Thinking critically about the forces of social gravity

Are hard work and persistence the essential ingredients for success in America? Pepi Leistyna, associate professor of applied linguistics UMass Boston, challenges his students to think critically about this question.

His documentary film Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class (Media Education Foundation) examines working class representations from American television's beginnings to today's sitcoms, reality shows, police dramas, and daytime talk shows. Leistyna believes these images reinforce the myth of meritocracy. The film also associates unflattering television portrayals to cultural attitudes and public policies that directly affect the lives of the working class.

“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,” says Leistyna in Radical Teacher, Spring 2008. Through his film, he shows how mainstream media largely ignores a variety of social forces such as inheritance, social and cultural advantages, unequal educational opportunity, changing structure of job opportunities, and discrimination in all of its forms that tend to suppress, neutralize, or even negate the effects of merit in the race to get ahead. These forces of “social gravity” tend to keep people in the places they already occupy, regardless of the extent of their individual merit.

Class Dismissed was conceived as Leistyna was struggling to develop Language and the Media, a course that prepares graduate students to understand the media through a critical lens. He searched for materials that addressed social class and representation to no avail, so he decided to break new ground in exploring the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect with class.

Leistyna believes that corporate-managed media have constructed their own tales about the lives of everyday people. He emphasizes that the purpose of Class Dismissed is not to “beat students over the head” with a particular point of view but to encourage them to think through their understandings. “Whose interests are served by such representations?”

He encourages his students to access, make use of, and even create alternative sources of information that aid in civic mobilization to democratize global media systems. He believes it is in the public interest to have diverse voices in the news sphere in order to foster engaged and informed citizens.

Class Dismissed has taken on a life of its own beyond classrooms across the nation. Most recently it was screened at a film festival at the London Public Library, sponsored by Indymedia, a group of independent journalists offering an alternative to mainstream media. In his Radical Teacher article, Leistyna says he is “energized regarding how a little idea generated in the middle of the night can snowball into international dialogue…and play its little part in working towards global change.”

Speaking internationally on issues of democracy, public education, and social justice, Leistyna's books include Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy; Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception; Defining and Designing Multiculturalism; and Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. Leistyna was the 2007 recipient of the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism for Class Dismissed. "That was a really great moment for me given the respect I have for Studs' life work," says Leistyna. Leistyna has a masters and doctorate degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education