College culture represents one of the most complex and important parts of students’ life. The majority of students are not willing and sometimes anxious to talk about their own educational experiences, about influences upon them, and about their own actions and reactions. College culture and popular images of college dominated in society can have a negative impact on students and their values, behavior patterns, and views. Micheal Moffatt (1989) writes: “The students’ Rutgers was obviously not the same institution the professors and other campus authorities thought they knew. The college was a very complicated place, made more complicated by its inclusion in a bigger and even more confusing university”. These ideas vividly portray that corrective actions and administrative support are crucial for college students in order to correct popular images (usually negative images) about the college and its inner culture. Analysis of the book is a necessary corrective to popular images of college.
Analysis of the book can be seen as an important corrective to popular images of college because it provides a vivid and clear examination of modern college culture and communication. Sharing experiences and images through the book is an important part of early life at college. The wonder and joy of unique college culture will alert students to different worlds, different realities. Acknowledging and sharing experiences and their contexts. If educators valued such connections and, when appropriate, taught using narrative modes of knowing, perhaps students would be better prepared to manage the challenges inherent in their personal and professional lives. Moffatt explains that: “the different perspectives of the students and of campus adults were also rooted in a generation. Professors and other campus authorities were not in the same position in the typical American middle-class life cycle as college adolescents”. This created the main problem for both students and administration to establish unique culture and control behavior patterns and discipline in the classroom and on campus.
Analysis of weaknesses and strengths of the popular image of college can be viewed as a mode of inquiry because it involves cooperative activity, has a qualitative focus, and encompasses theoretical perspectives. It can be used either to explain or to express, to analyze, or to understand a culture. Moffatt discovered the more educators worked with students, the more learning power their stories had. It makes sense then for educators to encourage students to analyze and examine their own culture and events they have experienced and to make links between stories of the world and their own life. Cultural images “are drawn from the national and international youth culture to which most American college students orient their sense of generation in the late twentieth century, a culture that comes to them” (Moffatt, p. 30-32). These facts enable educators to use analysis and dialogue in various forms to help students make connections within and between self and other, subject and object, and thought and feeling. Analysis of the book is a necessary corrective because “undergraduates are far removed from their professors at most large, modern state universities” (Moffatt, p. 335). The human need to recount and explore experience and culture, including college images, results in the composition of some form of narrative, often a story that describes actions, emotions, and outcomes. Such analysis placed events in narrative contexts and, by doing so, assign them particular meanings.
The analysis of the book is important and might also benefit students if educators create opportunities for more complex, creative, and diverse patterns of communication and cultural images. As a learning strategy, the analysis accommodates diverse realities and enables students to share experiences from their own cultural frame. The analysis of the book fulfills its main task: improving communication and interaction between students and educators. However, this approach may involve variable practices and rests on a set of guiding principles. These principles should reflect modern youth culture and healthy lifestyle, fun, and joy typical for the youth. The main problem is that:
American undergraduate culture in the 1980s is the product of two older student subcultures inherited internally on American campuses. Modern students are the “new insiders,” she suggests–joyless workaholics like the old outsiders and nonintellectuals in their basic orientations toward higher education, like students in the old college-life elite (Horowitz 1987:263-288 cited Moffatt 52).
These principles should involve context, construction, collaboration, and conversation. Context, from this perspective, referred to the physical, cultural, social, and political aspects embedded in the analysis and embodied in tellers and listeners, while the construction of knowledge is the result of their active participation in this process. Collaboration encompasses the relationships which develop between students and educators and the ways in which they work together to construct new culture. The conversation is the means by which those involved articulate experience and engage in reflective dialogue. As a learning strategy, the analysis of the book accommodates diverse realities and enables students to share experiences from their own cultural frame of reference.
In the process of engaging with the analysis, the students construct meaning. The analysis of images allows them to glimpse the worlds of others and come to know their own world more fully. Because the analysis holds educative and transformative possibilities, they have significant roles to play in teaching and learning. The analysis of the book is a crucial corrective practice because it allows educators to introduce new material in entertaining and interesting ways, to share practice experiences that demonstrate key points. The use of analysis will help to facilitate emotional release, to learn from experience, and to bring about thoughtful change to practice. For instance, Moffatt mentions that: “the actual ability of Rutgers students to deal with real cultural diversity … was often very limited. Many students could not tolerate it at all but sealed themselves into little friendship groups of people as much like themselves as they could find” (60). The analysis of the book will help to teach and educate students, improving the popular image of racial diversity and vulgar language.
In the process of living and learning, the students shape their character for good or for ill. The popular image of college shape the level of expectancy, the teaching, the curriculum, student responsibility, and religious life. All these are a part of what surrounds the student. At this point, the analysis of the book will deal principally with the nonacademic influences which educators have not discussed in full. Initially, the quality of the environment is established by the level of expectancy. For instance, “most of the image is obviously about college fun–sexuality, drinking, and entertainment–and, implicitly, about being on one’s own to enjoy such things, away from parental controls” (Moffatt, p. 30). When a high level of culture does not penetrate the entire campus, however, units of the environment proceed quickly and easily to negate the desired expectancy. What applied to the large campus is not applicable to the small, more closely-knit academic community. For these reasons, the colleges should constantly struggle to maintain a productive climate and cultural images. Further than this, the college must take into account the surrounding community.
In sum, the analysis of the book will help to set certain standards and rules, make corrective actions and shape the behavior of students. Where a strong shared conviction does not permeate the campus, the students appear to fall back upon some familiar group to guide what they think and do. The college might state in a general way its rules and regulations governing conduct. The size of the particular group which sets the standards depends in part on the size of the particular college. For this reason, the analysis of values, traditions, and weaknesses will help to avoid false images and unrealistic expectations shared by some students. Students adapt their habits of thought and action from social interaction, which happens to be closest to them. They “take on” the attitudes of those with whom they live and with whom they spend their social hours. In this case, the analysis will help to provide them with realistic and positive images of college and its culture. The college need not be satisfied with simply bemoaning the effect of the group but provides an environment in which its level of expectancy becomes the accepted pattern. It can take advantage of conformity and create within subsidiary groups the conditions within which educational ideas and ideals may flourish.
Works Cited
Moffatt, M. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick. 1989.