Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast, the space where education meets resilience.
I'm Joey Weisler, and in each episode, we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students, leaders,
and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities of modern education.
Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration,
we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities in our schools.
Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom and get started.
All right, so welcome back to another episode here of the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast.
Today, I am so honored and very privileged to be joined by my very first guest, Dr. Patrick Zwosta,
who just recently conferred his PhD in English with a focus on film studies through St. John's University.
Congratulations, Pat! So Patrick is also an educator whose work deeply explores this intersection of trauma
and mental health through a way that we can find some sort of what we call narrative healing in the classroom through narrative medicine.
And his dissertation works to explore how 1980s films during the Reagan presidency attempted to make responses to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation.
And this connects to Patrick's broader philosophy that trauma is something that we can't leave at the door,
and it has to be both addressed and worked through in order for us to find the most fulfillment within our lives.
So today, Patrick's going to be talking to us about how different modes of both literary and film texts can be used within university English spaces
to help students find the most healing and resilient possible. Welcome, Pat.
Thank you so much for having me, Joey. I'm so excited to be here.
Such a pleasure.
Pleasure's all mine.
Pat and I were colleagues in our PhD program at St. John's University.
We were cohort members, even though Pat was just a few years ahead of us.
And Pat has always been someone who I have admired through his pedagogy, which is the choices that he's made within the classroom throughout his own life experiences as well.
So, Patrick, tell us a little bit about your research and your scholarship and how that's helped you approach how a classroom should look.
So my research basically focuses on the politics of 1980s action films.
And the reason for this is a little bit selfish, admittedly.
I have been a huge fan of time travel movies, sci-fi movies, action movies, pretty much ever since I was a teenager.
And when I decided to embark on this PhD journey, I made myself a promise that I would only write about something if I was passionate about it.
My dissertation sort of talks about how at the height of Reagan's presidency, especially in his first term,
the rhetoric was very anti-Russian, very anti-communist, and it was very tense.
And, you know, the mutually assured destruction policies that were in place, they truly were mad in more ways than one.
It's interesting because, you know, the two sort of main films, I would say, that my dissertation talks about and I bring in other ones as well, are the Terminator series and Back to the Future.
And both of them deal with these teams of nuclear energy and consumerism in vastly different ways.
And the Terminator, it's very much dark and gritty and basically saying our obsession with always being number one,
our obsession with consumerism, technology and all that is what's leading to our destruction.
And these machines basically have no other choice but to view us all as a threat, as humanity, and wipe us all out.
Back to the Future, released only six months later, is the opposite of that.
One of the main plot points involves a scientist sort of making a deal with terrorists, telling them that he's going to make them a bomb.
And it turns out he's just going to give them used pinball machine parts instead of the materials that would make a bomb.
But it basically turns nuclear energy into a joke.
And, you know, the time machine is powered by plutonium, you know, and the characters have to wear hazmat suits even to be around that plutonium.
In the first couple of scenes of the movie.
But it's all played very much as a joke and basically saying consumerism is a necessary, they wouldn't even say evil.
They would they would say consumerism is a necessary part of being in capitalistic America and it's our best defense against communist threats.
So, Pat, as a film scholar, a lot of what you work about is seeing how film and writing seem to intersect.
And, of course, as you've already mentioned, your dissertation has focused quite a bit with that back onto the 80s.
What types of social commentary does film provide as a way to make connections back into your classroom?
And I'll give an example myself.
So this past week in my honors literature class through St. John's University, we've been reading The Hate U Give, which is an excellent novel by Angie Thomas,
which focuses on the themes of both social justice as well as blame.
And in the season one episode from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, this is a theme that's echoed with a hint of comedy when Will Smith and his cousin Carlton both get pulled over and arrested,
all because Carlton's driving his car for like two miles an hour.
And it spawns into a very, very serious ending where Carlton starts to question social justice.
And this brings a call onto action to the audience in terms of saying, "hey, this is pretty significant".
And moving images such as television do a great job in pointing these types of things out.
And stories tend to do this, too, in terms of just general text that we read.
And in your own research, I wanted to ask how you've noticed this and what kinds of student works have you been able to work with as part of your own classroom?
And what kind of social commentary do you observe?
And how can we look at that deeper as educators?
So that is one of my favorite things to do as a professor, honestly.
One of the main reasons I probably went into this field is because it gave me the opportunity to really show a wide variety of film clips and TV clips,
and even sometimes full episodes or full movies, if I thought it was appropriate,
and sort of tie that into more traditional works of literature, like a play like "A Doll's House" by Ibsen from the late 1800s in Norway,
or a novella by Franz Kafka called "The Metamorphosis", which was published in Germany in 1915.
And when students first hear about those things, they usually roll their eyes like, oh, what things in this are still going to be relevant 100 plus years later or whatever?
And I'm like, "well, you'd be surprised. So buckle up!"
So tell us more about the metamorphosis, because that particular plot could be a universal theme that many of our listeners could be dealing with.
An example, yeah, an example that I would give regarding the metamorphosis would be it's a novella with a very strange premise,
but a very relatable sort of premise at the same time.
So one morning this guy wakes up and he realizes he's been transformed into a six foot giant cockroach,
which when I first read the story, honestly, that almost immediately took me out of it because I'm not a bug person.
I hate bugs. So just that visual is like scarier than any horror movie I've ever seen.
But what's really about is how this guy has been beaten down by life, how he's been abused by his family, who only view him as a meal ticket.
He's been I want to spoil too much, but he's been abused at work because he's been a perfect attendance record.
He's never been late, never called in sick.
And this morning he wakes up, he turned into a six foot cockroach.
He's still trying to get to work and then the boss literally comes to the house, tracks him down and accuses him of embezzling from him.
It's like we'll talk about jumping to the worst possible scenario.
The one day that your employee is late, you automatically assume that he's embezzling from you.
You don't even assume, oh, maybe he's been turned into a six foot cockroach.
But at least you don't even assume that he's sick or whatever.
Maybe he just has a flu or something like that.
And I always tell my students that I think that it's really more of a metaphor for depression, which I know is another topic that we're getting to today.
And that's probably why I relate to it so well, because I struggle with depression, anxiety.
So I think that there's possibly a chance that Kafka never really meant you to believe that Gregor was turned into a six foot cockroach.
It's more that he felt like he was a cockroach, because again, he stepped on his whole life by his family, by his job.
He was never able to form attachments with a woman and start a family of his own and stuff like that.
And he felt very isolated as a result of that.
So I recently started organizing my classes loosely around the theme of isolation, loneliness and reconnection.
And one of the main sort of works that I put in there is the Metamorphosis for that reason.
And to give an example of a movie or TV show tie in, I've been tying in the Hulu series "Only Murders in the Building".
We watched the first season together, which is like 10, 30 minute episodes.
So it takes up a few weeks of class time, but it's a really powerful show for anybody who hasn't seen it.
I highly recommend it. And that's a great example of what you were talking about before about how sometimes you can use comedy as a means of dealing with trauma.
And it's a great show because it melds both things.
It melds sort of the comedy side of trauma, which a lot of people don't always necessarily realize is a thing, but it is a very real coping mechanism.
And the thing with the Metamorphosis is that the power from the story, which I'm teaching it to my classes next week for our first year seminar, and I just wrote about it in my own research within the week, actually.
And as Pat, you already mentioned, it's about a guy who wakes up a cockroach.
But the number one thing on his mind is "I got to get to work".
Unfortunately, our students don't think that when they wake up, we should just assume our kids are turned into cockroaches too when they don't come to class.
I've felt that a couple of times.
He has this vision that he has to get to work because he has to just be there and be present.
And his dad even says to the boss, listen, something's wrong with my son.
I mean, all he does is look at the train schedules to make sure he's on time.
I mean, he lives and breathes his job.
So I'll show that text to my first year seminar as a way to teach them that, hey, burnout is real.
And burnout is so real that we already see it in the stories that we read and the things that we watch.
The burnout and the broken dream tend to go hand in hand.
And what I was also thinking of earlier this week, alongside the metamorphosis, when it comes to the broken image that society portrays, I went back and I rewatched The Wizard of Oz.
Dorothy, who lands in the Emerald City, she wants to go somewhere over the rainbow, this metaphor.
And if you think about it, the instrumental version to Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays at every moment where Dorothy has her darkest points.
When she's trapped in her castle.
I've never heard of it before.
Yeah. And when she's trying to run away from Auntie Emma and Uncle Henry, she's just talking to Glenda that I want to get home, I want to get home.
You always hear that in the background somewhere.
So when she gets to Oz, she's going up and down this yellow brick road of broken dreams, trying to reconnect to other people around her.
The scarecrow, the lion, right, who all want to yearn this image of something to help improve their lives, like Gregor, who's one of the metamorphosis, who just wants to keep working.
But at the end of both stories, we find that this image that they want for a perfect life is just beyond smoke and mirrors.
So the humanities offers a lot of that with both film and television.
And as instructors of these types of courses, we need to let our students know that these emotions that they could be feeling are strongly validated.
So, Patrick, a lot of our conversation so far has pivoted towards this focus on the metamorphosis in particular.
And we said that we use these types of stories in our own classrooms as a sort of a cautionary tale, if you will, to say to our students, hey,
an author felt very compelled to write about these in literature to help you feel validated with your own burnout in a way to help you prevent feeling like this metaphorical six foot
cockroach who feels such a deep sense of emptiness and hollowness about their own lives. So in thinking about some of the topics that this podcast series will be covering through several ongoing segments,
we're going to be discussing this intersection of welcoming emotions into a writing classroom in particular through standards that are certainly not offered through a very formulaic method that would sustain the nature of,
let's say, a science or a math classroom. And I mentioned this because students tend to respond to burnout in ways that might bring out the pseudo psychologist in us as English professors,
especially perhaps around the metamorphosis. And when those types of moments happen, there is a line that needs to be drawn when the English teacher tries to respond to their students writing.
So that being mentioned, what would you say is, I guess, the secret sauce in education to having more trauma informed open dialogue in a writing classroom?
And how can either film or literary texts help sustain this?
I think in my experience, it's I always say my students help me as much as I help them.
I learn as much from them as the other way around, as cliché as that may sound. And I think that the minute you stop learning from your students is the minute you should retire, quite frankly.
You know, like I said before, not to pat myself on the back, but just to to really encourage you that you can use writing and film and exploration of literature in general as a way of coping with your own sort of anxieties and your own problems.
So, again, I'll show back to future in my in my classroom. I'll show Terminator in my classroom sometimes.
Just as an example of writing about something that you're passionate about and also to explore the themes that I talked about in my dissertation.
And again, just to show you like these things, they might seem like they're trivial on the surface and they're just like fun, fun sort of escapist action movies, but they're actually masking deeper,
more pervasive concerns about the society might have about death and nuclear war, consumerism and all of these things. So I just think that film can be very powerful in that way.
And also, I usually at the end of every semester, I have my students do original presentations where they pick a clip from their favorite TV show or movie and they tie it in with the course theme.
And I have another eureka moment I love to see where they realize, wow, the stuff that I consume for fun is actually a form of literature, you know, and that helps them to remember the themes and the stories that we talked about so much better.
So between that and really encouraging them to write about things they're passionate about, that seems to be a really good strategy of getting them to realize that the classroom can be an empowered space.
It doesn't have to be a draining space. It doesn't have to be a space of fear and anxiety. It can be just a space of exploration and curiosity and give you that opportunity to dig into things that you might never thought were possible within the confines of
classroom before. And then if you're lucky like me, you can turn it into a career, you know, I never thought I'd be able to turn my love of movies into a career but here I am.
And I think that I can absolutely agree with what Pat has shared is that when we allow students to bring their emotions into our writing it allows us to grow also as educators.
And I think the day that we stopped caring for our students is the day that we're no longer allowing ourselves to grow as educators.
Carol Deletiner in her publication from the 90s has a perspective that educators should allow their hearts to bleed in front of their students.
A lot of controversy around that. But some of us in the humanities can agree that to compromise her perspective, there is a trauma informed mindset that should enter every classroom.
And through that mindset, what we offer is just knowing that every student may not have had trauma, but they will more than likely have had unpleasant experiences that they may be willing to talk about, and our ability to not sterilize those experiences
and their writing, and allow them to use their words to talk about us with that can only help us grow as humans and as people who run these classrooms and that's one of the ways that I do believe that academia can benefit and grow.
That brings us to the end of today's episode of the Classroom Narratives Healing in Education podcast and a huge thank you to Dr. Patrick Zwosta, PhD, for sharing his powerful insights here on trauma, writing, burnout, and how mental health plays a role in our classrooms and within education.
And again, his unique experiences show us that personal stories are not only valid, but also authentic and helping us create a nurturing classroom environment at all levels.
So that's all you today's episode and if you would take the moment to leave a review, share some insights and spread the podcast around your networks, it would be greatly appreciated as we continue to produce future material, and you can go ahead and check out our show notes for more content and ways to keep in touch with both of us.
Thank you again for being here. Thanks for listening everybody. That's great. Thank you for having me, Joey.
Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing in Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom
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