Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy

I have used this text as basic reading for pre-service and in-service teacher seminars that focus on issues of popular culture in education. Students have rated the text highly. The text could be supplemented applying the inquiry techniques or teaching strategies, suggested by these authors, to new topics of popular culture. I highly recommend it for introductory teacher education courses.

There's very little written about the role of popular culture in the classroom. Nearly all teachers get little or no education in what popular culture is all about, but yet popular culture has a powerful influence on shaping the self-images, values, and ideas young people have about themselves, their peers, and the larger society.The authors of this work start from the premise that "The ability to read and critique popular media is significant for at least two reasons. First, in an age of expanding consumerism, children and young people who learn to question how their identities are constructed by the various forms of popular culture that they elect to take up are likely to make more informed decisions about how they live their lives. Second, the abundance of media messages (both image based and verbal) in the home and community suggests that there is an urgent need to help students learn how to evaluate such messages for their social, economic, and aesthetic contents." These authors go on to tell about the ways they approached or observed the teaching or use of popular culture in the classroom. Topics such as the differences between the Backstreet Boys and Puff Daddy, the Spice Girls, self-identity and images of young women in popular texts, and the various approaches to the pedagogy of popular culture are explored. The authors offer no cookbook strategies to take to the classroom, but they do provide a framework for teachers interested in introducing popular culture in their classroom. Finally, I would like to say it's significant that this work is published by the International Reading Association, for "reading" popular culture is very much a part of how young people read their world. For far too long adults have assumed that the adult world is the only world to read and understand. In this approach, we have allowed the media and popular culture to educate our youth, while we assumed that the "adult," canonized world of school could have a greater impact. Well, it's not. We need to come to grips with that. We can use popular culture to help young people understand and become critically aware, as the authors explain, of how the social, political, and economic messages emanate from different forms of popular culture.I highly recommend this work to my fellow teachers.