untitled film stills – student as archetype
In the first, a tousled woman peers out of a darkened room into the bright sunlight, martini glass in hand, sunglasses shielding her eyes from the glare, stocking hitched, a bored socialite drenched in ennui. Her children will populate the early Bret Easton Ellis novels of the 1980′s, deadened by money, neglect and sex.
In the next picture, we see a beautiful woman on a city street. She looks concerned. Maybe she has $30,000 in her briefcase, ‘borrowed’ from the office safe. She might be worried about her lover (James Stewart, perhaps?) who has been acting strangely recently. It’s possible that she is being followed by a portly gentleman with a distinctive profile. Whatever, she’s a smart woman in trouble.
These are 8 x 10 stills from B-movies you have seen before. At least, you’ve seen films like them. You won’t have seen these particular films because they were never made. They are a part of a sixty-nine frame series created by the artist Cindy Sherman in the late 1970′s, each of which she starred in herself as heroine, starlet, woman in danger, sex kitten, sophisticate, ingenue…
Sherman has continued to use herself as a subject, transforming herself into ridiculously-breasted virgin mothers, sinister clowns and fairy tale goblins. This not-quite-first series, however, is her simplest and most direct – both visually and thematically. The artist is an actress, and she plays ‘types’…. vaguely familiar, known but unknown.
Korean artist Nikki S. Lee has gone a step further in her immersion, as a guerrilla method actor, like Sherman not a photographer but an artist who uses photography to capture her conceptual or performance art. She places herself entirely into her context and collects snapshots as an archetype archaeologist.
That’s archetype rather than stereotype. Whilst the stereotype is cliched, oversimplified, tired, the archetype is the quintessential embodiment of an ideal. The archetype represents a universal, instantly recognisable to anyone. One might say it’s just a question of positioning. Nevertheless, archetypes are common features in literature, in psychology, in cinema, as shorthand to help us understand and connect to narratives. The Child, The Shadow, The Devil, The Sage, The Mentor.
Lately, I’ve noticed archetypes emerge in my classroom. I have been teaching some of the same classes for three years now, and although the students change every year…. in many ways they don’t. Classes from the same department have a familiar charater and chemistry year on year. I am wary of allowing this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as far as curriculum development goes (the narrative of teaching) I can work my story around certain archetypal characters before they actually arrive in my care.
Is this dangerous? Are there archetypes in your classroom? What are they, and do you use them to your advantage?
You mean like the hot chic, the bored dude, the flirty one, the no-talker, or the aging and slow to learn business man? I think there are lots more as well
Actually, in Turkey there aren’t too many archetypes. There is the studious headscarved girl with excellent English, the I could care less cause daddy’s paying type, the willing to push boundaries one and then all the others who are terrified of what the previous guy is talking about.
I find the dynamics change in the class a lot simply because of how different the teaching is from what they are used to. They go through predictable stages, but it throws a lot of students for a loop and they come out rather different then they would in another class.
Per my usual statements, I’d say run with the archetype thing as not doing so is just a bit too PC for me. There are only so many ways students will behave in a class and culture can predetermine of lot of behaviors. A good teacher makes predictions on what they know to be likely and then adapts quickly when those predictions need to be corrected. I don’t think the dreaded pigeon-holing occurs unless a teacher refuses to keep an open mind.
Those are exactly who I mean Nick. I hate to label, but there seem to be a finite number of types. I want to use this to my advantage in curriculum planning, but also to dig a little deeper and find out the individual differences in every student.
Thanks for this post, Darren, and for introducing me to Cindy Sherman. I’ve thought about it all quite a bit and gone around in a few circles, to say the least.
I don’t like the idea of pigeon-holing anybody, really, because I think everyone is a complex mix of more than one ‘archetype’. I’m not sure it’s really fair to project our own prejudices / slant of how we expect a certain ‘type’ of student to be behave onto individual people based on the behaviour of what’s gone before. In fact, when I look back to my own school years, I think I bore witness to just this kind of judgement. Although the school I attended was fairly ‘mild’ in comparison to some of the more challenging schools out there, my year was a particularly difficult one, and was undoubtedly viewed by the staff as problematic. It was fairly clear to me that the archetypal ‘mouthy kids’ were labelled at the beginning of each year, as were ‘flirty ones’ and the ‘bored dudes’, to which Nick refers. The result was a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.
I think rather than looking at each student as archetype, we can pick out particular behavioural traits and idiosyncracies (which could manifest themselves in all manner of concoctions in any one student) and try to adapt our teaching in recognition of these, be they positive or negative.
Perhaps this is what Cindy Sherman is saying through her artwork – that, as ever changing human beings, we can be any one we want to be at any given time and are therefore impossible to predict.
Best, Callie
As Callie states, biases can predispose us to react a certain way and create self-fulfilling prophecies, but I don’t think it’s all that common. I find it very hard to believe that the way I believe a person to be will turn them into that person. Saying that my perception of another will actually determine there personality is rather unbelievable.
I’ve always found it to be quite the Western myth that people are unique and complex. It’s really not true. The vast majority of people are highly predictable. Various behaviors have very similar causes and simple determiners like place of birth, religious and political affiliation, home life, and class have very high predictability patterns.
The blogs are a great example. You can predict the general vein of what most people will say on a topic before even reading it. People don’t tend to change all that much, and certainly not very fast.
Nick (sorry Darren),
My opinions and reactions change like the wind. Maybe that is a predictable aspect of my butterfly-like personality, or maybe it’s because I’m open to what others have to say and the fact that things evolve and are not set in stone.
I’m not saying that your, or anyone’s, perception of another human being will directly make them anything they are not, but the way you treat an individual as a result of your perception of them might well. Especially an impressionable teen – have you not seen any examples of this? At the very least, I think it could have an effect on their self esteem. I guess the key is to have our perception of someone (this is involuntary, is it not?), but challenge our own projections of these perceptions, bearing in mind that we cannot properly make a judgement of a person based on their behaviour in the classroom.
Also, I absolutely can’t predict what people are going to say on any given topic on any given blog – otherwise what would be the point in reading it? Sometimes I’ve read comments and had a suspicion of who has written it before getting down to their name, but I’ve had LOTS of surprises, too.
Callie
I’m inclined to agree with you Callie, especially your insight into what Sherman may be trying to show us in this particular series. The shorthand of archetypes can help a busy teacher to organise his or her class, but it is vital that we allow students to breathe within their allocated roles, or even break out of them entirely. I often ask students to reflect on their role in class, to find out how they see themselves… as leaders, as followers, as mood makers. It’s something I’d like to explore more provided I can think of a way of doing it without then locking them into those roles.
I don’t worry about most of my classes… smaller classes, those that meet several times a week, writing classes all offer opportunities for students to show themselves for what they really are rather than what they look like to the casual observer. The classes I am more concerned about are those which I only meet once a week and have more than thirty students. Each student makes an attendance book in which they grade themselves, write something about themselves, and at the end of every class they have a chance to write a reflection on what we have done. I hope this is one way of finding the differences.
So while very broadly I agree with you Nick, I don’t really like the sentiment. Yes, we often run true to type. But is it really a ‘Western myth’ that people are unique and complex? Japan, as you probably know, is considered a collectivist culture, whereas many ‘Western’ cultures tend towards the individualist. That doesn’t mean, however, that people are more alike in Japan… it just means that the happiness of the group is more important than that of the individual. Hence the Japanese proverb ‘十人十色’ (Ten people, ten colours), which recognises that each member of a group will have his or her own motivations. Which means that it is even more important for the teacher to understand individual differences in a collectivist society.
That doesn’t mean I won’t hang a handy label on a student as they seat them selves for the first class. And it doesn’t mean that he or she won’t act entirely true to form. But we have to be open to the unexpected, and we have to allow students the opportunity to surprise us.
Maybe you’ll think I’m crazy, but I think I can change from one minute to the next, just like anyone else. And as a teen, like any other teen, I was a “raw, white, unprotected fibre” and everything, every tiny particle of dust in the ray of light in the attic, and everybody, every word, could leave its print on me.