By: Alexander Kenny
After decades of teaching experience and years at SFU, Jody Baker has earned himself the respect of his students. His classes have become some of the most raved-about lectures within the communication program. As one of the most recognizable names amongst students in the school, his style has received great praise along with a few critiques. I sat down with Jody to discuss his thoughts on his style of teaching, its effectiveness, what he’s learned, and both the praise and criticism he’s received.
The Peak: I’ve taken a couple of your classes, so I’m familiar with them and how you like to run them. One thing that is always mentioned is how relaxed you are in your requirements . . . Students really seem to enjoy and appreciate that. I’m wondering, how crucial is that to you, that in moments . . . when they have a take-home thing [for example] that is big in seeing how they understand the material, that they are relaxed?
Jody Baker: I’ve never studied pedagogy [the theory of how to teach and how people learn], but I have 30 years [of] experience teaching, and it seems to me that stress doesn’t help . . . I think one of the reasons students enjoy my courses, what it comes down to, is a very simple formula that I am committed to student success[.]
[A]nd it’s not about grades [or] getting an A . . . I want them to enjoy the material. What’s really important is that they bring what they learn into their everyday lives. I’m trying to change their relationships to their everyday lives.
I have a love for theory, for textual analysis, cultural analysis, and cultural studies. It’s important that I share that love and enthusiasm with students. I don’t see how adding stress to the process helps that in any way. I want students to leave loving the material, and wanting to keep doing it.
P: Obviously, instructors, especially in this school, teach the same courses most of the year, as you do with [CMNS] 220 and 223 . . . Students mention how energetic and enthusiastic you are. How do you stop your courses from getting stale?
JB: It’s always fresh, it’s always interesting. It’s part of the privilege of teaching something like advertising, which constantly refreshes itself[.] [T]here’s always new ads, there’s always new things happening. It’s not like I’m teaching math or history, where it’s the same formulas over and over again. It’s always fresh, there are always new brands to talk about, and I can bring new things into it, and that keeps up the excitement and enthusiasm for me.
I’m sure one could make television and advertising boring, it’s probably not that hard to do. It’s not simply that: it’s also that I love theory, I love imparting theory . . . it’s a gift, it’s a set of tools. I love giving those tools to the students. I love to stand there, give them these tools, and I work with media on the screen, constantly, in the classrooms. For me to show something, unpack it, talk about it, and then I can see, in the classroom, people getting it, seeing something for the first time. I can see it on their faces, they’re learning it, figuring it out, and it’s changing their lives, how can one not love to do that[?]
Also, working with young people is great, I’ve been teaching since I was 30 or something, now I’m 57. So, working with young people is exciting, people who are inspired . . . [E]very generation is getting better, as far as I’m concerned. So no, I’m not burning out, I don’t feel like I’m burning out. I don’t dislike students, I don’t resent students, I love all my students, I love working with students, that keeps things exciting.
P: Do you think that the number of anecdotal evidence and stories that you use in your lectures is something that helps you connect with your students and keeps them engaged?
JB: Yes[.] I taught public speaking for years, and there’s a few things you learn, and the primary thing you learn is that you have to connect with your audience. It has to do with looking them in the eye, looking up, looking at them, speaking extemporaneously. If you’re just reading from notes, you’re a robot. I get criticized for . . . [stories], too. I get course evaluations that say ‘he’s wasting my time telling stories’ or I got one last semester, ‘what’s with these personal stories[?]’
P: In a bit of research, I looked you up on ratemyprof.com . . . The majority of the reviews of you on there are positive recommendations; the majority says things like ‘it’s a good class.’ The one recurring criticism is something along the lines of ‘he goes off on tangents that convolute the course material’ because you may lose your place in your lecture, and it can be confusing. How do you respond to that?
JB: You can see it as a weakness, I suppose. It’s who I am, it’s how I teach, how I connect, how I keep that excitement going. I have to do it. Like, I speak too fast, I get that constantly: that I speak too fast. I get excited and my octaves go up, and I talk faster[.] [I]t’s a weakness, and I can’t help it. It’s just how I’m wired. So, I get that critique a lot, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. Well, maybe there is something I can do about it, but it’s not something I’m compelled to fix.
And the anecdotal stories, I can’t be a robot, I can’t just read from a set of notes. I think learning is more than just a set of facts, or a set of processes. Education has to be living, it has to be part of me. I want to give myself, not just imparting material[.] [I]t’s giving myself, keeping that enthusiasm up, and connecting with people. . . .
[T]he first rule of public speaking is you have to make a connection. There’s all kinds of ways to do that, but you have to be personable. I don’t care if my students like me, that’s nice. In education, one doesn’t get respect because one wears a tie, one doesn’t get respect because they have [a] PhD attached to their name. One gets respect by one’s ability to teach, and students, I think, are really good consumers of their own education. They know good teaching when they see it, and I see them coming to my classes, so I must be doing something right.
I’m not perfect, I’m sure there’s lots of room where I can improve, but I want to enjoy myself. If I’m not enjoying myself, I can’t pass on my love of theory to my students.
P: What does it mean to you, in a school where so many of the professors are so well liked, that you are still one of the most raved about, recommended professors in the faculty?
JB: We have a lot of excellent instructors in communication, and I don’t know what happens in other classrooms so much[.] I probably should, maybe, sit in with other classes, Gary . . . [McCarron’s] class, Martin . . . [Laba’s] class. I hear great things about Martin . . . So yes, we have some great teachers here, I don’t feel like I’m competing with them in any way. I think we’re all working together.
I think part of it, too, is the discipline. The discipline of communication is multidisciplinary, it’s contemporary, it connects to students’ everyday lives. I think that creates excellent teachers, and it helps us build really good courses, that are relevant and exciting to students. So, we have that advantage. I think it’s easier to put together a great communication course than it is to put together a great math or physics course, but I don’t know, I don’t teach math or physics, and I know some great math instructors[.] I’m sure there are some amazing biology instructors out there.
Just from my perspective, I feel privileged, and I feel it’s a real advantage to be able to teach media studies, because it’s so much easier to create a course that keeps students engaged, teaching television or advertising, or [CMNS] 130, which is communication and social change, where you’re tying in media to history, and putting media in its historical context.
P: Speaking of media and its historical context, you wanted to speak about empowerment?
JB: Yes, so I want to talk about empowerment. I locate my pedagogy, I build my pedagogy around a concept of empowerment. That’s what I’m trying to achieve, I’m trying to empower my students, that’s why I want them to succeed. I want them to be empowered. To me, that’s what critical theory does, it empowers us in relationship to our everyday media experience. It empowers us in relationship to our democracy, our relationship to society as a whole, which is mediated by various mass media and consumer culture in particular. So I constantly locate back into our everyday lives, which is part of the reason why I have those little anecdotal moments. I talk about myself as a consumer.
The other thing I’m very careful not to do is to judge my students, and when you teach something like consumer culture there could be an impulse to judge, to wag one’s finger at one’s students, ‘you shouldn’t consume too much, avoid luxury brands.’ I can just see myself wagging my finger at them, telling them what to do. I carefully avoid that. I’m not there to judge them, or their practices, and I remind them of that, over and over again.
I don’t want them judging others, as well. It’s about understanding our own place and our own role in the ideological frameworks, and the way in which our own lives reproduce the dominant frameworks of meaning or those dominant ideological frameworks . . . [O]ne of the things I say in my classes: ‘ideology works through us, not at us.’ I want us to see and recognize our own participation in something like consumer culture. I want us to see our own participation in the ideological frames that we consume, when we consume television. So, I’m constantly pushing students up to the meta level, so they can see their own role and place in it.
I think, for some students, there’s a certain period, and a period I went through, where students get depressed, where they see ideology around them all the time, they don’t see outside the ideology, they don’t see a means of escape. What I recognized, between third and fourth year is ‘no, theory is the means to get outside of ideology, you have to get to that meta level’ and to me, that is really empowering. I think students tend to move this ‘oh my God, there’s this dominant ideology that’s suppressing us all’ and then they realize that understanding that and how that works is a form of empowerment. I’m constantly pushing towards that, building my courses around getting my students to that empowered place. It takes years, but I think most of the students get there, and that’s when I know I’ve been successful.
P: Going back a bit, then, you say that if you judged your students based on their choices as consumers, or you let them judge too much, perhaps that would artificially alter the path of learning in those situations?
JB: No, I think it diverts our attention from what’s important. What’s important are the systems, the media, political economy, the ideological frameworks, and how they get reproduced. So, it’s not about the individual, or us and our own practices. It’s about the system, about capitalism, and consumer capitalism. We’re all participating in it, we have to, we have to consume, we have to eat, and we have to wear clothes. We’re all consumers. Beating ourselves up about it doesn’t help, it’s not empowering, it’s disempowering.
If we switch to talk about exams, the way I formulate exams the way I do is because I don’t want to undo that empowerment, I don’t want to add stress to student’s lives.
Here’s my theory, and I don’t know if it’s correct, it’s ‘Jody’s cognitive theory’ and I know nothing about cognitive science. It seems to me that if you have an exam situation, I’ve walked into exam rooms, where all the backpacks are at the front, and you have people patrolling at the back, trying to catch cheaters. You can feel the tension in the air. You can feel the stress and anxiety oozing from people’s bodies . . . [I]t feels like prison, and I can’t imagine that any knowledge that comes out of that process is going to be retained by the human brain. I would imagine that any knowledge that’s associated with that amount of stress, the mind would reject, bury away somewhere, and those brain cells would burn off or move off to something else to avoid that stress.
So I try and create[.] I have perfected, I think, or [have come close] to perfecting, the stress-free exam. My exams are maximum challenge, minimum stress, and I think that’s what helps students learn.
So yes, all my exams are designed to be written at home. I say ‘get in your pajamas, get a cup of tea, relax, gather your course materials, and write the exam. There’s a time limit, so that’s your challenge,’ but I don’t think memorization is particularly useful, doesn’t replicate what we do as academics. I don’t have to memorize that much stuff to function as an academic. So, memory work is not what I’m after. What I’m after is, can a student find the resources they need to do the critical work that they want to do.
. . . I let my students have access to all the course material. It seems absurd to me that we make them do all these readings, and then we get to the exam and then say ‘oh no, I’m sorry, you can’t access those readings now, you can only access your memory.’ It makes [no] pedagogical sense, no critical sense.
P: How do you like to use Canvas and the resources that you have?
JB: I like Canvas. I like to provide a rich online environment to supplement and support the face-to-face learning that we do in the classroom. I’ve taught online courses for a number of years, and it was a humbling experience. I had to re-learn how to teach, because you can’t do the same thing you do in the classroom, online. Because I teach media course[s], I began using podcast lectures, first, then I migrated into video.
I’m teaching advertising, I’m teaching television, so it makes perfect sense. I started producing these videos as [a] supplement to the face-to-face experience or as the means of teaching an online course. What I found really quickly was when making videos, I couldn’t use the same voice I use in the classroom. The voice I use in the classroom is a voice of authority, I have to command the front of the room, I have to be the authority. I guess it requires a certain gravitas, maybe arrogance is the word, to control that space and speak to students. That voice doesn’t work on video, it doesn’t work as a podcast, you need something that’s more intimate.
When I make videos, I position myself, not in front of the student, but beside the student, looking at our material, at advertising, at television episodes, so I’m there facilitating their learning. That experience of making videos has really changed my thinking about what I teach, how I teach, and while I still do the same, formal, face-to-face lecture, it did change how I understand pedagogy . . . I’m not just simply imparting something to my students, not just that I’m gifting them knowledge, [but] . . . we’re learning together.
Using media, in the classroom, all the time, helps with that. I can get students to respond, work together, figure out ‘what does this ad mean, how does it mean it.’ I learned a lot from online teaching, I learned how to produce those online resources, and I want to give those resources to my students.
I sometimes wonder, if I have all these videos, and it ties into the course material and lectures, am I encouraging my students not to come to class[?] [But] I refuse to restrict resources to ensure butts get into the seats. Students come to my classes because they learn, it’s a great learning experience. If they choose not to come, that’s their choice, they’re adults. It’s important to me that I provide as many resources as possible, and more than just simply more and more articles. I could fill Canvas with articles for students to have access to. I do try and put in a lot of recommended readings as well as required readings.
I understand that some students are oral learners, some are visual learners, so I try and provide a variety of materials. When you’re teaching something like advertising, and you have a 30-second ad that you want to unpack, the best way to do it is video. I could do it in the classroom, but then I can also, for study purposes or paper purposes, provide them with a nice, neat, 10-minute video that takes apart a particular ad, which they can then use to write their own paper, or use for the exam.
So, I like using the medium of video, and I really think it has its pedagogical possibilities that can really facilitate the classroom experience.
Editor’s note: answers have been edited for clarity.
