Popular Culture And Critical Pedagogy

"Grounded in the field of adult education, this international compilation offers a range of critical perspectives on popular culture as a form of pedagogy. Its fundamental premise is that adults learn in multiple ways, including through their consumption of fiction. As scholars have asserted for decades, people are not passive consumers of media; rather, we (re)make our own meanings as we accept, resist, and challenge cultural representations. At a time when attention often turns to new media, the contributors to this collection continue to find “old” forms of popular culture important and worthy of study. Television and movies – the emphases in this book – reflect aspects of consumers’ lives, and can be powerful vehicles for helping adults see, experience, and inhabit the world in new and different ways. This volume moves beyond conceptually oriented scholarship, taking a decidedly research-oriented focus. It offers examples of textual and discursive analyses of television shows and films that portray varied contexts of adult learning, and suggests how participants can be brought into adult education research in this area. In so doing, it provides compelling evidence about the complexity, politics, and multidimensionality of adult teaching and learning. Using a range of television shows and movies as exemplars, chapters relate popular culture to globalization, identity, health and health care, and education. The book will be of great use to instructors, students, and researchers located in adult education, cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, cultural sociology, and other fields who are looking for innovative ways to explore social life as experienced and imagined."

This collection attempts to incorporate cultural studies into the understanding of schooling, not simply addressing how students read themselves as "members" of a distinct culture, but how they, along with teachers and administrators, read popular texts in general. The purpose of this book is to suggest some alternative directions critical pedagogy can take in its critique of popular culture by inviting multiple reading of popular texts into its analysis of schooling and seeing many forms of popular culture as critical pedagogical texts.

Illuminating one of the most pervasive issues of our time, Popular Culture is the first book to link the importance and implications of popular culture with pedagogical practice. It shows how cultural forms such as Hollywood films, pop music, soap operas, and televangelism are organized by gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity, thus providing the contradictory text that both enables and disables emancipatory interest, so fundamental to the formation of self and society. What emerges is a redefinition of the very notion of popular culture.

The integration of popular culture into education is a pervasive theme at all educational levels and in all subject areas. Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Teacher Education explores how ‘popular culture’ and ‘education’ come together and interact in research and practice from an interdisciplinary perspective. The international case studies in this edited volume address issues related to: how popular culture ‘teaches’ our students and what they learn from it outside the classroom how popular culture connects education to students’ lives how teachers ‘use’ popular culture in educational settings how far teachers should shape what students learn from engagement with popular culture in school how teacher educators can help teachers integrate popular culture into their teaching Providing vivid accounts of students, teachers and teacher educators, and drawing out the pedagogical implications of their work, this book will appeal to teachers and teacher educators who are searching for practical answers to the questions that the integration of popular culture into education poses for their work.

"Spinning Popular Culture is a book about the effervescent activity lying (perhaps dormant) beneath the surface of seemingly inert and mundane cultural items in everyday life. It is a book about the power of the Everyday to maintain loyalty to or, at the very least, an unthinking acceptance of particular ways of being in the world. It is also about the capacity of such seemingly mundane artefacts to provoke resistance to this, and to enliven the visioning of social alternatives. It is a book about individual critical analyses of album cover art.Following a brief history of the development of the aesthetics of the packaging of recorded music, eleven internationally recognised critical scholars each interrogate the cover of a particular vinyl record album they grew up with or with which they have some personal experience or resonance. The totality of the cultural artefact that is the vinyl record album is, essentially, dissected and considered from perspectives of paratextuality and pedagogy.In this book, the contributors make the connections of everyday life to memory and history by locating the album in their personal biographies. They then look to the artwork on the album cover to explore the pedagogical possibilities they see resident there. The individual chapters, each in very different ways, provide examples of the exposure of such broad public pedagogies in practice, through critiquing the artwork from both reproductive and resistance positions.Hopefully, readers will be encouraged to look more consciously at the Everyday – the mundane and the taken-for-granted – in their own lives with a view to becoming more critically aware of the messages circulating, unnoticed, through popular culture. Spinning Popular Culture might also encourage the reader to pull out that box of old vinyl records sitting in the back of a storage cupboard somewhere and revisit and rethink their histories. Or maybe, to just find a turntable somewhere and play them one more time!"

Teaching about the media and popular culture has been a major concern for radical educators. Yet in recent years, the hyperbolic rhetoric of "critical pedagogy" has come under attack, not only from theoretical perspectives such as feminism, anti-racism and postmodernism, but also in The Light Of Actual Classroom Experience. The Notion That Teachers Might "liberate" students through rationalistic forms of ideological critique has been increasingly questioned, not only on the grounds of its political arrogance, but also because of its ineffectiveness in practice. This book seeks to move beyond the limitations of these debates, and to explore positive alternatives. It contains a broad international range of contributions, covering practice from primary schools right through to higher education. The authors draw on diverse perspectives, including poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies, anti-racism and feminism; yet they share a willingness to challenge radical orthodoxies, and to offer positive practical alternatives.

A collection of eloquent essays, Tooning In critically examines and interprets the concept of 'popular culture.' Many interesting works have addressed this subject, but few have provided a critical perspective regarding the possibilities of popular culture as a tool for teaching and learning. White and Walker suggest that popular culture is a vital aspect of contemporary life and can be wielded as a tool for efficacy and empowerment, particularly among youth. The book addresses such important questions as: What is the role of popular culture in students' lives? What are the possibilities for popular culture in schooling and education? What are the differences between traditional and transformative approaches to popular culture? With essays specifically devoted to film, music, television, games, and other alternative popular culture texts, Tooning In invites readers to re-examine the fundamental aspects of popular culture as a societal force.

Schools have been traditionally defined as institutions of instruction, but the authors of this volume challenge that position in order to generate a new set of cultural categories and constructs through which the nature and process of schooling can be more appropriately understood. Giroux and McLaren develop a theory of schooling that takes into account not only the more traditional relationship between teaching and learning, but also the import of wider cultural dynamics such as language, mass culture, popular culture, the state, theories of readership, ethnographic research, and subcultural studies.