Abstract

This essay is a personal remembrance of teaching an Honors course related to the Grateful Dead, the Beat Generation, and the Counterculture at Texas Tech University during the Spring of 2019. It describes the readings, assignments, techniques, and overall class response to the material. The goals of the course are explained and the syllabus is added as an appendix.

Keywords: Grateful Dead, Beat Generation, Counterculture, Teaching Techniques, American experience, United States History, San Francisco Music.

Author Bio:

Robert G. Weiner is Popular Culture Librarian at Texas Tech University. He started the Grateful Dead area at the Southwest Popular Culture Association in 1998. For years, Ray Browne, the founder of the Popular Culture movement in academia, asked Weiner to bring the Grateful Dead area to the National Popular Culture Association. Now with the Grateful Dead Studies Association that is happening.  Weiner was an area chair for SWPCA from 1996-2019 covering a wide variety of areas from Popular Music, Zombies,  Mystery Science Theater 3000, James Bond, Transgressive Film, Silent Film, to founding The Graphic Novel and Comics Area. He is the co-author of The Grateful Dead: An Annotated Bibliography (with David Dodd) and editor of Perspectives on the Grateful Dead. He wrote about the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, and Sequential Art (Comics) in the edited collection If the Head Fits, Wear It, Contemporary Art and the Grateful Dead and has published other articles about the band. In addition, he has authored/edited/co-edited numerous books related to popular culture, sequential art, and film and has published  book chapters and journal articles. His most recent co-edited volumes include The Super Villain Reader (with Robert Moses Peaslee) and Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Essays on the Punisher in Print and Screen (with Alicia Goodman, Matthew McEniry, and Ryan Cassidy). 

Recommended reference citation:

APA 

Weiner, R. (2022). Teaching with the dead: A Short personal remembrance. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 9(1 & 2) http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v9-issue-1-and-2/teaching-with-the-dead-a-short-personal-remembrance/

MLA 

Weiner, Rob. “Teaching with the Dead: A Short Personal Remembrance.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, vol. 9, nos. 1 & 2, 2022 http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v9-issue-1-and-2/teaching-with-the-dead-a-short-personal-remembrance/