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Popular Culture in the Classroom
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How the inclusion of popular culture media and texts in an Early
Childhood setting can promote more engaged, critical thinking and
socially aware learners.
5/9/2014
Jana[Type text]
Page 1
“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which
they can learn.” - Albert Einstein
(Goodreads, 2014, p.1)
Introduction
This essay aims to identify how the inclusion of popular culture media and texts in an
early childhood setting can promote more engaged, critically thinking and socially
aware learners.
Dowdall (2014) suggests that educators often find no time to connect with young
people’s popular cultures within the official curriculum which in turn may increasingly
alienate students from learning by not connecting to their world (Beach & O’Brien,
2008). This seems alarming based on the importance placed on the way children
learn, especially when they draw on the here and now of their world (Carrington,
2011).
Though investigating and defining popular culture, we can explore the importance of
its application in an early childhood setting and identify the considerations for
teachers in this sector as well as a more generalised education sector.
Popular Culture
Popular culture is defined by audience desires and needs. For example it would
encompass things we may want to own, pleasures we want to experience, or include
people way may want to be like or with. (Beach & O’Brien, 2008).
Popular culture may involve ICT’s and digital multimodalities, movies, books,
television shows, games and comics. They shape how students learn, what they
want to learn and how they see themselves because they inform us of the way in
which we relate to our surroundings, others and ourselves (Rietveld, 2014). It is for
this reason that they are becoming equally as powerful as the official discourse of
schooling (Beach & O’Brien, 2008).
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Through fostering innovative thinking that challenges traditional norms and practises,
popular culture texts and the media cultural space in which they reside, create
powerful forms of pedagogy. They go beyond what students acquire from the official
school curriculum offering opportunities to think critically, multitask, and immerse
oneself in another world (Beach & O’Brien, 2008).
Critical Thinking and Increasing Engagement
It is important to recognise that, typically, schools function to reinforce the status quo
which diminishes the possibility of students relating to and finding themselves in the
education process (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28). This is due to alternative histories and
perspectives as well as personal experience being ignored to make way for a more
ready-made and prescriptive curriculum (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28)
Popular culture texts as well as the media cultural space in which they reside are a
powerful form of pedagogy that goes beyond what students acquire from the official
school curriculum (Coiro et al., 2008). Therefore using texts that are derived from a
variety of different media sources would create an environment that fosters and
encourages more critical thinking where students could relate to and engage
critically (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28) as their home literacies are utilised in a school
environment. It would also cater for a variety of different learning styles as well as
social differences.
Students simultaneously engage in multimedating as part of their natural order of life.
The mediasphere is a new pedagogy of digital information and channels that provide
multiple teaching and learning opportunities (Beach & O’Brien, 2008). Further,
students have become accustomed to communicating through a combination of
print, visual and sound multimodal texts (Beach & O’Brien, 2008). This concept is not
disregarding the importance of traditional print literacies, rather impressing the
importance of providing opportunities for students to engage with a variety of
different texts they will already be exposed to and assisting them in critically
analysing them in the same regard we do with print literacies.
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The Early Childhood setting
Building curriculum in children’s interests is an established practise in the early
childhood curriculum (Hedges, 2011). Curriculum should provide a connectiveness
to the world. (Dowdall, 2014). Children’s popular culture can and should be used as
an asset that can be utilised in their literacy learning (Dowdall, 2014).
Dowdall, (2011) makes reference Vygotsky’s work on children’s development of
conceptual understanding through sociocultural perspectives. This view identifies
learning as socially and culturally constructed, meaning that technology and popular
culture are elements of children’s daily life experiences (Hedges, 2011; Parry, 2014).
A central pillar of literacy education has been a model of childhood identity that
subscribes to sequential intellectual, physical, moral and social development as well
as a personal journey becoming literate through developing an identity as a literate
citizen (Carrington, 2011) this therefore identifys a need for a more socially and
culturally responsive curriculum (Dowdall, 2014).
The prevalence of television shows, internet, movies and technology has grown over
the past twenty years (Hedges, 2011). Children can and should be encouraged to
look more closely at seemingly local, everyday texts and draw upon their own
knowledge and understandings to develop deeper understanding about how texts
are constructed and presented for a purpose i.e. to impact an audience a certain way
(Dowdall, 2014). Watching popular culture movies and deconstructing their
meanings and audience positioning is giving students a powerful tool of critical
analysis of their position in the consumer world.
Younger writers are drawn in through engagement with popular culture to
demonstrate that children can articulate how the use of popular culture texts and
artefacts motivates them to participate in their learning (Dowdall, 2014). Fiske,
(2010) acknowledges the importance of students feeling pleasure through their
learning. Students feel pleasure through making their own meaning rather than
accepting ready-made meanings. Students need to know how to engage with this
new popular culture and digital world. They therefore need to develop skills to know
how to search for information, images, videos and ideas to produce their own form of
texts (Beach & O’Brien, 2008; Parry, 2014)
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Engagement within a meaningful curriculum provides valuable space for teachers to
challenge the messages and stereotypes that children are exposed to through their
everyday encounters with popular culture texts (Dowdall, 2014). This can include
how something could appear in one text, verses another and then identifying how
else it could be portrayed (Parry, 2014). An example of this could be how fairy is
portrayed in two different texts, and then analysing how else it could be portrayed in
another way. For this process to be effective, it is important to ensure that the
parameters for discussion are not too specific or general so children can form their
own knowledge’s through critically analysing various texts (Parry, 2014).
This critical analysis can and will occur through removing boundaries and revamping
the educational playing field to equip students with a global awareness (McGregor &
Reeser, 2009). For example, using technology has become conducive to learning as
it is becoming a necessity more than an option to connect with students out of school
lives. It is also important to note that this does not mean using technology for the
sake of technology, but for legitimate, critical learning opportunities (McGregor &
Reeser, 2009). These learning opportunities need to foster the ability to critically
analyse texts, interpret and use genre features and apply this knowledge to how it
affects themselves as an audience member rather than having a passive stance
towards viewing (Beach & O’Brien, 2008).
Utilising ‘fan fiction’ in the classroom could be one way to incorporate children’s
interest in the classroom as well as have them critically analyse their chosen genre
to identify how to construct an appealing and appropriate fan fiction story (Beach &
O’Brien, 2008). While students may be knowledgeable about popular culture, they
may not know how to critique the ideological and institutional forces shaping popular
culture. They could examine how popular culture texts reflect values and how they
are positioned to want to purchase products.
It is up to educators to assist children’s opportunities to learn. Alongside evidence of
extending children in knowledge domains such as literacy, children learn about
physical and emotional wellbeing, identity and making sense of the world and its
people in an early childhood domain. Teachers can then move children into
discussions about issues related to identity, fairness and justice on which popular
culture may encourage a focus such as gender and gendered roles. This will then, in
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later years of schooling build the foundation for ideas such as democracy,
citizenship, corporation, globalisation and consumerism.
Consideration for teachers
Children regularly experience a wide range of literacy practises in their homes and
communities, many of which are different to the experiences educators have had
when they were children or that they believe necessary for school success (Arthur,
2001). This practise marginalises many children particularly those from diverse
cultural, social and linguistic backgrounds and those whose experiences may be with
television, computers and popular magazines rather than standard children’s books
and stereotypical toys from generations gone by. To build on all children’s funds of
knowledge and assist them to reach their learning potential, educators need to be up
to date and current in their thinking of children’s fundamental learning needs (Arthur,
2001) It is important for teachers to recognise that the children they teach have not
grown up in a world such as they did. The toys are different, they way they engage
with the world around them is different and the way they make meaning is different
(Carrington, 2011).
Teachers are being required to become better informed about children’s out-ofschool illiteracies in order to improve learning chances. This is being challenged and
undermined by a curriculum that requires teachers to orientate towards a skillsdriven interpretation of literacy which counters this social interpretation (Dowdall,
2014).Therefore many teachers feel challenged by strict policy documents and the
importance of incorporating students interests into the curriculum. There is often
more content within each annual benchmark than can be successfully taught in a
year (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28) so the addition of utilising popular culture and media
forms into the classroom is seemingly another thing to “add on” to the already full
curriculum.
Combining a rigid standards benchmark with increases in class sizes involves
adapting to more learning styles and catering to the increasing number of children
who are diagnosed with disabilities (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28). This means getting
material through to everyone in a way that suits their learning style and needs is
getting increasingly difficult if not impossible. To further this point, with such a
prescriptive curriculum, comes the pressure to move onto new content, to learn new
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skills and keep up with the requirements of the curriculum wether they have
mastered the new content or not.
As it stands, development of media literacy through popular culture and the
prescription of a standard curriculum are seemingly incompatible but it does not
mean they cannot coexist (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28). Popular culture texts have an
important place in early childhood settings as they provide links to children’s home
and community experiences and opportunities to examine ways in which texts are
constructed to present particular ideologies. It means celebrating diversity and
building on children’s strengths. (Arthur, 2001; Parry, 2014) Multimodal
representations are particularly attractive to children (Arthur, 2001)
This would mean that schools need to become more media literate to help forge
bonds between parents, teachers, students, administrators and the community.
These relationships will change when more critical thinking and media literacy are
incorporated into the classroom as teachers and students will be able to bond and
share experiences and opinions freely. The key would be to allow space for critical
discussion in the classroom without the pressures of a looming test or assessment
item (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28).
It is important to note here that no one can ever be fully media literate. Rather, there
are gradients of abilities to critically analyse the media based on agility with
knowledge structures. People become more media literate by exercising their critical
skills and exposing themselves to various forms of media literacy. In this sense,
media literacy is a constantly refreshing process that is continually creating analytical
bearings to challenge media messages barking for attention. Bearing this in mind,
media literacy should be seen as an ongoing process of education (?????).
As a final note, teachers often hold the view that popular culture limits the
imagination and creativity of free play because children are mimicking what they
have seen. This should not be the case as it is also an avenue to grow the storylines,
characters and idea beyond the original popular culture text (Hedges, 2011). This
develops children’s ideas of adult roles, ideas of social norms and rules, values and
behaviours including friendship, risk taking, danger, good, evil and helping others as
well as gender roles (Arthur, 2001). Rather than merely playing out given narratives,
children innovate, improvise, subvert and reinterpret characters and plots so that
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they make them into what they want them to be and make them their own (Arthur,
2001). When show and tell times come around, students’ toys should be used as a
stimulus for lessons and analysis of media surrounding their interests, not simply
returned to their bags after they have spoken about them (Hedges, 2011).
Conclusion
Through discussing the role popular culture and the media play in childrens life, we
can identify the importance of then including this into the school curriculum to make
connections to children’s lives. It is through this that educators can help to develop
more critical and engaged learners and avoid some disengagement through
presenting more learning styles and connecting to children’s home lives.
As a final note, Sir Ken Robinson (2010) makes important points in his TED Talks
video accessed through YouTube regarding working with strengths in education.
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Reference List
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Barak, K. (2009). (Barak, 2009, pp. 7-28) Reading, Writing and Reality TV:
Encouraging Media Literacy and Critical Thinking in American Classrooms
Through Popular Culture (Thesis). Retrieved from:
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=bgsu1245447140&dispo
sition=inline
Beach, R. & O’Brien, D. (2008). Teaching Popular-Culture Texts in the Classroom.
Retrieved online from Queensland University of Technology Course
Materials Database.
Carrington, V. (2011). The Contemporary Gothic: Literacy and childhood in unsettled
times. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 12(3), 293-310. doi:
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Dowdall, C., Vasudevan, L. & Mackey, M. (2014). Popular Culture and Curriculum.
Literacy, 48 (1), 1-3. doi: 10.1111/lit.12028
Fiske, J. (2010). Productive Pleasures. Retrieved online from Queensland University
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Hedges, H. (2011). Rethinking Sponge Bob and Ninja Turtles: Popular culture and
funds of knowledge for curriculum co-construction. Australasian Journal of
Early Childhood, 36 (1), 25-29. doi: 1836-9391
Mcgregor, L. & Reeser, M. (2009). Removing Boundaries and Increasing Student
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Parry, B. (2014). Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy
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Rietveld, H. (2001) Popular Culture. The year’s work in critical and cultural theory, 10
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Robinson, K. (2010). TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!
[video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I
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