5150 Final Project

I wanted to be able to just upload the pdf file of my final project to blogger, but apparently I can't figure it out, or it's not possible to upload pdfs. Instead, I have created a wiki page and have uploaded my final project there. To see the final project, click on the link below, and when you get to the front page, click on the link that says 5150 Final Project. Let me know if you have any issues opening up or getting to my final project!

Final project!

To end the semester with a laugh, please also enjoy the following clips from the Reduced Shakespeare Company's performance of Romeo and Juliet.

Graphic Novels = Awesome.

If you were to ask me what were my favorite genres of novels a year ago, I can assure you that the graphic novel would have not been located anywhere on that list. I was never into reading comic books as an adolescent, so I never really knew much about the genre, except that I assumed that all graphic novels had some sort of Manga aspect to it. Boy was I wrong. Fast forward to spring semester of my senior year at the University of Minnesota where I was taking an Asian-American Literature class. All of the books I had read previously for that class were mostly interesting, but were only read because I was required to. One day, I begrudgingly picked up the novel that was due the next week, and when I opened it, to my surprise, the book was actually a graphic novel! “American Born Chinese” forever changed my outlook on graphic novels, and now I actually have a long list of novels from this genre that I would like to read eventually.

The following fall semester, I enrolled in an Adolescent Literature class that would go towards my M. Ed in English education, and I was given the opportunity to continue reading graphic novels with the popular “Perspolis,” and now have an ever-growing list of books that were suggested to me by my instructor and by my peers including “The Pride of Baghdad,” “Maus,” and many others. In this class, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we can use these novels in the classroom, and we were pushed to think about how we would teach our students how to read a graphic novel, as there will be students who will have never even opened up a comic book. I thought a lot about this when I brought home “The Watchmen” a couple of months ago and was trying to experience the whole novel without getting overwhelmed.

In the article “How to Teach Graphic Novel Writing,” the author said: “But the rise in interest has created a pool of frustrated talent that needs focus and direction. You step up, ready to meet them and guide them, but you don't know how. Fear not, true believer, for a few simple steps are all that keep you from guiding these poor creatures unto the greatest destiny of all.” As the “expert” in the classroom, I know that I will be expected by my students to be aware of not only how to read graphic novels, but also how to potentially write them. I will have to ask myself, “How do you decide what to draw?” What are the important aspects of the story that should be focused on?” Writing one’s own graphic novel can take more time and effort than the typical novel.

As I move on to my 4th week of student teaching for a 9th grade honors English class, I have been trying to think more about how I want to teach Romeo and Juliet to make it relevant and inspiring for my students. This will be most of the students’ first real experience reading Shakespeare and will have difficulties understanding what is going on in it due to the many allusions made to what was popular during the time Shakespeare wrote the drama. While I am going to be coming up with different ways of helping them understand how the puns were made back then in comparison to the puns they know now. I recently purchased the book “90 Classic Books for People in a Hurry” which takes 90 classic books and turns the whole plot into humorous 4-panel comics. After looking through this, I came up with the following assignment to go along with my Romeo and Juliet unit:

Name:_______________________

Partner’s name (optional):_______________________

Romeo and Juliet Graphic Novel Assignment

Due by:______________________

Now that we have finished the play Romeo and Juliet, your assignment is to create your own graphic novel version of any scene of your choosing. You may work with a partner or as individuals.

1. Pick a scene that you would like to turn into a graphic novel. Once you have done this, come to me and have me sign-off on your scene choice.

Teacher initials__________

2. Chose what type of medium you want to use for your graphic novel. Your options are:

• By hand (drawings must be clear for me to understand what is going on)
• ComicLife computer program
• Comic Book Creator computer program

3. You will each be required to post individually on your own blog about your experience turning this classical text into a more modern format. What did you learn from this? Did it help you better understand the play? What (if anything) was lost between the transformations of Romeo and Juliet as a graphic novel? What are some pros and cons for doing this activity? This response must be at least 300 words long.

4. If you worked on this project with a partner, please write a summary of what each partner contributed to this assignment. This will only be seen by me, and must be turned in on the same day that your graphic novel is due.

There is a rubric that I created to go along with this assignment, but since I couldn't get it to format properly I will be willing to email it to interested people if they comment on my blog asking for it!

“Because music is a vital component of youth’s popular culture preferred over even movies and television, the teacher’s understanding and application of popular music can be a powerful tool for teaching and learning in social studies education” (p. 111). This quote from White and Walker hits right at the center of the topic of popular culture. While this article seems to focus on the social studies aspect of using popular music in education, as an English teacher, I have been able to find many different ways to use popular music in my own classroom with my future students. Since popular music is always changing, it can be hard to keep up with what is popular at the current time, so it is important to keep up on it to keep it relevant for my students as the years go on. Here are a few ways I have thought of to incorporate popular music into my English classroom:
• Poetry Unit- During a poetry unit, it would be a great idea to have each student come to class with the lyrics to their favorite popular song. The students could pair up and then find all of the conventions that we have learned regarding poetry (i.e., simile, metaphor, personification, rhythm, meter, rhyme, etc.) and analyze the lyrics together. What issues does this song bring up? How does it compare to the poems we have read together as a class over the last few days? It would probably be a good idea to do a sample one with the class and compare it directly to a poem that we have studied.
• Creative Writing Unit- Since students are constantly listening to music and are surrounded by it at almost all times (whether they choose to listen to it, or if they are shopping in a store playing music, or driving in the car with the radio on), so it would be fun to allow students to take time to write their own lyrics for a song. There would have to be guidelines as to what is acceptable, but to allow them to express themselves in a way that is already familiar to them would most likely increase their interest in a creative writing assignment instead of having them write poetry (but little do they know, us sneaky teachers are actually tricking them into writing poetry because music lyrics can definitely be seen as poetry!)
• Popular Culture Lesson- it is important to make sure that students are aware of how popular culture effects literature. When one reads older texts, often times there will be allusions to the popular music that was present during the time the story takes place. This can be confusing for some, but once they understand the importance of how popular music can tell us something about the time period, it should make them more conscious of the popular culture they read in today’s novels. Have students find music that contains references to older pieces of literature (i.e., Taylor Swift's current popular song "Love Story")



I was actually a little surprised to read that it is music that is really the number one aspect of popular culture. I was always under the impression that it would be either television or movies that would be at that number one spot (considering how many hours a day students spend in front of the television or watching movies), but now that I think about it more, I can see how music was ranked at the top of the list. I have just stared my student teaching this week, and over the last five days, I have had the chance to mainly observe and get to know the students in the classes better. I was shocked to see how many students would come into the classroom with their white earbuds connected to their iPods. I was even more surprised when I noticed that most of these students would only take out one of the earbuds, and keep the other one during class. I over heard some other English teachers in the department discussing their opinions on this phenomenon and they have taken to allowing the students to listen to their music during work time as a reward.





Regret:
Katy Perry-


Sexuality:


Race:
Chamillionaire- Ridin' Dirty

vs. Weird Al's White and Nerdy

Fake News

Before I first started to go to the University of Minnesota, I had had very little interaction with fake news in comparison to real, factual news. In my mind, fake news really only included the tabloids that were present at the check out lines when at the supermarket. The only “news worthy” articles that I saw pop up included: the end of the world quickly approaching, the coming of Jesus, or Bat Boy.

Every once and a while my dad would bring home one of these hardcore tabloids, and I would take time to look through it. To be perfectly honest, as a kid I was pretty naïve and had not ever been explicitly told that these “newspapers” were fictitious. Because of this, I found myself getting scarred at night because I really thought that the very creepy-looking Bat Boy was on the loose and that he would somehow make his way into my house and terrorize my family. My early experiences with fake news centers on the fact that I actually believed these articles and should be a warning for all future and current educators that they need to give their students the skills to figure out biases and what is true and what is not true (especially as they go on to write numerous research papers throughout their academic career).

While I lost much of my innocence concerning fake news and how to identify logical fallacies, though high school I never had to come into contact with it much, until I started my freshman year of college. Stationed at nearly every corner located at the University of Minnesota, there is a newspaper box for The Onion and after spending a lot of time waiting for the bus with nothing to do, I started reading the ridiculous articles written for this fake newspaper. My interest in the fake news increased as the political issues arose and really enjoyed reading the twisted articles for my entertainment. Over the course of the last year, I found myself really wishing that I had cable for the soul reason that I wanted to be able to watch The Daily Show and other parody news shows.

While I have never been a big fan of politics, these fake news stories really helped ease me into keeping up with what was going on in the world, because in order to be able to find the humor in the articles, I had to have a basic knowledge as to what was going on in the real world.

My feelings are that I am not the only one who has had this experience with fake news (especially from when I was an adolescent), and that with today’s influx of published unreliable news articles mixed in with the real thing, the youth may be having a difficult time differentiating be what the real stories are versus the fake ones. As an English teacher, I have been thinking a lot about how I can help my current and future students sift through the correct information that they will need to get through while doing many different types of papers, and how I can use examples from the Onion to get my point across. Some areas that may be causing students trouble with fake news is that it is presented in the same format as the real news. The fake news (when paired with the real articles) can really help students realize that you cannot always take what you read for it’s face value and see that knowing the source of where the news comes from is just as important of a step in the research process as everything else. Students know that they should be wary of Wikipedia articles when digging for information about their particular topic, so they should also start figuring out what print resources are reliable and which one are not. Not only could these fake articles help students with research papers and learning about logical fallacies, it can also enhance a journalism lesson on the conventions of newspaper writing. The Onion is written in such a ways that makes it hard to distinguish what is real and what is fake because it’s conventions match that of high quality newspaper writing. An assignment that could work with journalism students (or in any class where they need to journalistic style writing) to show them the best ways to write a newspaper article is below:

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be learning what it takes to be a great journalist. At the end of the semester we will publish and distribute the school’s biannual newspaper “The Rebel Riot.” Before we can start writing stories, we need to learn the conventions of newspaper writing.

With a partner, take a look at the following news articles:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/obama_peddling_stimulus

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/us/politics/26talkshow.html?fta=y

On the backside of this paper, compare and contrast the two articles and include information regarding the conventions of how the articles were written, and the set up of the website that the article is on:
• What did you notice?
• What were some similarities?
• What were the differences?
• Find anything surprising?
• Comment on the voice of each article

After the class has finished combing through the articles, we will come together as a group and discuss our findings.

I want TOYS!!!

This weeks readings have really hit close to home for me. I have been working with younger kids ever since I was 12 years old when I started to babysit for my neighbor’s three young boys. In the last ten years, I have also worked as a t-ball coach for four, five, six, and seven year olds, as a camp councilor for kids in elementary school, a park supervisor, and most recently I have been employed as a nanny for three kids (ages five, six, and eight). At one point during my undergraduate experience, I had considered getting my teaching license in either elementary or early childhood education. Now that I have made up my mind to teach adolescents and teens, sometime I wonder how much “kid culture” can really help enhance my lessons.

In chapter 15, White and Walker discuss the importance of play in the classroom. During my foundations of education classes, we spend a lot of time learning about why it is important to let students use play to solve problems. “Toys of value enhance children’s own ideas. They help the child to engage in imaginative, meaningful play by allowing them to solve the problem” (144). As a nanny, I see this happening all of the time when they are playing amongst each other. While these kids are fortunate enough to have several toys, the most loved toy in their house would have to be the play kitchen that they have set up in the basement. Often, the kids will pretend to have their own restaurant and take their jobs very seriously. On longer days, I will take the kids to the Minnesota Children’s Museum, and while we are there, I get the opportunity to observe hundreds of kids using the toys provided by the museum to solve certain, task-related problems. In one room of the museum, the area is set up like an assembly line where blocks are moved from upstairs, to the lower level, and then moved to the “shipping truck”. As soon as the children would enter the room, in no time, they were dressed in the worker uniforms, hard hats, and begin working with one another to complete their task. I am always amazed by how quickly a couple dozen elementary aged students can come together are work with great teamwork. Also, within the museum, there is an area named "Our World". This space is set up to replicate a small town including a Chinese restaurant, a city bus, doctors office, recording studio, grocery story, etc. Here, kids are able to dress up and become little grown-ups. In the restaurant, the kids take the time to happily clean up from their "cooking" (something that they would never actually do at home). This place allows for children to practice adult roles, and by watching them, you can see how they view society and different hierarchies.

“These toys channel children into imitative play, robbing them of their own imagination, problem solving, and creativity” (146).

“Starting at birth, relatives and friends give children toys or objects to express love” (146). I feel like this is a big issue in the United States culture. Toys are loosing their purpose. I remember the days when my mom would give me the empty oatmeal container and washed out milk cartons and I would use them in a ways to help my "customers" finally get breakfast (after months of only having plastic hamburgers to offer them). What makes me almost sick is how much money parents will spend on the popular toys, instead of figuring out which new gift would have a more enduring meaning to their child. Over the holiday season, the popular television show The Office ran an episode that dealt with parents over paying for the holiday's most wanted toy, "Unicorn Princess". Unicorn Princess is what Tickle Me Elmo and Furby were like to us 90's children. These were toys that we just HAD to have, but in the long run, we just ended up donating them to Goodwill after about a year.

One thing that has left me questioning these chapters is how relevant can this be for the middle and high school classrooms? There isn't much time allowed in the older classrooms for play time, and this can most obviously be seen from the lack of playgrounds at middle and high schools. Maybe using games and the cartoons from kid culture is enough? I do realize how important it is to use kid culture to enable our students to have the tools to critique popular culture and take more charge of their social education.

My random gizmoz

Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips

Wisdom from the eMe

During my time here at the University of Minnesota, I have been through many classes where there have been some sort of online component or technical aspect that was either required or was provided for additional support for the students. In Aaron Doering and George Veletsianos’ article Conversational Agents and their Longitudinal Affordances on Communication and Interaction, I had a very personal reaction to this piece because I recently completed the EDHD 5007 class through the I.L.P./M.Ed where I was required to create my own eFolio to record my personal accomplishments and what I did to complete all of the various standards and benchmarks in order to receive my Minnesota board approved teaching license. As the paper noted, the class only met once, every other week, for about three hours at a time, and the amount of time in the classroom was dedicated to learning about the new technologies that we could possibly be encountering or instigating as new teachers in our future teaching placements. This left little time for us to actually learn about how to use the eFolio site and how to go about creating the most effective portfolio. Because we learned little more than how to upload a photo or a document, most of use had to figure out on our own time outside of class how to navigate this non-user friendly site. Our instructor made sure to inform my class that there were online-help tutorials, but I don’t ever remember being told about the Conversational Agents to help out with this daunting task.

While I was working on my own eFolio, I was able to figure out what to do for the most part, but it did take hours upon hours of trial and error to actually get a decent looking semi-final product. If I had known about the Conversational Agents before I started to work on it individually, I wonder if the process would have been much easier for me? Would I have taken full advantage of them? Would I have saved time? Would I have a better-finalized eFolio? I don’t know if the Conversational Agents would be the best option for me, as I like to have quick and direct instruction. When I’m not talking to a real person, it becomes very easy for me to zone out or not completely understand what the avatar tells me. I know this because when I was listening to this week’s assignment through the Gizmoz avatar that Thom sent to us last week, and had to repeat it several times before catching everything I needed to know. I prefer to either have the directions right in front of me, or to have a real life person whose body language I can read at the same time. I rely on so much more than just a floating head talking to me. I can definitely see how the Conversational Agents can be more beneficial and supportive than if the user had no help at all.

Speaking of Gizmoz, after trying my hand at creating my own avatar, I spent some time trying to think of how I could use this program as an assignment in my own future classrooms. At first it was really hard for me to think of ways in which this product could be used in the classroom to ENHANCE my lesson, rather than just use Gizmoz for the sake of using them. I had a classmate who informed me that she tried using the Gizmoz in the class she will be teaching, by using it to introduce an assignment. Her students were surprised and slightly confused as to why she was using it (and in my opinion, I was a bit confused as well. I couldn’t figure out how using it to introduce their free-writing assignment really enhanced her lesson). Here is a layout of an assignment that I came up with for how to use the Gizmoz/avatars with my future students:

Digital-You Book Reporting

In today’s day and age, so many things are resorting to using the digital world to get their points across. In this assignment, you will be creating an avatar and reporting on your independent reading book through this innovative technology!

1.) Write your book report. Make sure to include a quick plot summary, 3 important findings from the book, if you would recommend this text, and why or why not? Make sure that you have this completed before we go to the computer lab.

2.) Practice reading this out loud. This is what your classmates will hear during your presentation on the book. This part must be clear, understandable, and loud enough for us to hear what you are saying. When spoken, the book report should be 2-4 minutes long.

3.) Create an avatar- this is the digital-you who will be presenting your book report. Be creative; make it you; be appropriate. If you have to ask me if it is appropriate for school, it’s probably not… (See yellow handout with instructions on how to create your avatar!) We will be in the computer lab on _____________ and ______________ to work on this.

4.) Bring your avatar to life! Using the avatar program, record yourself saying your book report aloud. It may take several tries to get your recording just perfect, so take your time, and have fun with it. Write your book report. Make sure to include a quick plot summary, 3 important findings from the book, if you would recommend this text, and why or why not? Save often. Once you have a finished product MAKE SURE TO COPY DOWN THE URL HERE:

_________________________________________________________________

5.) Presentation: Let your avatar do the talking! On the last day, each student will have the opportunity to play his or her avatar for the class.

**After the presentations, we will have a short discussion on the pros and cons of using avatars instead of paper copies of reports like these.**



DUE DATES:

Written script of book report: ______________________

Presentation date:______________________

Let's get some SHOES!

From the Washington Post article, this quote stuck out to me the most: “Bush seems to have calculated -- cynically but correctly -- that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as commander in chief from becoming more than a nuisance.” I became very mad upon reading this. When Bush told us to “go to Disneyland,” I was only a sophomore in high school, and was probably comforted by this statement. Now knowing what it has caused our nation with the present recession, I am very upset with what our former president told us. As a teenager, the shopping mall was where I went with my friends to socialize, and with my mom to kill time (and always bought random things that I “just had to have” and we spent money without even thinking). Even through my junior year in college, I spent a lot of time at the Mall of America because there wasn’t much to do on a Sunday afternoon (especially when I didn’t want to be doing homework). My fiancé and I live right next to the Light Rail station, and would just pop on the train and head down to the mall whenever we felt like it. That was when we didn’t have to worry about bills or future student loan payments, ect. Even though we didn’t go there with anything in particular to buy, but sure enough, we’d be riding the train back home with multiple bags in our hands.

After reading about the history of the shopping center and mall, it got me wondering about when was it within that history that marked the time when going to the mall became more than just a trip to get necessities for the home? When did it become a social phenomenon? As a kid growing up, I had always been somewhat aware of the fact that Southdale Mall in Edina was the first fully enclosed shopping center in the states, but to think about what an impact it had on the rest of the nation is incredible! From 1956 to 1968, shopping centers became more than just a place where you could go buy clothing for the family, or pick up some new towels at the department store. It became a place where one could go to admire the architecture and the wonderful décor of the interiors.


This is all I can post at the moment, as my computer/internet is being wonky. I'll get the rest posted before the end of the week!

Gaming, Gender, and Education

GAMING + GENDER

Reading these articles got me thinking about my own relationship with video games, and being in a household with five women and only one man all living under the same roof (my poor dad- even the pets were all female!), and how we got our first Sega Genesis system when I was about 8 or nine years old. The video games we had in the house that I can distinctly remember playing included: “The Little Mermaid,” “Echo” (about a dolphin), “Sonic” (probably the most violent of the games that were given to us), “Bugsy,” and one other game where you were a newspaper boy and you had to go around delivering papers to clients in a certain amount of time. When my male cousin, Andy (who is only 6 days older than I am) would come over, we had to start hiding the Sega or else he would spend the whole time playing our “lame” games (as he would call them). If he got his hands on the controllers, he wouldn’t put it down until it was a.) Time for him to leave, or b.) He had beaten the game completely (something my sisters and I could never do, and to this day still haven’t). As the years passed, my family eventually became the owners of a PlayStation, Play Station II, PC computer, and various handheld devices after relentless begging on my sisters’ and my part. My parents never limited how much time we could play them based on the fact that we would get bored if we played for more than an hour at a time. Our game collection gained a few more violent games (ranging from a couple of World War II games, to Cabella’s Deer Hunting), but the game I see most often in the disc drive is The Sims. I moved from home for freshman year of college and found myself constantly surrounded by people who were video game fanatics! My boyfriend, Luke (now fiancé) lived in a room with three other guys, and if I walked into their dorm room at any given time, I would more than likely find at least 3 of them playing various video games all at the same time. I spent a lot of my time in that room, and learned more about video games than I ever thought I would. Who knew that watching the plot progress in Halo, Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto could be so interesting? Or how detailed the character development is in BioShock or Gears of War? While I never actually actively partook in the games (except for a few lame attempts at Halo where I ran around in circles and get stuck against a wall), I found myself asking Luke to keep playing just so I could see what happened next. Now that I live with Luke, I am still surrounded by all sorts of gaming consoles including: an Xbox360, Nintendo Game Cube, N64, multiple computers, and a Nintendo DS.

After my two different living situations, I’ve had the chance to see how members of opposite genders approach video games. Not only do the majority of males and females seem to have different views and priorities concerning video games, the actual gender roles that are portrayed within these games. In Game+Girl=Advance, the author wrote early on that “As a woman who plays video games, I've had to think about gender in videogames, because it's so obvious that I'm playing in a boys' world.” When you look at women in video games (i.e., Lara Croft, etc.), they are the ideal women with tiny waists, and huge breasts. They can kick ass while looking gorgeous at the same time. This got me thinking about a good friend that I have who is in school to become an animator, and out of the sketches and final projects that I have seen of hers; her characters mimic the ideals of society. The men are tall with great hair and chiseled jaws, while the women are how I described them before. While her work is beautiful, and she has a great grasp on the art of animating, these standards are not going to go away. After reading the 4 aspects of “Genderspace,” I can definitely see why characters are made the way they are and the thought that has to go into them. The creators have to remember that “some people either take great pains to distance themselves from the avatar, or conversely, create avatars with which they identify very closely,” and need to take this into account to be successful.


GAMNG + EDUCATION

There are many people (parents, educators, ect.) who believe that video games are doing more harm than good when it comes to adolescents’ education. While to some it may seem like a waste of time, to others, it is a precious tool that can be used in the classroom to help reach out to students who don’t fully understand what is going on in class. Since I am on my way to become a high school English teacher, I want to try to use video games to enhance my lessons when necessary. Video games can be used in a variety of ways across a school campus, and in the English class, it can prove to be a valuable tool to get students to understand plot development, and different aspects of literature. Take for instance, if you were teaching a regular Language Arts class and you are trying to explain the concept of plot, climax, and character development to a group of young students who just aren’t grasping these important concepts. Many video games have cut scenes that they go to after the player has made it through a level. These cut scenes add to the story and let the player know what is going to happen next. As the player gets further and further into the game, they become more immersed in the plot of the game and often times become emotionally connected to the characters. This goes along the same lines as reading a novel. You get through a chapter and want to know what is going to happen next. You can sense the building climax through a novel just as you can through Halo or Bio Shock. While I wouldn’t want to have video games take over the classroom, I am very open to using pop culture and media with my students and I realize that video games can be used to enhance one’s classroom, and the power it can have when used correctly.

Parting quote (taken from Confessions of an Aca/Fan):
“Our approach respects all that is inventive and exploratory in play while challenging students to grow intellectually. If we succeed in these goals, we hope to offer a model for what a good learning game should be, one that resolves the contradictory demands schools place on this emerging technology.”

I'm Your Biggest Fan!!!

As I was sitting here at my computer, I was trying to think about when I first remember becoming a fan of something. Back in the mid 1990s, I was talking with my past babysitter named Crystal. Crystal would bring over CDs every time she would come over to baby sit, and my three younger sisters and I thought that it was the most awesome thing ever (we only owned cassettes). One evening, Crystal brought over the Hanson CD, and she told me that since she had a crush on Taylor Hanson, I should have a crush on Zac Hanson (the youngest of the trio who was only a year older than I am). After a few minutes, I agreed and voila! I had my first celebrity crush and from that point on, I was officially Hanson’s biggest fan. At every gas station, I kept my eyes peeled for the latest issue of Teen Bop or Tiger Beat, which often featured the band on their covers and included inserts of Hanson posters. Although my mother warned me not to tape the posters to my walls, I just had to prove to my friends what a hardcore fan I really was. I can’t even come close to estimating how many hours I spend listening to their original tape and just HAD to have the new Hanson Christmas cassette as well. From then on, every time I would see Crystal in the neighborhood, we would spend a few minutes talking about how much we LOVED Hanson. Many of my friends didn’t understand why I liked this group of young guys so much, and often poked fun at me for it, but I didn’t care. If they didn’t want to share my interest with me, I had other people who I could dump my feeling and emotions about the band on. While I slowly lost interest in Hanson and eventually took down the magazine posters, this was my introduction to perpetual fandom that includes many areas of fandom.

Now, there is no way I can discuss what I am a fan of without including the incredible Harry Potter series. My grandmother introduced me to J.K. Rowling’s novels when I was in junior high school, and I became instantly absorbed in them. My younger sister, Lauren, also found that she was lusting over the series herself, so it was definitely to my advantage to have a fellow Potter fan living under the same roof as myself. Lauren and I would spend hours upon hours reading and rereading the same set of Harry Potter books until the next one would come out. Many of my friends read it too, and I LOVED the heated discussions and arguments over whether or not Sirius or Dumbledore were either actually dead, or if Snape really was one of the bad guys, and ultimately would Harry of Voldemort be the conqueror in the final battle between good and evil? It’s amazing how quickly the world-wide obsession with J.K. Rowling’s books spread, and how even though the series has been finished, people are still losing themselves in the hallways of Hogwarts. According to the Wikipedia article, “a March 2007 study showed that "Harry Potter" is the most searched-for fan fiction subject online.” While I have never participated in any type of fan fiction, it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that there are so many people who are so completely absorbed in the witchcraft and wizardry that they look for other stories written about the familiar characters to keep getting their fill. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series is another viral series of books that is spreading across the world. I have found myself wandering the streets of Forks, WA many times during my daydreams, and love to have discussions with other adults who made their way through all four novels.

In relation to education and popular culture, one can really map out the trends from generation to generation. While there are many timeless examples of fandom (i.e., Star Wars, Star Trek, Anime, Manga, etc.), many of them can be pinpointed to a specific starting point and could be used in many ways to assist educators. I feel that this would be particularly helpful in a social studies classroom when they are discussing what was popular a long time ago and how people felt about those different celebrities, hobbies, genres and fashions. I think that as teachers, we can really use this to our advantage to get students to realize how important popular culture and being a fan of something is and how it directly relates to them. For example: I am going to be a high school or middle school English teacher hopefully within the next 6 months. When I am choosing a classic text such as The Great Gatsby or something similar, if my students question as to why it is important for them to read it and how will this (by their standards) ancient piece of literature relate to them in the twenty-first century, I can bring up the likes of Harry Potter, Twilight, and other popular texts to help them understand that the feelings they have for these books are quite similar to those who read the classic texts when they were more modern.

I will again end this post with my favorite quote from this week’s reading regarding the relationship that didn’t happen between Harry and Hermione:

“My comments weren't directed at the shippers who acknowledged that Harry/Hermione was a long shot but loved the idea of them together. It was directed at the "militant" shippers who insisted that there was overwhelming canon proof and that everyone else was too blind to see it. You were delusional; you saw what you wanted to see and you have no one to blame for that but yourselves.”

A good place to start....

Going into this class, I thought that I knew more than I actually do about incorporating popular culture into my future classes and lessons. I hadn’t really put much thought into how I would do it to make sure that I am not just adding media and other types of popular culture just to take up time just because it is out there and available. After reading the first three chapters in White and Walkers’ “Tooning In,” I have started to think more critically about how I want to use popular culture to enhance my future students’ education. Since I am a future English teacher, I am starting to realize that there are many areas where popular culture can make a good lesson plan even better, by doing more than just pairing a film to its literature equivalent. Recently, I found out that I will be teaching Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to a ninth grade honors English class, and I have been constantly thinking about how I can take this ancient text and make it more accessible for today’s youth. While I could just pop in the modern film version “Romeo + Juliet” starring Leo DiCaprio and Clara Danes and leave it at that (hoping that the fourteen and fifteen years olds understood the film well enough to get the gist of what Shakespeare wrote hundreds of years ago), there is much more that can be done to get the internal cogs moving inside of my young students’ minds.

I wholeheartedly agree as a future educator that students must be given the tools to investigate “how media and the mass-produced icons of popular culture situate us into relations of power by shaping our emotional, political, social, and material lives” (p.23). Since it is quite possible that students don’t have models at home who push them to take a more critical look at the impact of popular culture, it is important for educators to inform them at school.

While I am definitely all for incorporating popular culture into the classroom, I found it very interesting to read the arguments and complaints from those who strongly disapprove of using popular culture as a tool to enhance modern-day students’ education. In particular, I thought that the discussion in chapter three concerning Disney was fascinating. I am definitely in agreement with Giroux when he says, “Disney’s animated films should be incorporated into schools as serious objects of social knowledge and critical analysis” (p. 25). I do think that some of the messages that Disney conveys to today’s youth can be stereotypical, and can push its young viewers to see the world in a false light, but when taught to view this type of media with a sense of skepticism and to think about it critically, there shouldn’t be that much to worry about. In comparison to Giroux, White and Walker discuss how the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) view Disney, and why they believe it should be boycotted. I attempted to look up the website myself to see the twenty-three reasons for why ERLC is against Disney, but the link no longer works. For those who want to view the CNN article, the URL in the book is incorrect and should read: www.cnn.com/US/9706/18/Baptists.Disney. It still surprises me how many people are out there who are so intolerant of different lifestyles and look down upon those who approve of these existences. The ERLC should be reminded that “Educators must provide students with the tools to critically analyze how the texts from Disney and other media purveyors are constructed and construct viewers” (p. 26). Though this one group may not see the benefit of using this type of popular culture in the classroom, this whole argument is an excellent reason for why future educators must continue to fight the general opinions of the public/parents/school boards to make sure that their students get the chance to have the tools that will enable them to make these important decisions on how to view popular culture themselves!

Popular culture plays such a large part in our students’ lives that it is necessary for us educators to help guide them to the tools they need to use to sort out the information they are getting from the media and such. I will end this post with my favorite quote from the assigned reading:

“As adults they try to restore the popular culture that was familiar to them and as a result the popular culture created by the next generation sometimes becomes a source of fear and concern; the culture gap, in fact is a generation gap” (p.32).

CI 5150

I found that it would be easier for me to just continue on using the same blog for CI 5150, so everything posted from this date on (22 January 2009) will be for 5150! Feel free to browse my past posts if you like from last fall's CI 5472.