Academics defend going to The Wire to teach degree students

Final-year sociology students at York University can choose to study a 10-week course on the acclaimed series The Wire.

It will use the series to look at topics including class, race, political processes and city life.

The lecturer behind the course believes the show could challenge traditional methods of teaching.

Professor Roger Burrows, head of sociology at the university, said: "We look at The Wire as a form of entertainment that does the job some of the social sciences have been failing to do.

"It's a contrast to dry, dull, hugely expensive studies that people carry out on the same issues. We spend an enormous amount of our time trying to craft books and articles that are read by so few people and it could challenge how we represent the work that we do in the academe."

He denied that teaching the show in seminars amounted to "dumbing down".

"If it was just sitting down and watching TV programmes there wouldn't be much excuse for it.

"But what we're trying to do is use a TV programme alongside other material if it's something that will induce enthusiasm in our students."

He argued that in a multimedia age students found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on a lecturer "standing up and talking in front of a power point presentation and added: "It's easier to get students to use The Wire as a way of looking at the current political system than it is to get them to read a dull book on it."

Set in Baltimore, The Wire is a dramatisation of observations made by writer and journalist David Simon into drug dealers, police officers, industrial decline, the education system, City Hall corruption, and the decline of local newspapers.

The 24 students who have already signed up for the York University course will need to watch all 60 one-hour episodes and the programme will just be a "point of departure", Prof Burrows added.

"After watching the show, people are keen to discuss things they weren't previously interested in discussing," he said. "The show was doing a better job than we were in interesting people in the profound problems of urbanism."

He cited American TV shows The Sopranos, The West Wing and Mad Men as worthy of study. Academics from around the world had met in Huddersfield in 2005 for a conference on how Buffy the Vampire Slayer could aid learning.

The Wire, which counts US President Barack Obama among its fans, is already being studied at Harvard University and was the subject of a conference in Leeds in November.

Prof Griselda Pollock, director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at Leeds University, who spoke at the Leeds meeting, warned: "It's an innovative idea to show sociology students that television can give them an insight, but we must also take into account that it's not transparent, it's constructed.

"We can't just look at the TV programme and think by studying it we know what's happening in Baltimore."