PART OF THE GAME
Intensive Freshman Seminar participants study violence in sports not only as a societal problem, but as something affecting their own lives.
(Appearing in the Fall 2007 issue of IU Teaching & Learning Magazine)
On the final day of his Intensive Freshman Seminar, “Violence in Sports and Leisure,” Rasul Mowatt passes around a bag of cheese and caramel popcorn—“the best popcorn on the planet,” he says—reviews some key concepts, and goes over questions for the final exam—an open-book, in-class essay exam including questions on the social impact of violence in college and professional sports, the history of sports and violence, and policy approaches to the issue.
“Are you leaning toward any particular questions?” a student asks. Mowatt thinks, then grins.
“They’re all solid questions. It’s like going to a car lot and seeing all Mercedes Benzes: the black, the red, which one is best? They’re all good.”
The students laugh, then begin to pack up their bags. It’s time for dodgeball.
“Dodgeball is a controversial game, a lot of schools have banned it, right?” says Mowatt, a large, imposing man with a warm, baritone laugh. His students—an attentive group of twenty pre-freshman wearing baseball caps, tank tops, and flip flops—nod. “But it’s also got all the features of play. You run around, you get exercise, there’s the team aspect.”
“It’s probably banned because it can get violent,” a student says. “I remember in middle school a kid got his legs taken out and landed on his head.”
Other students laugh, recalling other dodgeball incidents: a broken pair of glasses, a bloody nose, a kid sent to the nurses office after absorbing a particularly damaging blow to the back of the head. Mowatt listens, lets the discussion swell, then brings it back around.
“That’s right, there’s also the violent aspect, which is why we’re talking about it” Mowatt says. “So, ready to play?”
Watching near fully grown eighteen-year-olds run around a gym trying to hit each other with red and yellow rubber balls is a trenchant reminder of dodgeball’s unique place in the pantheon of schoolyard games. There’s something truly frightening but also fun and carefree about dodgeball, which is what makes it the perfect recreational diversion for a class like “Violence in Sports and Leisure.”
Many students take the word “sports” in the title to presage three weeks of parsing the finer points of fantasy football. So the syllabus’s stated goal of establishing “a foundation in the theoretical framework of sport in society . . . through a sociological, psychological, historical, and anthropological view of violence” can be a hard sell. It helps that Mowatt, with his shaved head, Barry White-like voice and easy manner with teenagers, is the kind of hip authority figure to whom kids relate.
“When I worked for Parks I had to figure out how to deal with people, so walking into the classroom is not uncomfortable to me,” says Mowatt, who was a manager in the Chicago Parks system for eight years before doing graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I try to deal with students in a way that shows them they’re valued.”
By “valued” Mowatt does not mean coddled. He designed the seminar as he would a 300-level course for juniors. Students read and discussed over twenty articles, including pieces from academic and law review journals. They watched several movies, including Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.” Assignments included response papers, a seven page term paper with a minimum of ten sources, and a group project on proposing policies addressing violence in college and professional sports. Students were expected to come to class ready to discuss topics and issues ranging from soccer hooliganism in Germany to theories of masculinity in the context of hockey violence to homophobia in professional sports. And they had to absorb the material in only three weeks.
Cramming an entire semester’s worth of material into less than one month is daunting, Mowatt admits, but worth the effort for both teacher and students. Time pressure forces the instructor to whittle the topic down to its essence and think hard about what the course is really about. How violence plays out in sports and leisure activities is such a broad topic that the condensed time frame forced Mowatt to reexamine his approach to the readings and assignments. Instead of taking a highly theoretical approach, he said, it made more sense to present the material in ways that students could relate to their own experiences.
“I wanted to begin and end with emphasis on the social impact,” Mowatt says. “I want students to think critically not only about the readings for this class but also about themselves and about what they watch and read.”
Mowatt’s student-centered approach speaks to his philosophy that students are capable of much more than they, and sometimes their teachers, think. “I believe that kids have information in them, so my job is to facilitate the process of pulling it out,” Mowatt says. The lesson that knowledge exists inside is especially important, Mowatt believes, in an Intensive Freshman Seminar. Students will get the most from college if they’re able to learn about themselves. One of Mowatt’s goals in any class, he says, is to give students space to recognize and demonstrate their intelligence. For pre-freshman, the opportunity to begin the Fall semester with a greater sense of themselves as thinkers and learners is invaluable. And judging by his students’ presentations of their group projects, Mowatt succeeds in providing a positive head start. “The policies they came up with were amazing,” he says. “They talked about allowing players file criminal charges for violent acts that happen during games and the difference between healthy competition and harming people.”
At heart, Mowatt is a community organizer. After college, alongside putting together sports leagues and talent shows as a Parks manager, he served as Chicago City Commissioner for human relations, focusing on civil rights. Although Mowatt considered becoming a high school teacher, his parents, both long-time public school teachers, encouraged him to pursue a more lucrative profession. So when Mowatt began working toward a Masters degree in Leisure Behavior at Urbana-Champaign, it was with an eye toward advancing his career as a civil servant.
But Mowatt was a natural teacher, and before long the profession found him. As City Commissioner, part of Mowatt’s job involved speaking to groups about civil rights and the history of race relations in the United States. Again and again he found himself returning to the same topic: lynching in the South during the 1950s. Mowatt was repelled but also fascinated by images of white Southerners—adults and children--smiling as they pointed to bound black men dangling from trees. And so he dug deeper, finding found postcards depicting lynchings, discounted tickets for lynching “events,” and recordings of radio broadcasts describing the action for those unable to attend in person. What began to emerge was a theory of lynching as leisure—a dynamic and ready-made dissertation topic. Encouraged by his professors, Mowatt left the Parks department and job as Commissioner, extended his research, and committed to academic life.
Although he no longer spends his days convening panels and working the city bureaucracy, Mowatt’s community-building instincts have carried over into the classroom. A gifted communicator, Mowatt laces class discussion with frequent jokes and takes pains to put students at ease, encouraging them to ask questions and challenge his arguments.
“I’m aware of how I appear and how that might intimidate some students,” says Mowatt, who stands just under six feet and weighs over two hundred pounds. “In a lot of cases some students might not have had a black teacher, so I make sure that the environment is comfortable enough for students to disagree with the professor.”
Students respond well to Mowatt’s laid back demeanor, openly asking questions and responding to each other’s comments. But while the class vibe is loose, students take the material seriously.
“I chose the class because I’m a sports fan and figured it would be fun,” says incoming freshman Alex Cohen. “But there’s a twist because Professor Mowatt really makes us think about sports critically and why people are so attracted to violence.”
Mowatt’s primary goal in “Violence in Sports and Leisure,” he says, was to turn students on to how violent sports, and violence in sports, affects not only athletes but also the people who watch and revel in hockey fights, devastating knockouts in boxing, and explosive hits on the football field.
“We watched a video of the Pacers-Pistons brawl that happened a few years ago, and I paused the tape on an image of two young boys in the stands, the little one crying and the older one trying to comfort him,” Mowatt says. “And I asked the students, ‘What’s this about, what is this violence scene doing to these kids? What’s the impact on society?’”
By society Mowatt means not only the population at large but also the more immediate community of the classroom. He strives to connect with students on a personal level to make them to think about violence and sports not only as a theoretical or societal problem, but as something affecting their own lives.
“It’s like doing music at a party,” says Mowatt, a longtime DJ who still gigs in his spare time. “If you’re a good DJ you have to think on your feet and play what the crowd wants to hear. If at the end of a set I see everyone with sweaty t-shirts, I know I’ve done my job. It’s no different in the classroom. I know what I want students to learn, but I’ve got to be flexible and work with them and consider what they want, and what they have to offer.”
What Mowatt’s students want on the last day of class is to dodge, catch, and hit each other as hard as they can with large, bouncy balls. After three weeks of reading and writing about violence and leisure, they seem eager to act it out. Mowatt watches from the sidelines, sizeable forearms crossed.
“I like to get them out of the classroom when I can,” he says. “This is partly to blow off steam and it’s partly just fun. But it’s also to demonstrate what we’ve been talking about the past few weeks, how violence and aggression can be part of any game.”
One student, a big, athletic kid, hovers near the line, ball in land, looking for a victim. Just as he throws, two balls come whizzing at him from opposite directions—a classic dodgeball trick. He twists away, off balance, as one of the balls hits him in the back with a resounding “pop.” He’s out, and as he jogs to the sidelines, wincing slightly, the opposing team cheers.