At the dawn of the twenty-first century, actor William Shatner embarked on a journey across the United States to explore the ways that the science of Star Trek – in which Shatner portrayed Captain James T. Kirk – had influenced real-world technology. From cell phones that resembled communicators, super-intelligent computers, and the virtual realities of the Holodeck, scientific advancements seemed to be reflecting the fictional world created by Gene Roddenberry.
In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise as an untold number of children who grew up watching Star Trek in the 1960s and 70s later chose some form of STEM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – as their career vocation. The original series, motion pictures, and later entries into the franchise were thus virtual classrooms, serving as inspiration sources for future technology.
What might come as a surprise, however, are the ways that high school teachers and university professors are incorporating Star Trek into literal classrooms that fall outside the realm of STEM. In the 2018 anthology Set Phasers to Teach! Star Trek in Research and Teaching, a collection of academics discuss the various ways that they use Star Trek as learning tools, and the list is both impressive and insightful.
While individual chapters on computers, energy systems, video game design, and scientific thinking are all contained within Set Phasers to Teach, two particular essays that have no connection to science are likewise featured, focusing instead on how the science fiction franchise can be used to help students relate to literature and college composition.
In the chapter “Where Many Books have Gone Before: Using Star Trek to Teach Literature,” Elizabeth Baird Hardy writes, “Star Trek’s strength, in many ways, lies in its ability to use a fresh approach to tell the old stories, the ones that matter. Thus, it is a valuable tool, as versatile as a tricorder and as effective as a phaser, in the teaching of literature, literary concepts, and themes. At the same time, Star Trek can help to reinforce the perception that literature is neither a chore nor a burden, but a pleasure that remains relevant even in a world littered with a vast array of technological wonders and distractions.”
Because college students primarily enroll in literature courses to fulfill graduation requirements, Hardy is often faced with a diverse classroom containing students from a variety of academic backgrounds. For this reason, she has found that intertextual analysis – understanding how narratives don’t exist in a vacuum but interconnect with other narratives – is an effective teaching tool in a college-level literature course.
The original Star Trek of the 1960s featured episode titles that were often lifted from classic literature, especially the works of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare had an even more noticeable influence on Star Trek with numerous installments paying homage to the Bard within their narratives, from “The Conscience of the King” in 1966 to “The Defector” from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
As a result, fans of Star Trek have already been introduced to the plays of William Shakespeare and experienced intertextual analysis in action since the aforementioned Star Trek episodes directly relate to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry V. The same can be said of the motion picture The Wrath of Khan, which portrays Ricardo Montalbán’s villain as a futuristic Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
More important than the interconnection of Star Trek narratives to classic literature of the past, however, is the ways that Star Trek incorporates books into the everyday lives of the characters. In the beginning of The Wrath of Khan, for instance, Spock presents James Kirk with an antique edition of Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities that not only pertains to the film’s plot in the same way as Moby Dick but is both warmly accepted and genuinely appreciated by Kirk as well.
“In the world of Star Trek, books matter,” Elizabeth Baird Harvey explains in Set Phasers to Teach. “Whether it is the antique volume of Shakespeare in Picard’s quarters or Holodeck experiences that take crewmembers into books historical and contemporary, literature is a valuable part of these characters’ lives. Though they have a wealth of technological diversions for entertainment and education, they still choose literature, printed words on a page. They read because they enjoy reading, not because there is nothing else to do.”
Like with literature, college composition is another course that students primarily enroll in to meet graduation requirements as opposed to being directly relevant to their field of study. Just as Elizabeth Baird Harvey has found Star Trek to be an effective tool to engage the students who take her literature class, Carey Millsap-Spears has discovered that the same holds true for college composition.
In her essay “Teaching with Trek: Star Trek, the LGBTQ+ Community and College Composition,” Millsap-Spears notes that one of the greatest challenges of teaching college composition is finding the right discussion topics that relate to the diverse collection of students in her classroom. It is the responsibility of the professor, after all, to not only convey the correct methodologies involved in writing but also assist students in finding meaningful topics for their classroom compositions.
“Star Trek helps students understand and write about complex human conditions,” Carey Millsap-Spears explains in Set Phasers to Teach. “Star Trek tackles civil rights, women’s rights, diversity in the workplace, and even openly discusses issues surrounding LGBTQ+ characters. As a fifteen-year veteran of teaching writing at the U.S. two-year-college level, facilitating discussions on race or gender issues can be difficult. I have learned to incorporate more Popular Culture in class and have had some positive results overall, but Star Trek tends to break barriers, and students seem to relate positively to the franchise’s treatment of social issues.”
Carey Millsap-Sears cites a 2002 Gallup poll which found that one out of every ten college students is LGBTQ. While it can be difficult to locate subject matter that correlates to that particular segment of the population, Millsap-Spears has found that Star Trek not only has the ability to connect with students based on gender and race, but sexuality as well.
She mentions a small handful of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, for instance, that include themes relevant to the LGBTQ community, with particular emphasis on “The Outcast.” During the installment, Commander Riker finds himself attracted to a member a genderless society – the J’nail – named Soren. When their forbidden romance is discovered, Soren is charged with the “crime of gender” and sentenced to therapy in order to “cure” her of this transgression.
“The Outcast” offers numerous topics of discussion, from the similarities between Soren’s therapy and gay conversion therapy, to whether Soren was a merely a “token” character within the Star Trek: The Next Generation mythos, to the varying ways that Star Trek fans might have reacted to the installment. The resulting conversations with her students enables Carey Millsap-Spears to instill in them the proper inquiry and research techniques necessary for writing effective compositions.
“Using low risk questions about a popular film or television show gives students the confidence to ask even deeper questions on more complex issues,” she writes in Set Phasers to Teach.
Although Star Trek may be considered science fiction, creator Gene Roddenberry added real world issues within the narratives from its inception, as well as resonating themes and storylines from classic literature. Thus while the Star Trek franchise may have been the source of inspiration for multiple generations of scientists, its narratives can also be used as effective teaching tools for liberal art professors just as much as those within the realm of STEM.
All one needs to do is set their phasers to teach – and then engage.
Anthony Letizia