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).