Integrating Pop Culture & Literacy
“When children are not taught to become critically aware of media-produced popular culture texts, their thinking about such texts goes unchallenged.” –Donna Alvermann & Shelly Hong Xu
As a future teacher, who has completed a little over four semesters of field experience, I have read, heard, and taught from various texts. However, the majority of these books, poems, plays etc. seem to be the same ones that I read as a child. While there are some classics that everyone should read, I believe that the selection of texts should grow and change like the world continues to do around us.
The insertion of pop culture materials in schools can aid student achievement in traditional literacy simply by bringing the students’ everyday literacy practices into the classroom. Children these days are surrounded by text from endless technological sources. So why aren’t we incorporating these modern texts that grasp and maintain student interest?
Pop Culture in the Classroom
Courtney Williams, a 5/6th grade teacher at Clear Creek Elementary School, supports the integration of literacy and pop culture (interview, 2014). For example, Williams instructs her students to “tweet” at least once a day, which involves writing on a dry-erase thought bubble (illustrated on the left). In these tweets, the students comment and reflect on lessons that were taught that day. For example, Gracie wrote, “@GracieSherrik Today in ELA we had a S.I.D. and we had to ask questions and answer questions too #Dumich” (Williams’ Twitter Feed, 2014).
Williams’ students write each message basically identical to how it would appear on twitter (view example above). They write our a Twitter handle and some even further express their ideas by adding hashtags.
Why Should Pop Culture & Literacy be integrated?
Elizabeth G. Friese, a doctoral student in the Department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, states that the inclusion of pop cultural texts in school libraries would offer students the opportunity to select and use information in a wide variety of topics and formats. This inclusive approach is one of the ways to facilitate the development of skills that students will need as information literate citizens, while they are in school and continuously throughout their lives.
Patricia Duff (2004), an expert with first hand experience, declares that children and young adults naturally develop repertoires of fictional characters and stories that are part of their background knowledge, cultural repertoire, social practice, and identity. Students draw on these elements socially due to various reason, such as to determining membership in certain groups, compare shared interests, and simply to have something to talk about with one another. Duff goes on to illustrate an example in which first-grade students partake in a literacy lesson about how planets orbit around the sun. Duff wrote:
[The students] interwove images of space robots that were transformed into a hip hop radio station; they then recited rap lyrics from a famous performer. The students were deemed to be creative, cognitively flexible ‘scavengers’ who used their agency to appropriate pop cultural content and genres ‘as a means of cultural production, that is, as a means of constructing social affiliations, expressive practices, and imaginative worlds’ (p. 234).
Barnes & Noble’s blogger, Rich Santos, argues that books are (almost) always better than their movies. He states that the movie gets lost in translation, the film doesn’t portray the story how the original writer pictured it, there is limited storytelling time, and the book allows the reader to put it together in their own imagination.
Teachers should administer books that correlate to popular movies that their students love. Not only will it grab and hold their attention, but the students will be able to connect with some of their favorite stories in a deeper and “better” manner.
Genre Pieces:
Poems
Comic Strip
References
Alvermann, D., & Xu, S. H. (2003). Children’s everyday literacies: Intersections of popular culture and language arts instruction. Language Arts, 81(2), 145–154.
Duff, P. A. (2004). Intertextuality and hybrid discourses: The infusion of pop culture in educational discourse. Linguistics And Education, 14(3–4), 231–276.
Friese, E. G. (2008). Popular culture in the school library: Enhancing literacies traditional and new. School Libraries Worldwide, 14(2), 68–82.
Hipster Belle. DIY LOL. Retrieved November 5, 2014 from http://assets.diylol.com/hfs/3ae/42e/48c/resized/hipster-belle-meme-generator-i-read-that-book-before-it-was-a-movie-66fd20.jpg?1323045890.jpg
Santos, R. (2013, October 2). 6 Reasons The Book Is (Almost Always) Better Than The Movie. Retrieved from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/6-reasons-the-book-is-almost-always-better-than-the-movie/
TeachersJourney. (2014, November 8). Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=pop%20culture%20education&src=typd
Williams, C. [Personal interview]. (2014, 11).
