Popular Culture in the Classroom

Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy

Donna E. Alvermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135853099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book is written for teachers, researchers, and theorists who have grown up in a world radically different from that of the students they teach and study. It considers the possibilities involved in teaching critical media literacy using popular culture, and explore what such teaching might look like in your classroom.
Published by International Reading Association

Chapter 1
Teaching Critical Media Literacy Using Popular Culture Texts

Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy is a book written for teachers, researchers, and theorists who have grown up in a world radically different from that of the students they teach, study, and theorize about. Carmen Luke (1997) wrote that there is an "urgent need for educators to engage constructively with media, popular and youth culture to better understand how these discourses structure childhood, adolescence, and students' knowledge" (p. 45). As literacy educators, we believe there is a special need to understand how cultural and political contexts influence the questions that teachers and researchers ask about popular media texts (for example, who produces these texts, for what purposes, and for whose consumption). It is toward such understandings that we developed this book.

What Is Critical Media Literacy?

The term critical media literacy, a concept best defined by taking into account some of the work being done in sociology and the interdisciplinary area known as cultural studies, has to do with providing individuals access to understanding how the print and non print texts that are part of everyday life help to construct their knowledge of the world and the various social, economic, and political positions they occupy within it (Baker & Luke, 1991; Christian-Smith, 1997; Luke, 1997). Critical media literacy is also about creating communities of active readers and writers who can be expected to exercise some degree of agency in deciding what textual positions they will assume or resist as they interact in complex social and cultural contexts (Buckingham, 1998; Hilton, 1996; Luke, 1998).

This conception of critical media literacy follows up on what Allan Luke and Peter Freebody (1997b) have referred to as the move away from psychological and personal growth models of reading toward the view that reading is a social and cultural practice. In their words,

This move is significant in terms of how we see difference and diversity in the classroom... In so far as we view literacy as a psychological phenomenon, we will tend to define classroom problems in terms of student lack.... instead, a sociological approach focuses on the kinds of discourses, language, and practices that students have had access to and practice with. These are the products of participation and membership in particular interpretive communities, not of simple individual difference. They are the resources of cultural practice, not of innate intelligence, natural ability, or developmental stages, (p. 208)

Finally, it is important to consider that our conceptions of critical media literacy do not deny the psychological or cognitive aspects of reading, writing, and speaking; instead, we see them as attendant processes in a much larger social context—one in which "literacy is always already political" (Green, 1997, p. 241) and relations of power are at stake in people's daily interactions around popular culture forms. We also acknowledge that issues of gender, race, class, age, and other identity markers are historically part of these everyday interactions (Luke & Freebody, 1997a).

Living in an Age of Popular Culture

We are living in an age often portrayed as being dominated by consumer capitalism and the products of a capitalistic mass culture— for example, shopping malls, tabloid newspapers, talk shows, Music Television (MTV), and the World Wide Web. Consumers of all ages and backgrounds, but children and youth in particular, often are criticized for mindlessly buying into these cultural artifacts. Popular consumption of cultural phenomena such as computer games, MTV, chat rooms on the Internet, video arcades, comics, Madonna, and the television shows South Park and Ally McBeal produces texts of a sort, which in turn evoke different responses from different people. For example, popular culture theorist John Fiske (1989a) has pointed out that for some audiences Madonna is read as nothing more than a "boy toy" while for others she personifies a resistance to patriarchy's definition of what a woman should be, do, and say.

This oppositional reading of a text, in the broad sense of the term, is what Fiske (1989b) sees as the distinguishing characteristic between mass culture and popular culture. Refusing to equate mass culture with popular culture, Fiske has argued that mass culture represents the goods with which a capitalistic society attempts to dominate and homogenize people's thinking, whereas popular culture reflects people's bid to evade and manipulate those attempts, such as when Madonna assumes the image of "The Material Girl," To Fiske, it is this manipulative aspect of popular culture that enables subordinated groups (for example, women, children, and minorities) to subvert mass culture's attempts to dominate their lives by telling them through the media's influence what they should be, do, and say. He also believes that an audience's ability to oppose or resist the media's influence is more or less a "natural" response—not a practice that needs to be taught formally.

Although she agrees that children are not dupes of the media that some adults may make them out to be, Carmen Luke (1997) is not content to sit back and wait for children to develop the subversive practices Fiske (1989a, 1989b) has outlined. Instead, she has argued for developing a critical awareness of the media that begins as early as the primary grades and extends through teacher education programs at the graduate level. Luke has cautioned, however, that teachers should not insist that students learn to critique the very texts (film, video, print) in which they take pleasure. She wrote the following:

By asking children in the public forum of the classroom to under-take...[a] critique of the texts that are important to them and that usually form a subversive counterpoint to the discourse of schooling, teachers unwittingly position students to reveal and possibly disavow their "secret pleasures." In other words, by giving students the technical skills with which to dismantle and dismiss ideologically incorrect texts—to identify stereotyping, class bias, sexist or racist content—we ask them to expose and confess to desires, and publicly to confess their dislike of [television] programs that they probably like a lot. (p. 43)

Murdock (1997), who writes widely on contemporary culture and communication, also sees a problem in counting on children and adolescents to engage in the subversive practice of "doing popular culture" (cf. West & Zimmerman, 1987, on doing gender) as a way of resisting mass media's messages. For Murdock, there is a danger in romanticizing or celebrating the consumer's right to refuse these messages. For example, what if a child repeatedly fails to exercise this right and adopts wholesale the images offered by the dominant forces of consumer capitalism? Moreover, Murdock sees in Fiske's (1989b) stance the potential for colluding (however unwittingly) with the neoconservative view of the world as a marketplace where concerns about individual freedoms should take precedence over concerns about the common good.

Why a Book on Teaching Critical Media Literacy?

Perhaps at no other time in the history of literacy education have more demands been put on teachers to develop within students an ability to read and critique a wide range of media texts. A small but growing body of research on critical media literacy (for example, Dyson, 1997; Finders, 1996; Lewis, 1997; Luke, 1997; Neilsen, 1998) points to the importance of developing within children and adolescents a critical awareness of the social, political, and economic messages emanating from popular fiction, music, movies, comics, magazines, videos, computer games, and other popular culture forms.

The ability to read and critique popular media is significant for at least two reasons. First, in an age of expanding consumerism, children and young people who learn to question how their identities are constructed by the various forms of popular culture that they elect to take up are likely to make more informed decisions about how they live their lives. Second, the abundance of media messages (both image based and verbal) in the home and community suggests that there is an urgent need to help students learn how to evaluate such messages for their social, political, economic, and aesthetic contents.

Organization of the Book

This chapter introduces what we mean by critical media literacy and the different interests and cultural resources each author brings to the book. It also lays out a rationale for teaching critical media literacy using popular culture texts and offers four scenarios designed to engage readers in experiencing some of those texts. Chapter 2 considers issues surrounding the selection and introduction of popular culture texts for use in critical media literacy lessons, then offers some cautionary notes to teachers about the politics of pleasure, that is, to the potential conflict between students' desires and what they know is "politically correct" to say or do. It also addresses what it means to be part of an audience and the role of the teacher in relation to both pleasure and audience. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide examples of teaching strategies that we have used at the primary, upper elementary, and middle school levels to engage students in critical media literacy lessons. Artifacts from these lessons also are included along with self-reflections on what we learned from working with popular culture texts in regular classroom settings. Chapter 6 gives a detailed analysis of how children's and adolescents' identities are constructed through the media in an age of popular culture. The chapter argues against a monolithic view of either youth or the media's representation of popular culture and gives special attention to how readers take up or resist the textual positionings available to them through the media. Chapter 7 synthesizes and explores where the literacy field is and needs to go in theorizing and researching critical media literacy. We chose to address theory and research last in order to draw from previous chapters those issues that seemed most relevant as we reflected on our own initiation as teachers and researchers of critical media literacy in an age of popular culture.

The Stories Behind Our Interest in Writing This Book

As authors, each or us brings different interests, experiences, and interpretations of those experiences to our teaching, researching, and writing. In the sections that follow, we tell our own stories (hence, the use of "I" instead of "we") about various background experiences that led us to write this book.

Donna's Story

How did I become interested in teaching critical media literacy using popular culture, not to mention writing a book on the topic? In terms of background, I have been reading and conducting research on how gender intersects with literacy teaching and learning (an aspect of critical literacy) for a little over 6 years. However, my knowledge of the literature on popular culture was very limited before I began work on this book. Apart from having seen a few episodes of The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead, I knew very little about contemporary media. I had attended R.E.M.'s benefit concert for the Clinton/Gore U.S. presidential team a few years ago when Vice President Gore came to Athens, Georgia, and I do read The New York Times Arts and Leisure section on a regular basis. Occasionally, I scan Newsweek's cyberscope department, but I have not found or taken the time to venture far on the World Wide Web—at least not into the chat rooms where the latest popular culture phenomenon is sure to be discussed at length.

All this changed, however, when I began experimenting with some critical media literacy activities in my graduate-level content area reading class for preservice and inservice teachers, grades 1-12. Soon, two of the students in the class began putting videotaped copies of the newest television hit South Park in my office mailbox along with newspaper clippings about this low-budget cartoon's "raucously subversive look at small-town life in all its complexities" (Robinson, 1998, p. 25). Other students, mostly women in their mid- to late-20s, let me know how much they enjoyed learning a particular content area reading strategy that 1 had introduced by juxtaposing two critical reviews of the Ally McBeal show on Fox television. Another student in the class (a woman who had participated minimally in discussions previous to the Ally McBeal activity) e-mailed me that she was surprised but pleased to see I had taken the risks she associated with using popular culture in an academic setting. Out of 25 students (predominantly white women), only one had negative comments to report on the course evaluation form regarding my use of the Ally McBeal texts.

As word spread of my interest in writing a book on critical media literacy using popular culture texts, information started arriving in the mail, over e-mail, and by word of mouth. For example, I received a package from Carmen Luke in Australia that contained a number of articles on contemporary media literacy, including a critique of several advertisements for cyberculture software. Friends began e-mailing me Web site addresses to check out, and some even sent me copies of newsletters that listed these sites in hard-copy form. Colleagues dropped off issues of recent newspapers and magazines that featured the latest articles on new forms of music such as "popabilly hip-hop" and reviews of a controversial movie rumored not to be shown in any local theaters. Soon, I discovered that my fairly meager knowledge about popular culture was increasing exponentially. In true rhizome fashion (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), offshoots from one information source spread to other sources, sometimes fragmenting into unregulated networks that took off on their own.

Jennifer's Story

As children growing up in New York City, the first thing my brother, sister, and I would do daily after arriving home from school was to turn on the television. Both of our parents worked and would not be home for hours, and because we were told to stay inside and off the streets, our television stayed on until our parents came home. Those several hours after school became a time when my siblings and I were in our own world. Even before the term channel surfing became popular, we were already practitioners. We would flip through the channels to watch one show after another with no breaks in between. We went from Tom and Jerry to Fantastic Four to The Flintstones to The Jetsons and then to Gilligan 'v Island. On Saturday mornings, we got up along with thousands of other children our age and watched the X-Men and the endless stream of cartoons and, in the afternoons, martial arts movies (the type in which the actors' mouths and the dubbed English dialogue never matched).

For us and many other latchkey children who grew up in a city, television became a natural part of our lives that was separate from our school lives. For us, school and the things we did in the privacy of our home (watching television, playing video games, and reading magazines) were separate worlds that did not overlap, except when we had to make arrangements with our parents to do our homework first and then watch television. Even as an adult, and now a doctoral student, I find myself feeling out of sorts if 1 do not turn on the television immediately after arriving home at the end of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• NOTE FROM THE SERIES EDITORS
• Review Board
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 Teaching Critical Media Literacy Using Popular Culture Texts
• CHAPTER 2 Appraoches to Teaching Using Popular Culture and the Politics of Pleasure
• CHAPTER 3 Engaging Primary Grade Students in Critical Media Literacy: Jennifer's Lesson
• CHAPTER 4 Engaging Upper Elementary Students in Critical Media Literacy: Margaret's Lesson
• CHAPTER 5 Engaging Middle School Students in Critical Media Literacy: Donna's Lesson
• CHAPTER 6 Identities, Positioning, and Critical Media Literacy
• CHAPTER 7 Where We Are and Where We Need to Go in Theory and Research
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX