Teaching Through Supernatural: Using SPN in the College Classroom

Paul Booth

Then ...

Like on most Friday nights, my wife and I walked our dogs, ordered the sushi, and at 8 p.m. tuned to the CW to catch the latest episode of Supernatural. As was my habit, I had my laptop open while the show was airing (I know, sacrilegious for a fan, but I think my students had an assignment due that night). And while I wasn't really playing with the computer, I did have the screen up on my latest project: (re)designing the syllabus for MCS 271: Media and Cultural Studies ...

Now ...

... It felt as if Castiel Himself led me to see the connection between the show that was airing and the syllabus on my laptop. Although I'd been looking for a way to 'shake up' the foundation of our College's required cultural studies course, I hadn't had a great deal of success. But thanks to that moment of concomitant viewing – that moment of divine intervention – I was able to see how Supernatural could be integrated into each lesson taught in that class. In the past, I have included 45-minute screenings of television shows and short films to illustrate the different cultural studies methods of analysing media. Most recently, I used relevant episodes of Supernatural that fit into the schema of the class. I hoped this would allow me to use my own fandom for SPN as a way of demonstrating to the students how different theories of the media worked together. And, Supernatural not only succeeded, but excelled at this goal. In this chapter, I'll be discussing the ways that I integrated episodes of Supernatural in my Media and Cultural Studies course. I'll begin by summarizing the structure and teaching emphasis in the class itself. Next, I'll offer some lesson plans to more fully articulate the multiple interpretations of Supernatural. Finally, I'll look at the ways students seemed to respond positively to Supernatural.

'Nightmare': Teaching cultural studies

The course objectives for MCS 271 ask that at the end of the course, students be able to:

1. Write clearly and cogently about theories of the media;

2. Demonstrate the application of media theories to media texts; and

3. Criticize contemporary media texts through the use of theories.

Using Supernatural helped reach these objectives. It also reached, however, a higher-level objective that I didn't necessarily intend. When I talk about 'levels of objectives', I'm referring to Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives (1984), which ranks the levels at which different skills are necessary for learning. For example, the first level is 'knowledge', which asks students to know and repeat back important information. As the levels increase, the difficulty of attaining that level rises. The next skill, 'comprehension', requires knowledge as well as critical thinking. The other levels – 'application', 'analysis', 'evaluation', and finally 'creation' – come with more intense styles of learning. Because MCS 271 is an introductory course, I aim for the simpler levels: knowledge, comprehension and application.

The first time I taught the course, I found that students were able to approach the application stage. They could view each text and apply the theory we were learning to it. The second time I taught the course – the SPN time – I found that students were able to reach the analysis stage – a more advanced level. Because we watched episodes from one television show instead of multiple texts, students were able to make connections between the different media theories. I believe this is partly because of what TV scholar Jason Mittell would call the 'narrative complexity' of Supernatural – that is, the way the show uses both stand-alone episodes as well as a longer narrative arc to tell multiple stories. Students understood the connections between episodes even if they didn't follow the whole narrative because they at least knew that there was supposed to be an overarching story.

I break the course into ten topics, each of which revolves around issues in cultural studies. Given the audience of the class, freshmen and sophomores, I aim for breadth rather than depth. The ten topics are:

1. The Subject (and Study) of Culture

2. Semiotics and Structuralism

3. Ideology and Hegemony

4. Political Economy, Marxism, and the Economics of Culture

5. Representation and Race

6. Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies

7. Reception Studies and Fandom

8. Postmodernism and Contemporary Philosophy

9. Genre Studies

10. Digital Culture

When I first taught MCS 271, I used multiple 'classic' texts to illustrate the topics. None of these classic texts related to one another. In class, however, I found that students were generally able to make comparisons between the theory and the text for that particular topic, but didn't seem able to make these larger connections between the theories themselves. When I added Supernatural, as the following section demonstrates, students were better able to achieve higher learning objectives.

'Devil's trap: Introducing Supernatural to cultural studies (and vice versa)

Generally in class I take students (via discussion) through the different types of 'meaning' to be found in media texts, as described by the classic film textbook Making Meaning (1991) by David Bordwell. For Bordwell, there are four ways to find meaning in a text. The first, the 'referential', is the most obvious: the basic plot. In class, I ask students to identify what happened on-screen, how the characters reacted to this and what the results of that were. When we explore the second way to find meaning, the 'explicit', I ask them to describe the moral of the text. This is usually stated in the show as the lesson to be learned.

The class tends to have more difficulty with the third level of meaning, the 'implicit', as it only arrives through careful consideration of what the producers of the media text implied by the moral. This isn't something stated in the show, but rather a more general feeling or theme. Finally, I ask students to explore the 'symptomatic' meaning, which examines the ideology that shaped the text, and then what we can learn through critical reflection.

To enable this fourth meaning, I give students two readings for each class. The first is a 'theory' reading from the textbooks I use, Professor Greg Smith's What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss (2010) and Arthur Asa Berger's Media Analysis...