It is easy for students to see academic inquiry as something separate from their daily lives. Learning is enhanced, though, when students can connect what they are learning in their classes to their existing knowledge structures. In this episode, Jill Peterfeso joins us to discuss several classes in which students examine the products of the Disney entertainment empire using a variety of disciplinary lenses. Jill is the Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Guilford College. Scott Furlong also joins as a guest host. Scott is the Provost and the Vice President for Academic Affairs here at SUNY Oswego.
Shownotes
- Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan (2020). “Structured for Inclusion.” Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 153. September 16.
- Betsy Barre (2021). ”Student Workload” Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 183. April 21.
- Betsy Barre (2020). ”Pandemic Pivoting” Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 132. April 25.
- Hass, Charlie (1978). Disneyland is Good for You. New West. December 4. (reprint of an interview with John Hench).
- David Zanolla, Out the Door Travel
- J. Jeff Kober
Transcript
John: It is easy for students to see academic inquiry as something separate from their daily lives. Learning is enhanced, though, when students can connect what they are learning in their classes to their existing knowledge structures. In this episode, we discuss several classes in which students examine the products of the Disney entertainment empire using a variety of disciplinary lenses.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners..
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John: Our guest today is Jill Peterfeso. Jill is the Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Guilford College. Scott Furlong is also joining as a guest host today. Scott is the Provost and the Vice President for Academic Affairs here at SUNY Oswego. Both Jill and Scott have been on previous podcasts, so many of you are already familiar with them. Welcome back, Jill, and thank you, Scott.
Scott: My pleasure, John, and I’ll try to fill in admirably for Rebecca. So let’s go around and see what everyone’s drinking. What’s today’s teas?
John: Jill?
Jill: I’ve got water and Coke Zero.
John: Last time you had a really nice peppermint tea.
Jill: I did, and I thought about making that just for the unison of that, but it didn’t happen.
John: It’s a bit warmer there, too.
Jill: It is, it’s too warm for that.
John: And I am drinking pineapple ginger green tea.
Scott: My tea, and I think John knows I’m not a big tea drinker, but for the purposes of our show, I’m drinking a Ginger Snappish tea that I found. It’s very good.
John: So welcome back, Jill. I saw that you had posted on Facebook, that you had just returned from a trip to Disney with your class. And you mentioned at the end of that post on Facebook, that if anyone wanted to talk to you about being able to teach a rigorous class involving Disney to please contact you. And so I did. I think as soon as I saw that post, I asked you if you’d like to come back. I think all three of us are fans of Disney, and both you and Scott have taught classes involving Disney. So, could you tell us a little bit about the class that you just finished and also a little bit about the earlier classes that you’ve offered that have focused on Disney?
Jill: Sure. I will start by admitting, as I admit to my students, that I am a fan of Disney, but I’m also able to be critical of Disney, that’s by necessity. And so it’s a great role modelling for students to love something while critiquing it, whether it’s Disney or American history, or gender politics, things that we care a lot about, but may not 100% agree with. So I am a fan, but I’m also a critic, a critical thinker and critical feeler around Disney. So, yeah, I have taught classes on Disney for about five years now, and my most recent one was called “Fantastic Journeys.” And this was a class… we have this three-week intensive semester at the beginning of the year before a 12-week more traditional semester… and this course was part of that three week and it involved a five-day trip to Walt Disney World, which I was involved in planning. “Fantastic Journeys” is part of the Honors Program curriculum. And the idea is to have an educational experience that focuses on intellectual inquiry, also community building, and the process of becoming a full person in personal and professional ways. And ideally, a group of Honors sophomores would travel together somewhere, either in the US or abroad. And they would be able to focus on bonding and also self-discovery. The directors of the Honors Program asked me to do this about two years ago, because I’ve been teaching classes on Disney, and she believed that an Honors Program “Fantastic Journeys” course to Disney would work beautifully, and I definitely agree. I can talk more about that later. But I will say we were supposed to do this in August/September 2020, and that got cancelled because of COVID. So they did let us go this year, which is really great, but this has been in the works for about 22 months. I started in late October 2020 preparing this trip for this class. Before this previously, I taught an FYS (first-year seminar) on Disney, that one was a multidisciplinary course that uses Disney as a springboard to critical thinking and how college works. And the other course I’ve taught was a joint English-religion course on Disney in narrative and storytelling, and how those narratives and those stories feed into our culture and our own self-understanding as Americans. So that’s a broad overview of my courses in Disney so far.
John: How does Disney fit into religious studies?
Jill: This is something I discovered along with my students while teaching that first-year seminar on Disney, which I did in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Those courses, those first-year seminars, we’re not supposed to make them discipline specific. And so I’m in Religious Studies, I also teach in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. But this course was supposed to be multidisciplinary, again, in introducing students to college and college-level thinking. So I wasn’t focused on religion. But as I went through the class with students, and we’re talking about things like Disney and pedagogy, Disney and messaging, like moral messaging, Disney and Disney-fying a past fairy tale and making it something that’s palatable to the American psyche, Disney’s take on American history, all of these things. It really started to emerge for me that, “Oh, Disney is functioning in the way that religion functions.” Disney is doing a lot of the same things in American culture that, Christianity for instance, the mainstream Christian culture does. So these became questions I started to play with with students. And that has led to my current research project which is on Disney, and American religion, and the intersection of those things. I think, if I had to boil it down, the ways that Disney resembles religion or Disney fits into a class in Religious Studies would really be something as simple as culture and narrative. Those stories that Disney tells, tells us about who we are, becomes part of our culture, becomes part of the pedagogical upbringing that we have as children in the United States. There’s also a creation of, sort of, an ethical system. It’s not just, “When you wish upon a star”, it’s “When you wish upon a star, something good happens to you if you’re a good person.” So, there’s something slightly transactional where you need to be inhabiting ethical and moral ways of being before you can get that reward. So yeah, that’s sort of my starting point with Disney and religion, and it’s been really interesting and fun to have those conversations with students, because initially, they’ll be like, “Disney’s not a religion. Disney is like movies and fun and magic.” And, by midway through the semester, they’re like, “Oh wow, I kind of think about this in the way I kind of think about Christianity, my Christian tradition,” if they’re Christian. It’s just a lot more fun. It’s a lot more effective, it’s more magical. And, just a side note, my research has revealed that there are organizations in this country, and churches, that look to Disney models for customer service to make their product more appealing. So both churches and other institutions, I have a student right now who works for the Boy Scouts, and his boy scout troop has used lessons from “The Mouse,” which is a book on using Disney culture and strategies to really great success to make their scouting camp even more appealing.
Scott: Well, there’s always the simplicity of bowing down to the altar of the castle as well, and for many people, it’s like going to Mecca, right?
Jill: Mm-hm.
Scott: You know, in terms of going to Disney World, or Disneyland.
Jill: The pilgrimage idea is huge. Yeah, that comes up a lot.
Scott: Yeah. And for many, it’s a 15-month planning activity to get there.
Jill: Like the American middle class ultimate pilgrimage.
Scott: Yep.
Jill: Mm-hm.
John: And you also note, in one of your syllabi, that Disney is something that affects not just U.S. culture, but it has a lot of global reach too?
Jill: Yeah, that’s something that I feel less confident speaking about, like, other people’s experience of Disney until I’ve been able to have conversations with those individuals. But when you look at how Disney has taken life on other continents. Like, basically, when they were building Tokyo Disneyland, the Oriental Land Company was like, “We want, we want what you have, and we want it to look exactly like what you have.” There was no conversation about “Let’s make this a Japanese version of Disney.” It’s like, “We want the American version, we want that.” Now, things were a little different in the building of Shanghai. Disney had to do some more, sort of, navigating between Chinese culture and Disney culture. That’s just really fascinating. There are a lot of stories, one of these just came up in my class, like three weeks ago, immigrants to the United States have that drive for that pilgrimage, that Scott was just talking about, to arrive in America as American by going through that rite of passage of going to Disney, there’s just something about that. And so the woman who came to speak to us is one of my colleagues at Guilford, and a great author. And she was saying is an immigrant to the United States going to Disneyland with that moment where they knew they’d made it, like they were American now. And that’s just a very powerful story. So Disney does have this global outreach, I do notice, it sort of always stands out to me when there are international crises, and you can skim and look at clothing, like the immigration crisis, the border and other crises, how often you just sort of skim and you see kids wearing Disney clothing, it just really jumps out. It’s this marker of some sort of, I think aspiring to be part of what is currently a dominant culture, which is American culture.
John: Surely the Disney entertainment industry has global reach?
Jill: Yes.
John: Which I think does help make it become a symbol of our culture.
Jill: Exactly.
Scott: Oh, and the fact that most of their movies are coming out of global stories and fairy tales that are, in some cases, hundreds or thousands of years old.
Jill: Yeah, for sure. One of the assignments we do in my courses is to juxtapose a Disney version of a story and the original. I’ve long used “The Little Mermaid” because Hans Christian Andersen’s version of that story is really, very dark and that is something that’s very surprising to students. “The Little Mermaid” does not have a happy ending per se, but it’s a really great assignment for students to take something that they know well. I mean they’ve all seen “The Little Mermaid,” so we rewatch “The Little Mermaid”, and then we read Hans Christian Andersen’s original version, and it’s a totally different message. But the takeaway from that is not, “Look how Disney has changed the story that’s bad, or that’s good.” Disney is recreating this familiar story, in an idiom that is familiar to Americans, and that sort of checks all the boxes of American culture, but also Disney’s version of American culture. And this assignment comes early in the semester and it allows students to start to think about Disney-fying as an activity that can be done. In one of my classes I asked them to take a story from their own lives and Disney-fy it. What does that then look like? What magical elements are added? What songs are sung? Who gets fun names that didn’t get named before? [LAUGHTER] Who is your sidekick? What is the message? There’s going to be some sort of tidy takeaway. And our desire for those tidy takeaway stories is very human, but Disney’s perpetuated enough that I think it’s also very American, and thus global as those things are spread around the globe, as you guys were just talking about.
John: You’ve each taught first-year courses that were tied to Disney, could you talk a little bit about these courses and why you chose Disney as a focus of your first-year seminar courses?
Jill: Scott, you should go first.
Scott: Okay, sure. For me, we were in the process of creating a first-year seminar program at my previous institution. And we had started that process by using pre-existing general education courses, and trying to first-year-seminar them, if I can use that as a verb. And frankly, it wasn’t working. People felt very strongly tied to their content, and almost a need to cover all 26 chapters of a psychology textbook. So we really navigated toward an interdisciplinary passion course type model. And my, it would be too strong to say academic interests, but our intellectual interest in Disney. But I was literally at Disney one year, I was at one of the water parks, and I was just really taken by the logistics involved in moving their lifeguards around. There’s a whole process there that they go through, and how long they stay at one place and move on to a next place in order to keep them fresh. And it really got me thinking about the different academic career dynamics that are within the Disney Corporation, and really thinking about, if anything is interdisciplinary, it’s the Disney Company in terms of how they create, how they’re using science, engineering, art, creativity, clearly business, religious, storytelling. It’s a very interdisciplinary organization. And so when we had an opportunity to develop a first-year seminar course, a colleague of mine, we are both again, self-professed Disney lovers, but also critics as Jill said earlier, decided to team-teach a course around Disney, and we co-opted the interdisciplinary and called it “inter-Disney-plinary” was the name of our course, and we basically went at it looking at an interdisciplinary view of Disney. I’m a political scientist. We looked at, sort of, the governed structure of Walt Disney World, which is very interesting. My colleague is an environmental psychologist, so she really looked at the use of space and architecture, and really brought in some of the older ideas around land use and planning that Disney has incorporated. We obviously used and looked hard at how gender identity has been shifting, how racial identity is portrayed within Disney, that really gets into some, not at the time I’m sure, but darker elements of how Disney portrayed many characters. We thought, and I still believe, it was a great entree into college-level critical thinking, written communication, opening up the mind to something different, and using the content that students recognized to really get them to think like college students. And that was really the purpose of all of our seminar classes, and this one as well. And we disappointed the students when we told them, “Yeah, we’re not going to sit there watching movies for 15 weeks. That’s not the purpose of this class.” In fact, I think we only showed one movie fully in the class, we showed a lot of clips, but we very rarely went through an entire film. And it was a great way of engaging students in academic content. It was a way of retaining our students, getting them interested in the college, we had other typical elements of first-year seminars in terms of engaging with the larger campus community and things like that. But I think the content was very accessible to the students because, as Jill said earlier, they know this stuff, or at least they think they know this stuff. They haven’t really delved into it. They haven’t thought deeply about it. They haven’t thought about, for example, how Disney’s portrayal of race has really changed in 50 years. It’s still not there yet, but it’s a lot different. They haven’t thought about: Why is the Magic Kingdom laid out the way it is laid out? What is it that they’re trying to do with that? And again, very few students know the governance structure, the idea that Walt Disney World in Orlando is a lot like the Vatican in terms of its governing structure. So for me, it just provided a great opportunity and I really wish we looked into it. I really wish we had the ability to take our students to Disney World for a few days and really experience it as a class environment as well. But that wasn’t in the cards for us, at least initially.
Jill: I’ll just piggyback on some of what Scott was saying. I agree with everything Scott just said. One quick thing, I would encourage all listeners who have any sort of interest in Disney or maybe even a hatred, but some sort of emotional reaction. Think about it as an adult, and not just like your kid self or your, like, early adult self because, what I heard Scott say, like, watching how the lifeguards move, you would never think of that if you’re 10 years old. But, as an adult, when I go now to the parks, I’m in awe of how it’s competent and how it functions. Because I feel like we’re in a world where so often things just don’t work, and things work in Disney, and it’s kind of magical. But I do agree with what Scott was talking about. It’s a great introduction to college, because students come in thinking they know something, so they’ve got that confidence, like, “Yeah, it’s Disney. I mean, I’ve watched ‘The Lion King’ so I’m gonna do okay in this class.” What they don’t know is they’re about to be taken on an adventure, an intellectual adventure, that’s going to be challenging for them because, thinking critically about that which you love can be really hard. So you tend to get the students signing up, at least I have, the students who have signed up for my Disney class are the ones who love Disney. And there comes a moment we’re asking them to think critically, and maybe even to think negatively about some things Disney has done around racial depictions, for instance. They don’t want to do that, it becomes uncomfortable. Moving through that discomfort is one of the gifts of teaching Disney to first-semester students, I think, because you’re really helping them understand what it’s like to do college. So there was a moment in my three first-year seminars on Disney, where at some point, I’d come into the class, and students would be looking just really sad and I’m like, “What’s going on you all? What is it?” And they’re like, “You’re ruining our childhood.” [LAUGHTER] And so we have a conversation about that. What does that mean? And what does it mean to think about something through college-level eyes? What does it mean to love something while you criticize it? How does that apply to other things outside of Disney in this class, in this moment? So the class really becomes sort of like a playground for so many different types of conversations, and you’re able to touch on everything, gender studies, the problems of excessive heteronormativity in Disney stories. You’re able to talk about how Disney depicts Pocahontas and why that’s really problematic. You’re able to talk about Disney’s distorting of American history, and how that feels really good, but it’s also not completely honest. Disney and capitalism and how those things are intertwined. So you can have so many conversations, and it also lays out various maps for students much in the way the Magic Kingdom is laid out with some sort of center with the spokes. This course, I thought of my course as being, sort of the center was Disney inquiry, but it could go off in so many different directions, like students were really given a map to explore that would help them maybe find a path in the future. So yeah, it’s a highly effective first-semester course and I wish I could keep teaching it. Things have changed schedule-wise, the way we do things at Guilford which is too bad for this course, because I think it was very effective.
Scott: I think as we get older, there is an evolution of how one might engage in Disney. As a small child, Mickey Mouse is real. He’s hugging you, he’s signing, at some point, you realize, “Well, maybe not,” right? There’s just different ways of pulling back that curtain. And again, for me, like Jill, I think a lot of it became again, as an adult, even as I’m bringing my own kids, or have brought my own kids to Disney. It’s really interesting how they do this, right? Or how they’re creating the magic. You still like the magic, let’s be clear about that, but the creation, the understanding, and I think Disney’s realizing this themselves. There’s reasons why they do backstage tours, there’s reasons why those of you who have Disney+, they’re doing shows about their attractions and how the attractions were built and why they were built. So Disney understands, going back to capitalism a little bit, they understand their market also that there are different ways of engaging their market. And they’re working that, as a company, to do that.
John: One of the things you did in your first-year class, Jill, was you had students complete an assignment in which they were asked to apply something that they’ve learned to an issue at Guilford College. Could you tell us just a little bit about that? And maybe provide an example of that?
Jill: Yeah, sure. I think Scott was just touching on this so nicely with the way that Disney is very effective, and is always ready to send its messages to a range of audiences using a range of media. So very creative in its problem solving and its creative approaches to pretty much anything. So one of the many things I really admire about how Disney operates and Imagineering especially. So like Guilford, we have this Center for Principle Problem Solving, which, really, as the title suggests, invites students or faculty and staff who are participating in the center, maybe as fellows, to think about how they can creatively address problems that they see in the world. So I tried to make this just a very narrowly focused on-campus assignment that drew on the kinds of innovative problem solving, the Imagineering types of techniques that we were studying in the course. So what I asked students to do was to basically imagine themselves as Imagineers and innovators who’ve identified a problem and want to get past the problem to a solution. And what I asked them to focus on was something they saw on campus. So first-year students don’t often, and first-semester students, don’t often think that they have the power or the voice to make a change. But I wanted them to realize that they, in fact, did. If they could identify something that they wanted to see changed and made better at Guilford that they could make that happen, or they could at least try and fail and see why they failed. So this is the culminating project, it’s a group project. Like I said, I invited them to think about: What’s bothering you at Guilford right now? You’ve been here a couple months, what do you want to see that’s different? How can you make it better? How can you be part of the positive change? I’ve seen a lot of topics over the years, every time I’ve taught it, so it was three times, some groups of athletes would try to increase school spirit. Building campus spirit was a big one: How can you get students who aren’t athletes to want to come to the games and cheer on the student athletes? So that was always a topic that they tackled. Another one that I found really moving, students were observing how hard housekeepers were working, especially in first-year dorms, where, allegedly, students were very prone to trash the dorm. So they had a series of conversations with their housekeepers and tried to strategize ways to encourage their classmates and dorm mates to be more respectful of common spaces. Part of this involved them taking up a collection and buying nice gifts for the housekeepers. This was sort of a more band aid solution than a big picture solution. But they also came up with a series of signs to post around bathrooms and in hallways to invite people to think about how their way of living might impact other people like the housekeepers. So that was heartwarming. Another group had a great proposal, they did so much research, they wanted to see those water fountains placed around campus where you can just put your water bottle in, and it automatically fills. Because we don’t really have a lot of those on campus and they wanted to get them installed in more buildings and dorms. They did a bunch of research about cost, about good location, they asked around about plumbing, and they took their proposal to the Dean of Students, and they saw bureaucracy in action. And they did not get their water fountains, but they did learn a lot about how you can try to be convincing and how decisions are made. I think it’s a really good project for getting students to feel ownership of the school. And how does Disney fit into this? Well, again, we spend the semester talking about innovation, whether it’s technological innovation, storytelling innovation, other problem-solving techniques that are done in the service of creating an experience, that’s what I think of Imagineers as doing. Imagineers want us to feel something and respond to something that they’re doing, and they find the best ways to do that. So inviting students to think of themselves as “Guilford Imagineers” in a way. And yeah, I think it’s an effective way to get them engaged on campus.
John: Especially in a first-year seminar class where you’d like to build that sort of community and bring the students into the college community.
Jill: Exactly.
John: One of the things that I thought of when I heard of each of your classes, and I think you both talked about this a bit is, was how it provided nice connection between students’ prior knowledge, and the types of techniques and skills they need to develop in college, which is a nice sort of bridge to later coursework.
Scott: Well, I think that’s got to be one of the most important roles for first year seminars, particularly depending on the institution you’re at, and the types of students you’re dealing with. But so many of our students here, as John knows, at SUNY Oswego are first generation college students, and we have to start setting those expectations early and getting them ready for the level of work we’re doing. And again, that doesn’t mean that the content is rigorous, right? I know my students, as I mentioned earlier, thought they were going to watch movies for 15 weeks. And there is a perception sometimes everybody gets an A and for sure seminars, but the level of writing the oral presentations, the amount of critical thinking, if these courses are done correctly, I would argue they’re more rigorous than sitting in a again, I taught a large lecture, American government class for years, much more rigorous than that course, because you just can’t do the level of engagement. And the students can’t hide, frankly, in the back of the room, they have to engage with the material, they have to engage with their peers around the material. And again, that’s part of learning what college level work is, as well.
Jill: I often had to tell my students, early on, even in the course description, because students would choose the Disney class beforehand, before they would even arrive on campus. And I tried to make clear, this is not just watching movies, we will watch some movies, but we’ll also read a lot of things and we will unpack a lot of things and it will not just be popcorn and movie night every day. I don’t know that they believed me until they were in class. [LAUGHTER] I think a lot of them were like, “Eh, whatev-s, Disney, what’s this going to be?” But I stand by that as a pedagogical move that works really nicely. Because they have that foundation together and in an ideal seminar, everybody reads what I’ve assigned them and we come together, and that’s our common starting point. And then we have a robust discussion about some readings. Well, you can’t always count on students to do the reading as we know, first-year students especially, but you could always count on first-year students to have some sort of basic knowledge of, again, “The Lion King” or “Aladdin.” They just knew these movies, they know Disney culture. One of the things that came up in my class recently was how few of us have actually seen Mickey Mouse cartoons. The newest Mickey Mouse cartoon is actually awesome. They’re on Disney+ and I couldn’t recommend them more. But in my life, how many Mickey Mouse cartoons have I actually seen? Not that many. But I know Mickey Mouse inside and out because he’s just everywhere. So there’s a shared starting point for discussion. And students can then get involved, even if they haven’t “done the reading.” They can be participants in the intellectual community that I’m trying to build. So the word empowering comes out again, which is something I really aim for in those first semester courses.
John: I think you also do some work on making the workload requirements fairly explicit. Could you talk a little bit about how you convey that to students in your syllabi, for example?
Jill: I can tell you that SACS makes us do this, or did at one point, that’s our accrediting body at Guilford. But yeah, it’s actually become a helpful tool for communicating with students, though it was annoying initially to figure out, “Okay, how many hours actually am I asking students to spend?” But what I do on my syllabi is I break down for them like, “Okay, we’re going to spend this many hours in class over the next 15 to 12 weeks. You should expect to spend six to eight hours a week reading. You should expect to spend 30 minutes on every quiz. You should expect to spend one to two hours on every reading note, you should expect to spend eight to 10 hours preparing your midterm.” I really tried to break it down for them. This is not Disney specific, this is more Jill-at-Guilford specific, but I like this because if a student is struggling, I can say, “Can we, like, spend the next couple of weeks taking note of how much time you’re spending on assignments? Because the fact may be you’re not spending as much time as you need to.” And that might be how we first address issues of performance. Or, I mean, I’ve never had this happen but I always tell students, “If you’re not getting the grades you want, and yet you’re spending this amount of time, please come meet with me because there might be a way to be more efficient. Or maybe I’m giving too much work, and then we can talk about that too.” But I do think being really explicit is helpful in establishing expectations. I find as a female professor, I think students have, for a long time, thought, “Well, she’s not going to be that hard, because she’s a woman” which is far from true. When you’re teaching things like Disney, you also have to just add a little heft. So I tried to communicate my expectations clearly and laying out workload expectations down to the hour, like, “Okay, this might take you five to six hours to do. If it takes you five to six hours, you’re probably doing it correctly. If it takes you 30 minutes, you’re not doing what I want you to do. So let that be a way that you have knowledge that will let you gauge your own work output.”
Scott: As somebody who, for years, ran our orientation program at my previous institution, we would often talk about: how much work can you expect to put into a class? And there’s always that guideline, two to three hours out of class for every one hour in class. And whenever I would say that both, and frankly, this was even for many of the parents that I would talk to about this, I’d get this sort of dumbfounded look of, ‘What can I possibly do for two or three hours outside of class? It just seems so much.’ For many of these students, they’ve flown through high school with barely doing any out of class work at all. But I think breaking it down, Jill, like you’re doing, is a great idea, where they can actually see that expectation. I mean, when I started laying out what I count in those two to three hours, the light bulb goes off. But to think about it even on an assignment-by-assignment basis, and as we know, the level of reading, the amount of reading, that we expect our students to do in college is not just more but at a much higher level. It’s not pulling out a novel and just letting yourself lose yourself in the novel. It’s critically reading, it’s really thinking through that reading and applying it to what you’re hearing in the classroom, bringing it back into that classroom environment. I think that’s a great idea. That and we started also, for our writing assignments, being very clear with our rubrics around grading as well, which helped a lot in terms of students knowing and perhaps accepting the grades that they were getting as a result of those papers.
Jill: And to tie this back to Disney even more. Disney produces so many cultural artifacts, from films to the merchandising, video games, social media, I mean, it’s all over the place. And so this critical thinking piece that we know is so important, we can also help them hone those tools of the critical “reading” that we were just talking about, can also be about critically viewing a film, critically thinking about how social media posts communicate messages, how it builds communities, and also keeps people out of certain communities. You can look at Disney merchandising. One thing that we do in my Disney class is, early on, we go on a little field trip, we walk across the street to the Walmart that’s in walking distance from school. I give them 15 minutes to find Disney on as many things as you can in a Walmart. And, invariably, there are hundreds of items. Disney on waffles, on diapers, on cheese, on soup, on cereal, little toys in aisles, balloons, greeting cards, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Stopping and thinking, “Okay, what does this actually mean? What is this communicating?” We don’t notice this until we notice it, but it’s probably having an impact. So yeah, the critical thinking, as Scott was saying, which is so important to school, with Disney you can also critically think about so many other, I use the term cultural artifacts, there are so many ways Disney’s imprinting the culture and helping students to find social media literacy, visual media literacy, products-in-stores literacy, that’s really valuable.
John: That’s such a great example of an activity to let students see the impact very directly and very quickly. I want to go back, though, just to that point about the workload, because it does connect to a couple of things we’ve talked about in past podcasts, and I’ll include a link to these in the show notes. When we talked to Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, who both were speakers at our academic affairs retreat at the beginning of the semester, one of the things they’ve researched is the importance of providing structure for students, and that it has a really large impact on reducing achievement gaps or equity gaps in educational outcomes, that first-gen students, in particular, really benefit from those extra directions. Just giving that guidance, telling students they’re expected to work two or three hours for every hour in the class is good, but as Scott said, it doesn’t really tell you what you need to do. But telling students how much time they should expect to spend on each of the activities, provides just that little bit of structure that can do a lot to reduce some of the achievement differentials that we observe, especially between first- and continuing-generation students. The other thing I wanted to point out is that we’ve had Betsy Barre from Wake Forest University on a couple times, and she’s talked about the two versions of the course workload estimator, which is a good place, as a starting point to go, to help formulate some of those expectations to share with your students. It’s a great practice that I think many of us should do much more of. And it’s nice to hear that that’s being, I was going to say encouraged, but I suppose mandated by the accrediting agency there.
Jill: Yes. I think it is helpful, ultimately. It was a frustrating thing to have to do, but now that I’ve done it, I’m glad it’s there.
Scott: Yeah, I’m not going to be pushing our Middle States accreditors to do that.
John: I know in workshops, we do encourage faculty to do that, and we really emphasized that when we made that transition to remote instruction, because it was new for faculty and students, and just giving students some expectations of what they’d be doing when they moved to what, for many students, was a more unfamiliar environment, was really helpful, especially for those people who actually followed through and did that. So that’s a really great practice. Now, when you couldn’t go to Disney last year with that class, you had students do an ethnographic analysis. Could you talk just a little bit about that?
Jill: Yes, so as John just indicated, I was supposed to do this trip in September 2020, and that got canceled. So it’s sort of a late shift to an on-campus version of this course. And my two versions of this class that’s not an FYS class, are vastly different, whether we’re going to Disney parks or not. So the Disney park experience changes everything, I’m happy to talk about that later on. But if we weren’t going to the parks, there was so much that I needed to do differently. But one of the things we were going to do in the parks wa, what we did do… is ethnographic research just on the ground, ways of seeing, ways of observing people, having conversations with people when you feel safe doing so given that there’s a pandemic. What we ended up doing in my non-Disney trip version of my 200 level English Religious Studies course was bringing in, I brought in a great friend of mine, who’s a huge Disney fan, and also just has background in higher ed, so very able to talk to college students. We sort of did a mock ethnographic interview with him, talking to him about his love for Disney, and then step back from that interview, talking about themes, talking about ways to unpack what somebody said beyond the words they used, but the tone and how they looked and maybe what was going on in the background. Like he’s a big fan who has Disney stuff going on behind him. So you can also let that fuel your ethnographic analysis. And from there students would, using that as sort of a model, they all had their own interviews with Disney fans, which was something that they did and then wrote papers on. And it was really, really wonderful to see them bring course themes and questions to bear on conversations with real people who want to talk about things that they love. I will also say it’s really hard… this is another thing that I think Disney classes have invited me to think about with students… why we like what we like, why do we love what we love? Like, if we’re Disney fans, can we pinpoint why? And I think that’s actually really hard because I’ve been conducting my own ethnographic interviews with Disney fans as part of my own research. And people have a hard time articulating why they love what they love. And so it takes a special kind of prodding and patience and sometimes you’re not going to get the answer that’s the most honest, you have to read between the lines. So helping students to think about how to look at the multiple levels of what you’ve been given in a conversation or an interview, and they really liked it. I’ll remind you all that this was done in early Fall 2020, and people were stuck on Zoom. We weren’t really in the classroom. It was a really bleak time, we were still many months away from a vaccine, we were coming up on a big election. It was a stressful time. So, one: immersing ourselves in Disney was really a really great way to spend our time, like, I was very happy to have Disney stories and messages, the colors and the characters and the music just sort of buoying me every single day for that semester… that was a three-week intensive. And also then talking to other people about something that makes them happy in a time where it was hard to find stability and certainty. So, I think it had a multi-fold purpose, where it was one: teaching students ethnographic methods that was helping them bring to bear their reading discoveries and critical discoveries onto conversations with others, but also just sort of a respite. There’s a great article by John Hench, who was an Imagineer and then a Disney executive. It’s an interview with John Hench from the late 70s. And he pushes back in that interview against the idea that Disney is an escape. He says, “We aren’t an escape, what we do is we offer reassurance.” And that’s just been something that’s resonated with my students. And I have felt that as an instructor who uses Disney. This is a place I can hang out safely during times that feel really hard, like the past year and a half with the pandemic.
John: So you mentioned this year, you did get to go to Disney this year…
Jill: We did.
John: How did you prepare the students in advance of the trip?
Jill: There were multiple levels of preparation, some of it involved COVID preparation and some of it involved just trip preparation. I have to address COVID first. It was very stressful to think about going to Florida, which was a hotspot, I think still is a hotspot.
Scott: Still is, yep [LAUGHTER]
Jill: …still is a hotspot, for a class with 20 people. Also, the school’s plan for dealing with it if somebody did get COVID, was incredibly scary, it was basically, to mean like, “Okay, you’ve got to quarantine a student in Florida for seven to 10 days.” So they would just sort of be stuck there on their own, and that was something they did not want. So we spent a lot of time talking about how we’re going to not get COVID on this trip. And yeah, we didn’t. We did not get COVID, nobody got COVID. We got tested right before we left and right after we came back and I went with a box of rapid tests and used about half of that box while on the trip. So not getting COVID was our goal, and we did not get COVID, and I’m very happy to say that. I gave them a pizza party as thanks [LAUGHTER] when we got back. We all had negative tests. I’m like, “Alright, you earned pizza and Mickey ice cream bars. In terms of preparing them for the trip, we’ve been talking so much about these other classes I’ve taught on Disney, and being able to go to the park and have that experience changes everything. It’s transformative. There’s no laboratory… I called Disney our laboratory for this course… there’s no laboratory like Disney in every possible interdisciplinary way. You want to study X? You’re going to be able to see it in operation somewhere at Walt Disney World and have conversations about it. Our focus of this class was magic, it really was magical in what we were able to do and accomplish. Getting students ready for Disney, I’ll put aside the logistics, just in terms of pedagogy, was a lot about inviting them to plan what they might want to do there. In no way is the content Disney for my course, like, that’s just the stuff we hang out in, like the real takeaways are elsewhere. So in this class, the way it’s designed, these “Fantastic Journeys,” it’s about building community, and it’s about figuring out who you are… What are my purposes? How do I make plans for my future? How do I navigate challenges when things arise that I’m not ready for? So we spent a lot of time talking about plans, like what do you want to do at the park? And to do that, for instance, I brought in a whole bunch of Disney magazines that I have, and just said “Look through this, find something that looks really cool that you’re going to want to do, some food you’re going to want to eat, some animal you’re going to want to see at Animal Kingdom, some nook and cranny in one of the countries in Epcot that you’re gonna want to visit.” And that just allowed them to start dreaming and planning. And in the parks, they had to keep journals of their own discoveries and also their own ethnographic observations. So we had to do some prep in terms of ethnography beforehand. We did the Walmart trip, for instance, and it wasn’t then just about, “Okay, count the number of items,” but “What do we make of this? What else did you see? What did you see people engaging with these products, for instance, at Walmart? What kinds of conclusions can you draw?” Preparing them for the trip also involved preparing them to be roommates and traveling companions of one another. So there was a lot of bonding going into those first few days before we went on the trip. The way the course was set up, we basically were in class for a week, went to Disney for a week, went back to class. So Disney was like the sandwich between two weeks of class. So just getting them to trust each other, because some of them were going to be traveling on a plane for the first time, and some of them were going to be traveling to Disney World for the first time. So there was a lot of nerves, there was a lot of excitement. A lot of students didn’t know other students, so they didn’t want to be going without friends. So building that community was an important thing. And academically, the foundation that I laid for them before we went was very simple. It was hard for me to simplify this because I tend to make everything more complicated. I think that’s just what we do as academics. But, we talked about story, and we talked about magic, and what those are, and how those very simple concepts can, in fact, be very complicated. And we talked about cast members, and how they’ve been treated during the pandemic, and how cast members are cultivated to create the magic. And we talked about the keys to the kingdom, which are Disney’s philosophy for how it does everything. So there are four keys… now five… and the Disney Keys are: safety, efficiency, courtesy, show, and now inclusion. And we looked in advance at how those five things permeate different aspects of Disney. And then when we were in the park, we were able to see those implemented. There’s a, there’s a lot of foundation laying, but then there was also just a lot of risk, like what’s going to happen when we get there? What are they going to take from this? How are they going to get along? And they did a wonderful job. I feel like I planted a bunch of seeds and I didn’t know what would sprout. But pretty much everything I planted sprouted plus a lot of things I didn’t know would and it was really cool to see them go from kind of nervous to take this trip to being on the trip and exhilarated to, “Wow, this is what happened, this is what I’m taking away from this!” Which is both about Disney and just about my own life, “Who do I want to be? What does it mean to make magic for other people? What does it mean to work for an organization that allows me to be part of something magical? How can I use my voice to make the world a better place?” Like the sorts of conclusions they drew were really very profound, considering we were together for three weeks.
Scott: I’m fascinated by going into a park with sort of an academic mindset and sort of separating out, you know, “I’m going to go on on as many things as possible,” versus trying to be part of something larger and analyzing and writing and journaling, and so on. And I’m just wondering if the students kind of recognize that as they were going through the sort of new way of experiencing, for those who have been there before, let’s say, the park?
Jill: Yeah. I had to take advice from my friend and travel agent, my friend David Zanolla, who’s Out the Door Travel, he basically made this whole trip possible, because he was our travel agent. But he’s also a professor who takes students to Disney every, like every spring break. And he just kept saying to me, “They want more free time than you want to give them.” And so I’m like, “Well, so what, like I should spend like five hours with them a day?” And he’s like, [LAUGHTER] “No, don’t don’t do that.” So I really had to pare it down for myself. And he was absolutely right, I think three hours, structured time, was about what they could handle, because Disney is the ultimate distraction environment. What I learned coming out of it… my fear was: “I’m not giving them the full educational experience, because I’m giving them so much free time…” No, they were learning a ton. And some of the most important stuff they learned was not with me, but when they were on their own having to deal with a problem with their credit card. Or some ride broke down and they had to deal with that or trying to figure out, “Okay, I have X number of dollars to spend on a meal, where are we going to go?” So much learning happened outside of the structured learning. The structured learning was an invaluable anchor, and I had help with that. There’s a great guy who used to work for Disney, now he basically does consulting in education. His name is Jeff Kober, and he lives in Orlando and he joined us in the park on three different days, for like, three to four hours working with different groups of students and helping them with their ethnographic projects. Each student went on the trip with some idea of something they wanted to explore while there, and he sort of helped direct them, like, “You need to go on this ride if you’re going to see this!” or “You need to pay attention to this thing that’s happening on Main Street.” So he was a great guide, sort of like turning their heads to certain things. So the timing spent between time with me structured, or time with me and Jeff structured, and freedom felt wrong to me as a teacher, but in hindsight, it was perfect… about three, four hours a day. And then yeah, go out and be distracted, students, because you’re gonna learn a lot if you have good ethnographic questions and reflection questions, which I think they did. So every day, they had to write certain things in a journal, and so they were constantly just having to take it all in and then reflect. And that was very effective pedagogically, I think.
John: From a logistic standpoint, you mentioned about three to four hours a day, did you do that in one block? Or was it broken up into different time blocks over the day?
Jill: Yeah, it was all in one block, it’s hard to get them back together if they’ve gone [LAUGHTER], so it was mostly all together. On two of the days it was in the morning, like, “Okay, we’re going to get to Animal Kingdom at 7:30, because they open at 8. So we’re going to get moving quickly.” So it’s like, you know, getting everybody up and together on a bus, for instance, and then spending a few hours before saying, “Okay, now you’re free.” But, they were good and they stayed safe, and they listened. So that was really important. I had some great TA’s (teaching assistants) who helped do a lot of those logistics. But, you got to just navigate what works for you and what you’re trying to do in the course. We also did some evenings, some evenings, we were like, “Okay, at five o’clock, we’re gonna all be together for the next few hours and end our day together watching the fireworks,” for instance. But Disney, there’s just so much you can do… anybody who’s been to Disney knows it’s really hard to make decisions, because there’s so many. So having to make decisions for the group was exhilarating for me, but also, like, “Am I making the best choice?”
John: Was cost a barrier to participation for students?
Jill: This is such an important point. So, the college, as part of their agreement with the Honors Program, pays for this trip. So the students did not pay for their own trip, the college paid for the trip… which is huge. I don’t know but, I’d have to guess most of these students would not have been on this trip or in this class if that had not been the case. So it was not a barrier, in fact. The college’s fronting of the bill for this made it possible for many of these students to go to Disney for the first time, on a plane for the first time, etc. I wonder if students in the future would take a trip that they had to pay for? I also know that Disney gets more and more expensive, more rapidly every single year. So already, I feel like the trip we just did would cost more than my budget would have allowed. And that’s from booking it in March, to looking at, if I were to teach this a year from now…there’s no sign that I’m teaching this a year from now, the college has not said we’re giving you this much money to do this again… but if I did, I mean things are changing so quickly at Disney, their prices go up, they’ve introduced new planning systems, like they’ve got, instead of FastPass which used to be free now they have Genie and Genie+ and Lightning Lane, two of which cost… like, I wouldn’t be able to spend $15 for every person on a 20-person trip to jump the line to go on Flight of Passage, for instance. So yeah, I think it would be a really different trip already. That makes me sad, because something like this was so valuable. So yeah, the cost is real, and this is the only trip that Guilford did this fall because it’s sort of like “let’s put our toes back in the water after COVID and see if we can make ‘Study Away’ and ‘Study Abroad’ happen.” And Disney seemed to the college to be close enough and safe enough. Disney had a lot of safety precautions around COVID from like July 2020 till about March/April of this year, and then they backtracked some when people started getting vaccinated. So at the time we booked it, it seemed Disney was a really safe place. So, it was not cost prohibitive, but I worry it would be in the future. But I will say my colleague David, who is also my travel agent from Out The Door travel, he says, when he takes students, they pay for it themselves, and he’s able to bring like 10 a year. So, I know it happens in some places.
John: As I saw your post, one of the first things I did was look up what the costs were for student groups, and it is lower than it is for everybody else…
Jill: Wait, you found a student group rate? I didn’t even know there was a student group rate! [LAUGHTER]
John: There is one, yes [LAUGHTER], for the tickets, they do have group rates that are significantly reduced. It’s still not going to be an inexpensive trip.
Jill: I don’t know if we got that because we were booking a package of hotel and tickets. But we did get some deals because Disney has deals and we were able to take advantage of them. We did not go at a crowded time: late August, early September is a great time to go to the park if you want to be really hot and not around as many people as will be there at Christmas, for instance.
John: Which is probably good during COVID.
Jill: Exactly. That’s what I kept telling the administration, like on a 1 to 10 scale, we’re going at 1-2 time, we’re not going at like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 time.
Scott: When I was looking at taking a group of students, I actually contacted Disney and they gave me some price that I was like, “Yeah, there’s no way….”
Jill: Right… right.
Scott: …that I can afford it. I think a good travel agent, and/or your own planning… you’ll end up being cheaper than trying to go through a sort of a centralized Disney.
Jill: Yeah, and the travel agen, when we booked the trip for the previous year, what happened was we booked the trip, and then they used to have a dining plan, I think dining’s coming back soon, but it’s not happening right now. So we were going to get a dining plan. But between when we booked in October 2019, and like, January 2020, dining became free on the dates that we went. And our travel agent knew that because he was paying attention. So he caught the window like two or three days when suddenly dining was gonna be free for our dates. So he was able to jump on that and save us, God, four, five, six thousand dollars on dining. But again, that’s the trip that did not happen. Yeah, and Disney’s also paused all behind-the-scenes tours right now. We were supposed to do a “Keys to the Kingdom” tour in the Magic Kingdom, and so you know, it’s not back to what it was, but it still was an incredible trip. It was incredibly fun, and it was a great educational experience, I think I can say. Having spent time reading the students’ final projects and journals, they learned a ton about themselves and what they want to do in the world, and that was really the goal.
John: It sounds wonderful. I’m really envious. We always end by asking: “What’s next?”
Jill:Yeah, I would love to think that I can keep teaching Disney classes. Again, it’s a really happy place to hang out. So, I could see developing either a 100-level or an upper-level course on Disney and Religion. I think that would draw students and, definitely, there’s plenty of material there. Having taught five Disney classes and one that resulted in an actual trip, I have to say I’m completely in love with the idea of taking [LAUGHTER] students to Disney World now. Like, this is cost prohibitive and not logistically possible for me to do on a regular basis, but, it became the best classroom-laboratory space that I could have imagined because there’s just so much going on. And if your students are ready to see and experience, and you’ve got to prepare them for that, but if they’re ready to see and experience, there’s really no better place for that richness. And yeah, in the meantime, when I’m not doing my academic duties, I’m doing my own research on Disney and Religion and hoping to get out to the archives in San Francisco at some point, the Disney Family Archives. That was a trip that was supposed to happen a couple years ago and got cancelled because of COVID. So yeah, I’m really eager to keep thinking about Disney and the role that it’s currently playing in American religious culture.
John: I love Disney too. I first went when I was 10, I believe, then I waited until later and I brought my kids down there. And I took them there every year until they insisted that they were getting tired of going to Disney every year. [LAUGHTER].
Jill: Aw…
John: Then there was a stretch of five years recently, when I went to the Online Learning Consortium there, which was right at the Swan and Dolphin hotels.
Jill: Really?
John: They moved this year. I’m hoping they go back next year. I’m not sure.
Jill: That’s wonderful. I actually have an Honors Program conference in October at the Swan and Dolphin. So it’ll be my first-ever Disney conference, and I’m pretty stoked.
John: It’s a short walk to Epcot or to Hollywood Studios, or…, take the water taxis.
Jill: Yes, or the Skyliner now. They have the Skyliner which I love.
John: I’ve only been on it a couple of times. It was amazing, it was so efficient. And going back to the accessibility you mentioned, one of the things that really struck me is how accessible Disney is and how it’s been doing that for a long time. The Skyliner, in particular, has this nice design where they can move cars in and out of the queue to allow people who need more time to get in or out, people in wheelchairs and so forth, to do that without any pressure or having to slow down the ride.
Jill: Yeah. One of the students who came on the trip uses a wheelchair and she needs the wheelchair. And so watching her experience and how Disney handles that… mostly very positive… there were some things where we would get frustrated with Disney. But watching how that is implemented and integrated into systems so that things still continue to move so smoothly. Yeah, it works! Disney works, and I marvel at that.
John: Well, thank you, Jill. This has been wonderful.
Jill: Thank you so much.
Scott: Jill, glad to meet you.
Jill: Thank you, Scott.
Scott: This has been fun, thanks.
Jill: I hope you get to teach your Disney class again at some point.
Scott: Yeah, me too. I’ve told people I miss the classroom. I don’t miss grading, but I do miss the classroom.
Jill: I will hope. Nice to meet you, thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.
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