Teaching Social Class through Alternative Media and by Dialoging across Disciplines and Boundaries Pepi Leistyna (bio) and Debra Mollen (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Still images from Class Dismissed, left to right , provided by the Media Education Foundation: The Honeymoners, Sanford and Sons, Yes, Dear, The Jery Springer Show, The George Lopez Show, The King of Queens, Married with Children, The Simpsons, Will and Grace, The Jeffersons, What 's Happening !!, and All In the Family [End Page 20] I had my class watch Class Dismissed on Wednesday. Boy did their heads spin. . . . This email is one of many that I (Pepi) have received since the 2006 release of my documentary film Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.1 Sent in by teachers, students, and members of activist organizations, these emails have inspired me to pursue how cultural workers such as writers, producers, and educators can make themselves more available so that if people's "heads spin" around a particular issue, there are places and faces that, in addition to the immediate learning environment, they can turn to in order to help them make sense of the material at hand and voice their insights and concerns. The following article presents an example of how this kind of interaction can be realized. It illustrates how an alternative media form in the shape of a documentary was generated and why, and offers some creative approaches for exposing students to such resources. It also demonstrates how to create, through new interactive technologies, a more collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to knowledge and critical dialogue that transcends geographical boundaries and inspires solidarity and social activism. The Making of Alternative Media The idea of Class Dismissed was conceived at about three o'clock in the morning when, as an associate professor in the Applied Linguistics Graduate Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I was struggling to develop a course called Language and the Media. While I was able to find fantastic multimedia materials that take up racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and other such oppressive practices that any teacher education program like ours should expose students to, there was virtually nothing that addressed social class and representation. So in a moment of desperation I emailed Sut Jhally, the executive director of the Media Education Foundation (MEF), a radical independent film company located in an old firehouse in Northampton, Massachusetts. MEF is well known on the alternative scene for being a superb place to find educational materials that examine the media.2 I had been thinking for some time about how television has played a pivotal role in shaping our perceptions of the world and in particular our understanding of social class. In an effort to better understand the romanticized ideas about economic life in the United States that my adult education, English-as-a-second-language students brought with them to school, I turned to folks like Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Richard Butch who had done some interesting analysis in this area. After collecting and analyzing tons of TV data, I was invited to meet with producer Loretta Alper at MEF, and we agreed to join forces in order to bring the project to life. Loretta provided brilliant technical support as the theory came rolling out. MEF funded the efforts and most of the production was done with a digital camera and Final Cut Pro (FCP) software. Software like FCP is not only affordable these days but user friendly. Students and activists should be encouraged to use it to generate their own critical media in the form of satire, news, public service announcements, and such, as we have seen a wealth of recently on YouTube. The early production discussions were met with the realization that what we had in front of us was actually three films: one on how the news media represent labor, another on how Hollywood film portrays the working class, and a third on entertainment television. The last was chosen as the place to start the trilogy as we figured that this is where most people connect to the media, and it would thus be the most strategic way to engage the public in how corporate...