Newswise — Three decades of motivating undergraduates to think, write and explore creatively have supported Donna Decker’s theory of excellence in learning: offering students an opportunity to explore a provocative contemporary topic is one of the surest ways to actively engage them in the curriculum.
Decker, an English professor at Franklin Pierce University, helps her students examine the events surrounding the tragic shootings that have occurred in recent years on high school and college campuses across the country. Her newest freshman seminar Intentional Venom: Making Meaning of School Shootings was offered for the first time in the fall of 2011. The product of a series of classroom discussions that occurred the previous year in Decker’s nonfiction course, Intentional Venom is being offered again this fall as a freshman seminar class.
Just as today’s undergraduate students are bombarded with media messages, they are increasingly fascinated with the concept of media literacy--specifically the idea that commonly held (and often repeated) notions about major news events frequently turn out to be myths. “We were covering the topic of the violence as portrayed by the media and some of the more infamous school shootings in my nonfiction class,” she explains. “As we talked about many of the notions surrounding the 1999 Columbine, Colorado, tragedy, it was clear that many of the students were deeply moved into the realm of intellectual engagement.”
As a result of the class discussions and reading assignments, books, articles, testimony from victims and witnesses, Decker says, many of her students pursued ambitious research projects beyond the classroom. “They found that so much of what we have all been told again and again, through stories, news reports, anniversary retrospectives, has not always turned out to be true or factual,” she says.
“One of my students traveled to Colorado, took photos of Columbine and brought them back to present to the class,” she says. “Others reached out on the phone and via e-mail to some of the people who had lived through the tragedy, including one woman who had walked some of the surviving students out of the building to safety.”
Decker--who also teaches Banned Books, a favorite English literature course among many students at Franklin Pierce since the early 1990s--says it was clear that a spark of the very best kind of learning and engagement was ignited in the class. “They were empowered by the understanding that it was possible to seek out and obtain a better understanding of an event that had happened early in their lives,” she says. “They wanted to obtain precise knowledge.”
Decker recently returned from her sabbatical, writing a book about the issues surrounding the December 6, 1989 shooting at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. “Though each of these tragic incidents is different,” she says, noting that the Montreal shooter specifically targeted women, “a closer look reveals that they do offer common points about violence, society, and about how the themes presented in the news coverage we readily consume when they happen may not always line up with the truth.”
Professor Decker's faculty Web page: http://www.franklinpierce.edu/academics/bios/decker.htm
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