4.2 Discussion
Reading and Responding through the “Spot ICE” Approach
Many upper-level undergraduate students assume that they know how to read: they have done it for many years, and they have read a range of publications including discipline-specific texts as part of their university experience; reading, then, is simply not a skill they feel they need to develop. But with increasing demands on students–especially within a music programme where they are often overloaded with rehearsals and performances–it can sometimes be challenging for them to bracket out time for their academic courses. Students then resort to reading quickly, sometimes only glancing over words and skimming through ideas. But reading well—reading closely and deeply—requires time and, to their surprise, even a strategy. While there are many techniques that help students read more effectively, I have found the ICE model–with its accessibility and flexibility–useful for them as they break open a fresh course pack.
In particular, students in my seminars are required to complete four “Spot ICE” responses per term where I ask them to read each text with an eye to identifying the Ideas, Connections and Extensions, and mark up (i.e., highlight, tag) the readings accordingly. Early in the term I often see each letter (“I” “C” “E”) in the margins, frequently with sparse marginal notes. Students are encouraged to write out their response after they first read the publication, which they can then use as an outline for their in-class response and class discussion.
The first response, not surprisingly, is usually the weakest (I only count their highest three responses, just in case they are absent one of those days and the first mark is usually the lowest of the four so it can be dropped when final grades are calculated). At this stage, the Connections students make are usually with previous in-class discussions or from their personal experience outside the classroom. Because students often resort to talking about their own musical preferences, classes can easily fall into opinion-based conversations. Accordingly, I instruct them to make Connections only with previous readings. This constraint challenges them to engage more fully with the reading and less with their own habitual thoughts. I also restrict the number of Ideas they can cite, usually two at most; this is often challenging because students come to the course with past experience of being rewarded for identifying more Ideas in their writing, but with less depth. The emphasis on fewer, but well-explored ideas, exclusive of their own experience, moves them towards a deeper engagement with material that, only later, will be supplemented by their personal experiences.
What I find most remarkable about this process are the changes within the Ideas and Connections sections across the four responses, and especially within the Extension section. I invite them to populate this section by exploring questions such as: How would they extend the article? If the article is more than a year or two old, what else might they consider if they were writing it today? What are some of the article’s omissions that could have strengthened it? Equally important is that they are encouraged to formulate this section by asking their own questions. By the final response they bring in none of their own personal opinions, are considerably more focused on specific Ideas and Connections from readings and their Extensions section is filled—filled—with questions, many of which, delightfully, I have not anticipated. Rather than “holding the floor” with their knowledge of the reading, often judging its merit by dividing ideas into neat “good/useful” and “bad/useless” categories, they are empowered instead to ask more thoughtful questions of the content. This replaces the drive to “master” the article with a desire to be vulnerable as they admit to and explore what they don’t know. If, as Brené Brown writes, “vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity,”2 then the ICE model helps us establish a safe environment within which we can understand vulnerability as central to intellectual growth, collaboration and generosity.
Reverse ICE: Working with “Older” Readings (a.k.a. Welcome to the ‘70s!)
An important benefit of the ICE model is that it helped me introduce students to a wider range of readings. Assigning texts by Freud, for instance, despite its limitations, usually isn’t problematic: students often receive his writing like a primary text and are more enthusiastic because they feel like they are going to “the source.” When I assign articles dating from say, the 1970s through to the 1990s, however, students often comment that they are “old” readings and suggest that the ideas aren’t as worthy of their attention as compared to more recent publications or primary texts. One quickly-rejected article that has shaped the field of feminist popular music studies is Simon Frith’s and Angela Robbie’s 1978 article “Rock and Sexuality.” I would like to give a short introduction to this article and discuss how I pair it with “Reverse ICE” to model for students how to appreciate “dated” readings like this one–and read it with fresher eyes.
The central argument of Frith and McRobbie’s article is that rock music is defined not only by its sound but also by its intended demographic audience (white), its form of production (commercial) and its ideology (that it holds more integrity than other genres). To illustrate, they present “cock rock” – stereotypically aggressive and often crude representations of male sexuality with assertive lyrics, loud dynamics and featuring phallic guitars (think Mick Jagger)—in juxtaposition to “teenybop.” Teenybop, or what we now refer to as ‘pop’ music, replaces the hyper-confident male with the vulnerable “boy next door” (think Donny Osmond). Magazines like Guitar Player provided performance tips, and tablature for the budding amateur, encouraging boys to perform “cock rock” as well as listen to it. Teenybop magazines focused on tidbit details about what readers’ (girls) favourite artists like to eat or how they relaxed on the weekend; they didn’t provide girls with instructions on how to perform the music. The expectation was that the girls listened to their favourite musicians and imagined dating them.
Students tend to argue that the ideas presented in the paper may have been ground-breaking in 1978 but that it’s been long established that boys and girls generally consume different music and in different ways. And, so what? With so many successful female pop stars like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry with net worths of 320 million and 330 million dollars, respectively, do we really need to worry about gender concerns as much as we did 40 years ago? To answer these questions, I introduce my students to the “Reverse ICE” Approach and invite them to imagine themselves, not as readers but, as the authors of the article. In other words, I don’t ask them to identify the authors’ conclusions but rather the main ideas from which the authors drew. As they sleuth through the reading and the end notes, they recognize that at least some of the authors’ ideas were developed as they themselves consumed popular culture. How then did they then make Connections between this Idea and the existing scholarly literature? By reading further, students then identify how well versed the authors were in a range of popular culture texts from music to lyrics and interviews and magazine. They learned that within the teenybop genre, females, romance, domesticity, and “the comic strip vocabulary of true love” were inextricably linked, an observation on their part that became a “building block” of their research. It brought their ideas into conversation with academic sources. Through further sleuthing, students then identified how the authors brought their ideas into conversation with academic sources and their burgeoning understanding of how the music that girls consumed shaped their lives as adults and especially how it functioned in the home and in the workplace.
Parsing out the article’s Extensions then happens in two stages. First, I ask students to work in groups and find consensus surrounding the authors’ most significant contributions. While Frith and McRobbie extended several intellectual discussions, students usually form consensus that their biggest contribution was to understand music as an ideologically-driven medium that affords the cultural industries a powerful means of constructing sexuality. In other words, popular music, even by 1978, was more than a form of sexual expression—it was a form of sexual control.
By this point in the process, I have met at least two of my objectives for assigning the reading: first, the article has served as an introduction to 20th-century artists (the Shirelles, Thin Lizzy, Bread) with whom the students may be partially or totally unfamiliar. More importantly, however, is that students have begun to realize that even though this article addresses music over 50 years old, very little, ideologically speaking, has changed.
I then move to the second level of the Extensions assignment by challenging students to imagine re-writing this article today. To this end, I ask them to “update” it by writing a hefty paragraph of questions—only questions—and extending them beyond gender to include race, class, and queerness (for starters). Below are some of the questions past students have posed:
- Today, pop music allows for both white and black women, but rock isn’t inclusive–why are black male rock musicians still so rare? What would happen to rock if blackness were more a part of this genre?
- Why do we encourage young girls to buy music by pop musicians like Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears and then make them feel ashamed as adults for liking it? Why do we continue to think of “authenticity” as a working-class rock band writing their own songs, playing their own instruments and driving in a van to out-of-town gigs? Does that type of struggle make them more “authentic” than someone who sings and dances and sweats breathlessly on stage? And if that attitude doesn’t change, can female artists like Ariana Grande ever really be taken seriously?
- Why do we have a category for “classic rock” but not for “classic pop”? What and who gets to be “classic” and why?
- Can rock co-exist with queerness? With women? What happens to rock in the age of the #metoo movement? Can it survive? Do we even want it to?
- How would future students update this article in 20 years? What will they see that we can’t in 2021?”
Good questions. By inviting students to fill pages with questions, I observe them push their Ideas and, over the term, expose their intellectual gaps to become more gracious seminar participants.
The reverse ICE process allows my students to step into the “Rock and Sexuality” article and it facilitates their understanding of how the authors did their research; it helps them ponder how the article might be read in an as-yet unknowable future. By pairing this technique with this particular article, students learn not so much about what has changed within popular music over the years, but rather how little, ideologically speaking, has changed. Most importantly, the process helps them critique their own notions of progress as well as the means by which we are encouraged to measure it.
ICE Speed Dating: Working with Term Papers
In my seminars, two classes per term are devoted to working on term papers and once again, the ICE approach has proven very helpful. During the first of the two classes we focus foremost on Ideas by playing a game of “building-blocks speed dating.” Students are paired for 20 minutes and for the first 10 minutes, one student presents the Ideas of their paper to their partner who “interviews” them and invites them to see new Connections. After 10 minutes, the students switch roles. When they are finished, one of them moves down the row and they each begin the process again with another student. After three pairs of students have had the opportunity to exchange Ideas, we come back together, as a whole class, to discuss how, by making Connections with new content, their Ideas changed over the 30 minutes. Then, students with whom they did not directly speak are invited to provide feedback on how their new Ideas and Connections might be extended further, thus involving the entire class.
During the second “speed dating” class, several weeks later, we slow this process down and focus on Connections and Extensions. Now students are paired for approximately 30 minutes during which time they once again interview one another about the papers, this time with a student with whom they have not previously discussed their paper. I invite them to focus on Connections and think about the intellectual conversation into which they are entering. Who are the scholars asking similar questions and what is the discussion within which they are engaged? How then will your own paper contribute to these conversations?
