with these four pages as soon as possible will make it much easier to understand the course and to prepare for your final paper. You may, indeed, have to read these four pages multiple times. I hope the prospective excitement of coming to your own conclusions will make it worthwhile.

Best regards, mg

Developing an Impression of Culture

I have "created an approach for studying "ethnic groups" or other cultures that I believe is sufficiently applicable, duplicable, and effective to commend to a larger professional audience. This approach evolved out of three separate occasions in which I was expected to create a curriculum for a general education course that was intended to study a "culture". At different times this included Southern California culture (perhaps an oxymoron), English culture, and African-American culture. I want to emphasize that I am not an expert in any of these areas, although at the general education level I have "credentials" that have allowed me to investigate each of them.

The excitement and frustration of developing course work in each of these areas was pronounced. I had the freedom to approach these courses in a disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and/or interdisciplinary curriculum. Frankly, however, any disciplinary approach per se proved problematic. All of our academic disciplines, except perhaps the natural sciences, offered useful and worthy material that might have been included. But how to present materials from a variety of disciplines meaningfully was most difficult.

A large part of this difficulty was due to the conflicting range of student interests. I expected our study to be vibrant, but this was difficult to accomplish when students varied so greatly in their relative interest in Art or History or Sociology or Literature. In fact, I had a strong sense of the topics and experiences students would find most interesting and revealing about the respective Cultures, but I lacked an organizing principle that made sense.

I was certain that I wanted my students to experience something of the texture of culture. From Anthropology I am impressed by the quality of "thick description" produced by ethnographers. However, I have found that such thick description is often more dense than many students are prepared for, and too sophisticated to expect general studies to students conduct. Nevertheless, I felt that the Anthropologist's concern for 'Culture' was somehow promising.

I next looked towards Sociology and their comparable concern for "culture". Typically, in an Introduction to Sociology the topics include: Social Organization, Religion, Political Structures, Economic Organization, and Material Culture. I certainly feel that those are essential topics whether to an understanding of Southern California, English, or African-American culture. However, only some of my students were interested in the sociological work done on these cultures. Yet, all the topics were still apropos. Was there another way to investigate them that was more inclusive of all my students' interests?

I am an absolute advocate of Cassirer's position that both artistic and scientific ways of knowing are necessary for "binocular" vision, depth perception. I am a former chairman of our Social Science Division and have tremendous respect for scientific ways of knowing. But my experience has been that whereas some students find the social science paradigms preferable, artistic and qualitative ways of knowing are more accessible to all students.

Thus I found myself exploring artistic ways of knowing. I quickly realized that neither Art, nor Literature, nor History, nor Music, by itself was a promising avenue for all students' interests. Each of these areas is an acknowledged part of Culture, and my experience is that virtually all students want to be more "cultured" (if it is not too painful). But none of the Humanities or Fine Arts by themselves were sufficiently inclusive for a full study of all the issues of culture I thought my students would find most interesting and most beneficial. I next revisited Elliot Eisner's work on connoisseurship to see if that might help me tie my interests together. Certainly I hoped to cultivate tastes among my students. However, the major problem with true connoisseurship for my curriculum needs is that it takes too long to develop to make a major part of a single course of study. In a sense I realized I needed something more superficial. One usually doesn't admit to looking for something superficial, but I was still looking for an approach to the study of culture that would be insightful, look for the big picture, and begin a development of cultured taste.

Gradually from my subconscious, I found myself returning again and again to my memories of Impressionism. Impressionist painters tried to grasp and capture a view of a whole all at one time. That was very much what I wanted my students to do, whether it was a grasp of Southern California, England, or the African-American culture. Like impressionist painters I wanted my students to metaphorically paint a canvas that got at the essence of that which they perceived. But what would define the borders of this metaphorical canvas?

Eventually I returned to the concerns of the Sociologist: Social Organization, Religion, Political Structures, Economic Organization, and Material Culture. Eventually I decided on utilizing an impressionistic way of Knowing with a sociologist's concern for the parameters of culture. After that the specifics of each curriculum started to fall into place. In my own curriculum development I always try to make the subject as "real" as possible. When possible I expect students to have first hand experiences, I prefer a good film to a lecture, I'll include a variety of reading and writing experiences.

The key to making this approach work is utilizing the best experiences available in providing students with opportunities to gain their own impressions of culture. With regard to the topic of Social Organization, my students might visit families, schools, courts, and towns. For example, most American communities will include someone Southern Californian, English, and African-American who could be visited, interviewed, asked to guest speak. With regard to Religion many communities have Anglican or African American churches which could be visited, and the movies "True Confessions", "Four Weddings and a Funeral", and "The Five Heartbeats" have clips of church services of their respective Cultures which could be shown.

With regard to Political Structure a visit to a court, for example, in one of the respective communities might not be possible, but with the O.J. Simpson case every student has seen a Southern Californian courtroom, "The Krays" and "Let Him Have It" include English courtrooms, and "A Soldier's Story" includes a military inquest involving the issue of race and justice.

For Economic Organization a visit to a place of business operated by someone from the culture being studied may be insightful, especially regarding norms and values.

Material Culture is usually the crowd pleaser with my students. I have found a study of the relationship of popular culture to high culture a great shoehorn into the study of culture. How does one compare the L.A. group "The Doors", to the English "Beatles", Scott Joplin or Jimi Hendrix to Classical music? How does one compare the movie "Valley Girl" to Shaw's "Pygmalion" to "A Raisin in the Sun"? (I think these contrasts should reflect genuine student interest on the visceral level for the examples of popular culture, and legitimate more cerebral "classics" for the examples of high culture.)

Like an Impressionist painter I try to create dabs of paint with individual brush strokes where each individual curricular experience captures its own light individually, together fill the canvas, and with the right perspective, capture the essential whole. The sociologists define the parameters of this frame - culture. But the method is suggested by the Impressionists' form of qualitative inquiry, gathering selective, discrete impressions across the area of social organization, religion, political structures, economic organization, and material culture.

Readings that I have found useful as background material for students include most any Introduction to Sociology text, T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, and the best novel available set in the studied culture and appropriate to the age group. On my part I ask students to compare and contrast the sociological topics and concepts to the artistic impressions they are gaining from the designated curricular experiences, all of this with an eye towards a meaningful overall impression of that culture.

Some underlying assumptions to this approach:

1. That this impressionistic approach benefits from Gestalt ideas about perceptual development. "We start with wholes, perceiving at first the general and most obvious qualities or attributes of a form. Then after perception occurs so that more subtle aspects, qualities, or attributes of the phenomena can be experienced." Elliot Eisner, Cognition and Curriculum, (New York: Longman) 1982, p. 78.
2. That this overview, impressionistic approach to the study of culture is necessary. "But our analysis of reading and learning suggests the paradox that broad, shallow knowledge is the best route to deep knowledge (and)...to other people and other cultures." E.D. Hirsch, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin) 1988, p.xv.
3. That well selected, as often as possible tangible, curricular experiences and impressions of each aspect of culture, will help students learn to see more clearly. "In the development of the lessons and visual materials, there was one particular theoretical idea in psychology that guarded a great deal of what we produced. That idea deals with the process of visual differentiation: seeing is not identical to looking. For example, in grammatical terms, seeing is an achievement verb, whereas looking is a task learned; it's not an automatic consequence of maturation. Hence, in the development of materials and task, we were intent on providing visual images that students could compare and contrast and in this process attain better skills in visual differentiation." Elliot Eisner, The Educational Imagination. (New York: MacMillan) 1979, p.166
   This process of visual differentiation applies directly to the kind of differentiation each impression the curriculum should strive to create.
4. While there is a logic to the list of topics recognized by sociologists as "culture", the approach to learning, and thus the approach to the organizing of the curricular experiences shares much in common with the Impressionists. Grace Seiberling captures many of these considerations in her book, Monet in London, (Seattle: University of Washington) 1988.

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