Pop Culture in the Classroom

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Recommended: some characteristics of media literacy

If you were a child in the late 1970s, it's likely you will recall one or more of these superheroes. Or, if you are currently working with elementary school-aged children, it's likely they will be able to identify essentially the same set of characters, and maybe even their successors.
Three years ago, Donna was part of a research team (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999) interested in exploring the uses that teachers and children make of popular culture in classroom settings.
We provide a description of four approaches to using popular culture in the classroom, attending to the tensions created when teachers try to develop students' critical awareness of the very things the children find most pleasurable about popular culture. We then share some practical, classroom-tried ideas for integrating elementary students' everyday literacies and popular culture interests into language arts instruction across the curriculum.
Like Kenway and Bullen, we believe this view of young children's use of media-produced popular culture is too simple and thus unhelpful.
Situations such as this suggest to us that any meaningful use students might make of popular culture is not being factored into the teaching-learning scenario.
When this approach is implemented, popular culture becomes a pedagogical guise for limiting the pleasures students can take from it.
Teachers who favor this approach typically shy away from asking students to critique what they find pleasurable in these texts. When children are not taught to become critically aware of media-produced popular culture texts, their thinking about such texts goes unchallenged.
Finally, a fourth approach (and one that we favor) involves developing students' ability to be self-reflexive in their uses of...

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...ar culture texts for children that involve female superheroes.
The CBS show Survivor is currently quite popular with students in the upper elementary grades.Teachers can use this show as a springboard to help students develop an understanding of the concept of survival.
We have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of what is involved in using children's everyday literacies to make connections between their interests in popular culture and the language arts curriculum. Certainly a first step involves getting in touch with our own interests in, and uses of, popular culture. Only then are we in a position to understand the appeal popular culture has for our students. In the end what matters, we believe, is that students begin to develop a critical awareness of how popular culture texts position them and how they, in turn, have a say in how those texts are "read."

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