Criminal Justice Final Phase

In the original paper Using Content Analysis Projects in The Introduction to Criminal Justice Classroom, In the abstract background the authors Finley (2019), emphasized:                                       The final phase of the project was completed individually. Students were asked to write a short page paper that summarized four items: 1) what they viewed and what they looked for; 2) the themes their group found in the portrayal of their assigned player across their assigned genre; 3) the ways their individual examples illustrated and differed from group themes; and 4) a reflection on what they learned about criminal justice from the project.

Included next is a justification for the project based on a brief review of literature and on personal pedagogical goals. This is followed by specific details about some of the more important steps in the project, examples of three of the group projects, student assessments of the project, what students learned, and personal reflections about and analysis of the project.

PROJECT JUSTIFICATION

In crafting this project prior to the start of the semester, I envisioned several pedagogical and practical purposes that it might serve. These included a need for students to be actively involved in the educational process, the importance of being responsive to student needs and desires, helping students to integrate new material with prior learning, the importance of critical media viewing, and the need to teach students to think critically. Each need is briefly explored below.

Teachers at all levels are being asked to revamp their teaching methods to include more active participation from students. Ahlkvist (1999) describes active learning:

Rather than the teacher presenting facts to the students, the students play an active role in learning by exploring issues and ideas under the guidance of the instructor. Instead of memorizing, and being mesmerized by, a set of often loosely connected facts, the student learns a way of thinking, asking questions, searching for answers, and interpreting observations, (p. 127)

In sum, active learning requires students to engage in the learning process, rather than simply passively receive information to be recited later on a test.

Additionally, instructors must consider what students like/want from a course. Brown, Tomlin, and Fortson (1996) accumulated the results of assessing undergraduates' opinions of professors. They found that students liked instructors best when they used a variety of methods. Further, educators have always been taught to build their course around student's prior learning (Armstrong 1994; Brooks and Brooks 1999). This has become increasingly complex as students learn more and more from a variety of sources. As so-called "voracious consumers of popular culture" (Farber, Provenzo, and Holm 1994:17), it is likely that a main source of information for young people is the media.

While students do indeed "learn" from the media, Cortes (2000) suggests they may not always "learn" what was intended. Nor is it the intent of media-creators to always depict the social phenomenon of interest accurately. Cortes (2000:17) says, "Learning, in short, does not necessarily conform to either the teaching goals or the nonteaching claims of mediamakers. Once a media product is published or projected, consumers 'read' that product." Viewers may then react in a number of ways according to Cortes (2000). These include analytically pondering the media's treatment of the issues and groups at hand, integrating the new material into their own personal identity, or uncritically and/or unconsciously absorbing new perceptions. Sobieraj and Laube (2001:467) contend that "The most effective way to address the influence of media on the public's understanding of social phenomena is to directly confront it in the classroom."

Additionally, projects that ask students to assess some portion of popular culture can stimulate critical thinking skills. Critical thinking, according to Chambers, Angus, and Carter-Wells (2000) is comprised of two components: cognitive skills, which include interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference and self-regulation, and the development of a critical disposition, including the ability and willingness to set aside personal biases in order to be open to multiple views. Following from this, content analyses projects can address not just cognitive abilities, but the affective domain as well. Brown (2001) says:

Attitudes are psychological states acquired over a period of time, as a result of our experiences. They influence us to act in certain ways and to respond to the world in a consistent fashion. Given this, higher education can play a major part in sensitizing and reinforcing student attitudes and perceptions concerning these responsibilities and how the process of learning contributes to the way that knowledge is used. (p. 103)

In sum, active learning, engaging students' prior knowledge, and critical thinking (both in general and specific to the media) are elements of constructivist pedagogy. Cooperative work is another element of constructivist teaching. Constructivist teaching, as defined by Brooks and Brooks (1999:15), refers to practices that "help learners to internalize and reshape, or transform, new information." This project, then, was consistent with my pedagogical aims as an instructor, current literature regarding educational design, and with the specific course objectives for this course.

PROJECT DETAILS

This project occurred at the beginning of the semester. Some may argue that this type of project should occur later in the semester, once students have a minimal understanding of the various criminal justice roles in reality; however, I approached it somewhat differently. My approach was that students were likely to come to class with a variety of misconceptions, many of which are provided or at least exacerbated by the media. As Perlmutter (2000: xi) notes, while we have extensive experience with mediated criminal justice, "our lived experience is generally minimal." Assuming this to be true, it made sense to challenge those assumptions and to analyze the role the media plays in developing them early on, so that the remainder of the course could elaborate on "reality." This project certainly could work later in the semester, though, perhaps as a culminating project.

In whole, most of the first three weeks of the course were devoted to the various facets of this project. This includes the first evening of writing, the second class period of the "reality" lecture, the practice run of Kindergarten Cop, and two class periods of presentations and discussion. While this might seem a lot in a fifteen-week semester, devoting this amount of time served a number of purposes. First, it provided students with an introduction to the material that would be explored throughout the course, in that the content analysis projects focused on the major players and systems involved in criminal justice we were required to cover. second, it allowed students to confront their own misconceptions and gradually add evidence to challenge them, as noted above. Ferguson (1998:156-7) states, in reference to the abundance and quickness of mediated images, "The results of this media deluge, this perpetual discourse of violence, often integrally linked with issues of race, is that these representations may become normalized. This does not have to mean that such messages are uncritically accepted by media audiences (although they may be), but they have become part of everyday experience." The assignment was intended to challenge the normalization of certain media images associated with crime. Third, it served to build camaraderie within the base groups, providing students with a built-in study group.

References

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=ef9ef280-cf62-4576-8a03-bae85df74708%40sessionmgr4008&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPXNoaWImc2l0ZT1lZHMtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=12456411&db=sih

Finley, L. L. (2004). Using Content Analysis Projects in the Introduction to Criminal Justice Classroom. Teaching Sociology, 32(1), 129–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055X0403200112