Students examine movies, images of Western culture to learn English skills

“Brokeback Mountain” and “Star Trek” might not seem like typical texts for an English course, but Keelan Diana’s How the West Was Wild is not your typical English class.\nIn Diana’s course, W170: How the West Was Wild: Constructing and Deconstructing the American Frontier, students learn basic English skills through studying Western culture. The course is one of the topical alternatives to the generally required W131: Elementary Composition freshman English credit.\nIt’s the basic blueprint for an English class but with a single focused theme that “instructors are going to get more excited about,” said Diana, the course’s instructor and creator. \nDiana has been teaching the class for two semesters. She said focusing the lessons on one subject gets the students thinking about the topic.\nThe class examines 19th-century Western history and genres and discusses how cultural ideas from that era have translated through history. The class also looks at how that culture is applied to modern-day political and cultural issues such as terrorism, same-sex marriage and immigration.\nStudents look at everything from the covers of old cult novels to movies such as “Easy Rider.” The concept of national identity is another main focus, and the class uses the Western model to look into the different contexts of “identity.”\nWhen asked what they like best about the course, freshmen Jordan Press and Matt Morris agreed that it’s interactivity. \n“You get more out of (this course) because you’re focusing on one topic,” Morris said, explaining why he chose the class over W131.\nThe goal of the course is “to examine not only what the frontier ‘means’ within American culture, but also how the frontier myth constructs us as American subjects,” according to the course description.\n “It’s dangerous to go around using big monolithic terms like ‘the American mind’ or ‘our country,’” Diana said. “The American West is a good model for examining the diversity of American identity.”