B.A., American Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ph.D., American Studies, 1992, Yale University
Office: UW1-119
Phone: 425.352.5362
Email: mlg@u.washington.edu
Website: www.uwb.edu/faculty/mgoldberg/
Mailing: Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246
I try to give students the opportunity to gain the skills, knowledge, experience, and confidence to expand their personal horizons, to become more effective and active citizens, and to have the abilities to succeed in a range of possible vocations. I base my teaching philosophy on the assumption that students can accomplish more than they believe possible. My task is to encourage them to take the intellectual risks that are fundamental for their success. I try to empower students by making them active participants in their own education. I make use of a range of appropriate educational technology to facilitate communication, ongoing assessment, and cooperative group learning. Learning outcomes are the organizing focus when I design my courses; I choose a disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary approach depending on which best fits the outcomes I hope to achieve. My courses draw on History, Cinema Studies, Musicology, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies. While I am committed to teaching analytical and communication skills, I also try to push students out of their "comfort zone" by challenging their preconceptions and assumptions. All points of view presented within a constructive and open-minded intellectual framework are welcome in my classroom.
BIS 349 Hollywood Cinema and Genre
BIS 462 The Culture of Cold War America
BIS 463 US Women's History
BIS 365 American Popular and Consumer Culture
BIS 424 Topics in American Studies: Disability and the Body
I am currently working on a book-length interdisciplinary study of the creation of a "generational discourse" in 1950s America that shaped the assumptions and attitudes of the 1960s Counterculture. I argue that this discourse provided privileged youth in the 1950s with a general road map for a broadly defined and highly contradictory rebellion. By appropriating black, "queer," Southern, and working-class signs as their own signifiers, young white urban middle-class men re-imagined themselves as victims and outsiders rather than as privileged heirs to cultural dominance, thus masking their class, racial, regional, and gender prerogatives. The contradictory nature of "generationalism" made possible the liberal reforms and radical attempts of the 60s while ultimately undermining the gains made by marginalized groups and the support of them by upper-middle-class "Boomers. At the same time, generationalism shifted the way the Boomers came to view their parents generation (relabeled "the Greatest Generation" and their cultural progeny ("Generation X"). The project combines formalist analysis of cultural texts (movies, music, novels, poetry, advertisements, photographs) with archival research into audiences and authors, utilizing critical theory to explain cultural processes and the subconscious production of meaning. I am also writing on disciplinary and interdisciplinary modes of teaching and research within American Studies and History.
A second strand of my research focuses on the effects of integrating educational technology and learning theory (including learning styles, educative assessment, and scaffolding) within an outcomes-based learning-centered2 paradigm. One project, in collaboration with IAS colleague Elizabeth Thomas, examines whether promoting students1 sense of intellectual ownership within this learning-centered paradigm can enhance their educational experience and increase learning "efficiency." Another project rethinks the notion of "teaching and learning efficiency" itself, advocating a broad outcomes-based approach that uses calculations based on the goal of promoting the health and effectiveness of the university community. This project also offers an alternative concept of "accountability" that challenges all stakeholders faculty, adminstrators, students, politicians, citizens, and business and non-profit leaders to identify their responsibility and fulfill it rather than simply expecting an institution to meet a narrow set of criteria with no shared responsibility. Finally, I am finishing a project with Sarah Leadley, Head of Instruction and Research at the UWB/CCC Campus Library, titled 3It1s 1a.m. Do You Know Were Your Undergraduate Researcher Is?: Locating a New Paradigm for Information Literacy in a Radically Altered Landscape. It argues that vast changes in technology, student culture, access to information, and scholarship have exposed old assumptions about student research and the skills required to perform it without much awareness on the part of instructors.
An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded-Age Kansas (Johns Hopkins University Press, "Reconfiguring American Political Culture" series:1997)
"Expanding the Possibilities of the U.S. Survey Through Student-Directed Teaching and Learning," OAH Magazine of History (Winter 1996).
"Breaking New Ground: 1800-1840" chapter in "No Small Courage: A History of American Women in the United States," Nancy F. Cott, ed. Oxford University Press: 2000.
"Populism" entry in "Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinity," ABC-CLIO Press, 2004.
"What Were They Thinking?: Using Film Studies to Teach the 1950s Dating Film and Film Date as Historical Event," OAH Magazine of History, forthcoming April 2004.
