THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES
In 1980, sociologist William Whyte released a documentary complement to his highly influential study on the use of space in American cities. On the left is a clip of the best copy available for public consumption. On the right is the same clip edited by me for use in an undergraduate research methods course. I adjusted the audio to remove much of the white noise heard throughout the original, corrected the aspect ratio, and fixed the closed captioning for good measure.
THE TROLLEY PROBLEM // THE GOOD PLACE
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE // VICE PRINCIPALS
Levity and humor, to me, are important aspects of teaching difficult subjects – there's plenty of depression fuel in the news, I'd prefer students not leave each class more pessimistic than the last. Accordingly, for an introduction to criminal justice course, I pieced together a collection of clips illustrating the "trolley problem" from an episode of The Good Place to use during a lesson on the stickiness of social problems. And I did the same with a story arc depicting a form of restorative justice from the show Vice Principals for use in a lesson on criminal justice reforms. These are examples where the video editing skills may seem tertiary to the teaching philosophy, but I would argue that by eliminating in advance the 15-ish minutes of each episode that were erroneous for my instructional purposes I made the presentation more impactful than it would have been were I to fumble around with the full video files in the middle of a lecture.