Teaching The Wire at UW-Madison: Week Four

This semester (Fall 2011), I'm teaching a course through the Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program at UW-Madison. Entitled "Narratives of Justice and Equality in Multicultural America," it's an outgrowth of some of the nonfiction writing and composition courses I've taught over the last decade.

We're engaging a variety of texts, including Jason DeParle's great book on welfare reform in Milwaukee (American Dream), Elijah Anderson's classic Code of the Street, and Paul Butler's recent Let's Get Free. The real backbone of the course is Season One of HBO's critically-acclaimed drama The Wire. In my mind, the show provides a perfect window to the main issues we're engaging in the course: poverty, violence, criminal justice, and politics.

In an effort to engage students more completely, I'm teaching the course in a somewhat novel manner. The most obvious change in my teaching style is that I'm trying to minimize the amount of straight lecturing. Instead of putting students to sleep, I'm giving them the chance to engage our main text (The Wire) together and then respond in real time. To do that, we're responding to the show on Twitter; all of the responses are filtered into the hashtag #wire275.

Thus far, the results have been great. I've been teaching for over 20 years, and I've never previously had the experience of seeing (or hearing) instantaneous student responses to a text. Twitter gives students the ability to put their thoughts down quickly, before they are lost or forgotten -- or before the instructor takes the conversation in a different direction.

Reflection is important, too; the substance of the students' input can't simply be 140-character bursts of thought. We have meaningful discussions in class, and students are required to post weekly responses on our course website. Moreover, they will be working together on group projects inspired by our work. As I try to break the teaching/learning mold, I'm encouraging them to eschew the standard academic paper and instead work on performances, digital narratives, or educational games.

So far, the results are encouraging. Judging from what their Tweets, posts on the website, and comments in class, it seems that students are seriously engaged in our texts. And, purely on their own, they are making connections to things outside our course: one student referenced the controversy regarding a recent prizefight, while another posted a link to speech by Elizabeth Warren in which she invoked the social contract. As a teacher, those are the moments I really prize.

This week, it's on to Episode Three, "The Buys"....

When Intense Belief Kills

An intriguing article in The Atlantic reviewing Sherry Adler's Sleep Paralysis: Nightmares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection. Most interesting here is the discussion of how dozens of Hmong immigrants died in their sleep in the early 1980's. According to the piece, "Adler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, comes to a stunning conclusion: In a sense, the Hmong were killed by their beliefs in the spirit world, even if the mechanism of their deaths was likely an obscure genetic cardiac arrhythmia that is prevalent in southeast Asia." Read it here.

Medicine v. Miracle

A great story here in the American Medical Association's amednews.com on religion-based medical neglect. The story focuses on events in Oregon, where members of the Followers of Christ Church have been implicated in dozens of apparently preventable child deaths. (I focused on the church in my book When Prayer Fails.) There are great quotes from a variety of experts. The full story is available here.

The Warren Jeffs trial in Texas Monthly

Katy Vine has written an excellent account of the most recent Warren Jeffs trial for Texas Monthly. Her story, published in the August issue of the magazine, is available here.

RNS "10 Minutes With . . ." Feature

I'm featured for a second time in the Religion News Service's "10 Minutes With . . ." feature, which is accessible here. The interview (which I did last week) focuses mainly on the aftermath of the Worthington trial in Oregon.

When asked, for instance, about the potential ramifications of the verdicts in the Worthington case, I told RNS, "It remains to be seen what the implications will be, both in Oregon and nationally. It surprises me because Oregon had revamped its laws to make it easier to prosecute parents. This was going to be the first test of that revamped law, and the first test did not work. It demonstrates how unsettled these legal and ethical questions remain even though the courts have been grappling with them for over 100 years."

PBS program "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly" focuses on faith healing cases

A recent segment of the PBS program "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly" was devoted to faith healing cases in Wisconsin and Oregon. It featured a variety of experts (including me and Rita Swan of the advocacy group CHILD) as well as a representative of the Christian Science Church, Joe Farkas. The show is viewable online here

Mother Jones article on faith healing cases

With the first of the Neumann trials beginning this week (jury selection in Leilani Neumann's trial begins on Thursday, May 14), there promises to be renewed media coverage of the legal and ethical issues implicated in cases when children die after being denied, because of their parents' religious beliefs, conventional medical treatment.

A case in point is Deena Guzder's story "Should Parents Who Call God Instead of the Doctor Be Punished?" in the current issue of Mother Jones (accessible here).

TIME article on faith healing cases

TIME's Deena Guzder has written a concise piece on recent faith healing deaths -- most prominently, that of Kara Neumann in Wisconsin last Easter Sunday -- and the criminal litigation that continues to unfold (accessible here). "When Parents Call God Instead of the Doctor" is among several recent articles in national publications tracking the phenomenon of religion-based medical neglect of children.

Interfaith Voices appearance

I'm one of this week's guests on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Interfaith Voices" (program accessible here). My segment is entitled "Faith Healing: Miraculous Cure or Deadly Gamble?"

New York Times article on Neumann case

Dirk Johnson on The New York Times has written a very thorough article on the Neumann faith healing case in Weston, Wisconsin (accessible here). I'm quoted about halfway through regarding the potential legal issues that might come into play as the case goes to trial.