Pop Culture Pedagogies

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Educational Studies

A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association

ISSN: 0013-1946 (Print) 1532-6993 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/heds20

Pop Culture Pedagogies: Process and Praxis

Julie Garlen Maudlin & Jennifer A. Sandlin

To cite this article: Julie Garlen Maudlin & Jennifer A. Sandlin (2015) Pop Culture Pedagogies:Process and Praxis, Educational Studies, 51:5, 368-384, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2015.1075992

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 51(5), 368–384, 2015Copyright C American Educational Studies AssociationISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00131946.2015.1075992

Pop Culture Pedagogies: Process and Praxis

Julie Garlen Maudlin

Georgia Southern University

Jennifer A. Sandlin

Arizona State University

As Miller (1999) explained, “it is increasingly important for educators to take seriously the processes

by which media texts are produced and disseminated, and to understand the ways in which media

images and constructions pervade all our lives” (p. 234). Taking popular culture seriously means

making a purposeful commitment to bring popular culture into the classroom. Rather than scripted

instructional strategies based on generalized research, context-driven critical approaches are needed

to empower particular learners to engage with popular culture in in meaningful ways. However, an

understanding of popular culture and its pedagogical functions is necessary to provide a foundation

for developing these approaches to bringing popular culture texts into classrooms. Toward that end,

in this article, we explore the depth and breadth of contemporary popular culture, describe some of

the ways that popular culture functions pedagogically, and outline a framework for self-study that,when practiced by educators, can serve as a locus for instructional decision-making and a catalyst for

enacting critical teaching and learning approaches we call “pop culture pedagogies.”

As Hall (1992) asserted, studying popular culture can help build understandings about “the

constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects

of language, about textuality as a site of life and death” (p. 285). In other words, popular

culture itself has material consequences, as it helps constitute society and social life; through

our engagements with popular culture, we learn what the world is, how to see the world, and

how to experience and act within the world. We need only take a cursory glance at a few

current issues—how news media has presented recent racist violence in Ferguson, Missouri; how

true crime podcasts and documentaries such as Serial and The Jinx have influenced the legal

system, leading to cases being reopened or suspects being convicted; how Starbucks’ latest “Race

Together” campaign brands, commodifies, individualizes, and color-blinds discussions of race

and racism; how Disney is (re)imagining gender and girl power through movies like Frozen (Del

Vecho, Buck, & Lee, 2013) and the new live action remake of Cinderella (Disney, Geronimi, &

Luske, 1950); how the 2015 Oscars largely ignored actors and directors of color, including those

affiliated with the film Selma (Colson, Winfrey, Gardner, Kleiner, & DuVernay, 2014); and how

sexuality and domestic violence are constructed in the movie Fifty Shades of Grey (De Luca,

Correspondence should be addressed to Julie Garlen Maudlin, Georgia Southern University, Teaching and Learning,

P.O. Box 8134, Statesboro, GA 30460. E-mail: [email protected]


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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 369

Brunetti, James, & Taylor-Johnson, 2015)—to grasp how popular culture has everything to do

with difficult knowledge that operates along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other

circulations of power. The study of popular culture helps us understand and perhaps intervenein how we, through our interactions with popular culture, produces, reproduces, and reimagines

social life and everyday social practices and relations.

Steinberg (2009) argues that with regard to popular culture, it is the responsibility of educators

to “prepare our student/citizens to learn how to use it, consume it, and to have personal power

over it. Empowerment comes when we are able to read media and make informed decisions

about what we have read” (p. xiv). Duncan-Andrade (2004) cautions, however, that educators

“run the risk of replicating the shortcomings of hierarchical pedagogy if they presume that there

are a fixed set of skills that will empower students to engage in critical action” (p. 315). Rather

than scripted strategies based on generalized research, context-driven approaches are needed to

empower particular learners to engage critically in ways that are meaningful for their specific

contexts. However, an understanding of popular culture and its pedagogical functions is necessaryto provide a foundation for developing these approaches to bringing popular culture texts into

classrooms. As Miller (1999) explained, “It is increasingly important for educators to take

seriously the processes by which media texts are produced and disseminated, and to understand

the ways in which media images and constructions pervade all our lives” (p. 234). Toward that

end, in this article, we explore the depth and breadth of contemporary popular culture, describe

some of the ways that popular culture functions pedagogically, and outline a framework for self-

study that, when practiced by educators, can serve as a locus for instructional decision-making

and a catalyst for enacting what we call pop culture pedagogies.

LOCATING POPULAR CULTURE

It is difficult to concisely define popular culture, because it encompasses so many different kinds

of goods, products, and experiences, particularly in the age of digital media, where the range of

cultural artifacts has expanded to include an endless list of processes and things, including text

messages, social media networks, and mobile apps. At its most basic level, however, popular

culture can be understood as the broad range of texts that constitute the cultural landscape of a

particular time and/or place, as well as the ways in which consumers engage with those texts

and thus become producers of new negotiated meanings. We view a text as any artifact or

experience that we can read to produce meaning. As Nealon and Searls Giroux (2012) explain,

“Reading or interpretation is not primarily a matter of forming or reinforcing personal opinionsbut rather a process of negotiation among contexts” (p. 23). Thus, the meanings that are made

of texts are contingent upon the contexts in which they are produced and read. These texts have

multiple purposes and existences, produced anew by every individual that reads them. These texts

communicate information with which we interact (both actively and passively) through viewing,

listening, reading, feeling, consuming, and producing, and include, among other artifacts, books,

periodicals, films, television shows, music, web sites, podcasts, advertisements, and consumer

products and experiences. Of particular interest are those popular culture texts in which we invest,

which occurs in at least two ways: purposefully and peripherally. We purposely (actively) invest

in particular cultural products or experiences by devoting our time, money, and attention. With

peripheral (passive) investment, we have prolonged exposure to a particular cultural product


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370 MAUDLIN AND SANDLIN

without having purposely engaged with it, such as the way we are exposed to television shows

watched by family members, friends, or students, or the ways in which social media forces us to

interact with popular culture in which we may have no interest, or even actively loathe (like thesong “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen).

According to Storey (2006), popular culture, in the Western context, has been conceptualized

in different ways over time since culture first became an object of critique and analysis, starting

with Matthew Arnold’s (1869) Culture and Anarchy. To more fully understand the range of

perspectives on popular culture, Storey (2006) offers six views or definitions used by scholars

within cultural studies to think about what popular culture is and what it does. First, popular

culture can be thought of as culture that is “popular”—culture that is liked by many people.

This conceptualization, however, is difficult to measure and quantify and thus becomes “virtually

useless” for analytical purposes (Storey, 2006, p. 4). Popular culture has also been conceptualized

as “inferior culture,” or what remains when we have separated out “high culture” (Storey, 2006,

p. 5). This view is grounded in the culture and civilization tradition popularized by MatthewArnold and F. R. Leavis (Storey, 1998), and which was the predominant perspective in studies

of culture from the 1860s until the 1950s. A third and related view is that popular culture is

“hopelessly commercial,” produced for the masses and consumed by passive, “brain-numbed,” and

ideologically manipulated consumers (Storey, 2006, p. 6). There are both politically conservative

and liberal versions of this argument; what is seen to be under attack is either “the traditional

values of high culture, or the traditional ways of life of a ‘tempted’ working class” (p. 7). Storey

(2006) places within this tradition both the work of Frankfurt School critical theorists such as

Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer, who viewed popular culture as a way for hegemonic power

to maintain social authority through the manipulations of the culture industry; and structuralists

and poststructuralists such as de Saussure and Barthes, who viewed culture as an “ideologicalmachine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the dominant ideology” (Storey, 2006, p. 7).

Within these “mass culture” perspectives, consumers of culture are seen as passive absorbers of

hegemonic messages who have little power to resist dominant meanings or produce their own

negotiations or readings (Wright & Sandlin, 2009.

A fourth way of seeing popular culture views it as originating “with the people,” rather than

being imposed from the upper classes or from the culture industries (Storey, 2006, p. 7). This

perspective emerges from what Storey (2006) terms the “culturalism” (p. 37) tradition, which arose

in reaction to the early, elitist, culture and civilization tradition that valued upper-class culture as

superior. This perspective focused on the active production, rather than passive consumption, of

culture. Within this tradition, popular culture is viewed not only as texts such as movies, popular

music, etc., but also as the everyday practices or lived experiences of individuals—it sees popularculture as a way of life. Biesta (2012) has recently retheorized this perspective, via Hannah Arendt,

in his work on the public sphere and public pedagogy “as the enactment of a concern for the

public quality of human togetherness” (p. 683), a vision of public pedagogy that retains focus on

both politics and education. This work explores how public artistic interventions can reignite the

public sphere through civic action when such interventions constitute “forms of interruption that

keep the opportunities for ‘becoming public’ open” (p. 685), and thus create public spaces where,

in the words of Arendt, “freedom can appear” (quoted in Biesta, 2012, p. 686). These artistic

interventions are pedagogical interruptions that are not led, and thus controlled, by pedagogues,

but emerge as an enactment of human togetherness.


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A fifth way of viewing popular culture builds upon this culturalist view and is grounded in a

Gramscian framework, drawing upon such theorists as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. In

this perspective, popular culture does not consist simply of cultural commodities such as film,television shows, and magazines (Storey, 1998, 2006). Rather, these commodities are seen as the

raw materials, provided by the culture industries that people then use to create popular culture.

Thus, popular culture occurs only in the interaction between individuals and the products from the

culture industries that they engage with. This perspective on popular culture thus conceptualizes

it as an active, rather than a passive, process and focuses, furthermore, on the intersections

between culture and power (Bennett, 1998), highlighting how popular culture is a site of conflict

where individuals resist, negotiate, and accommodate power relations around issues of race, class,

gender, and sexuality, among others.

Our understanding of popular culture is that it is created through the interactions between the

commodities produced by the culture industries and the individuals who make meaning of them.

We also recognize the ways that we derive pleasure from playful engagements with popular culturethat allow us to create and recreate our individual subjectivities. Finally, we position popular

culture as a site of struggle through which power operates to construct and circulate meaning.

As Guy (2007) describes, popular culture can be thought of as “a complex interplay of cultural

products and meanings placed in circulation by differently positioned persons” (p. 16). These

products, deeply embedded in the lives of learners of all ages, are simultaneously “received and

acted upon” (Dolby, 2003, p. 260). Popular culture texts, therefore, serve performative functions.

In other words, popular culture texts have the capacity not only to communicate information, but

also to construct and perform identities. More specifically, popular culture teaches us about race,

class, gender, and sexuality, reifying these differences as social relationships that are repeated

and thus constructed into social norms.Within the massive economy of goods, services, and experiences that constitute the fabric of

our everyday lives, our understandings of ourselves and others are largely driven by the emotional

attachments we make to popular culture texts. Within this web of cultural commodities, which

Ahmed (2004) describes as an “affective economy,” emotions are mechanisms that mediate

relationships between consumers and corporations, between individuals, and between bodies

and spaces. Ahmed (2004) posits that, “In such affective economies, emotions do things, and

they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very

intensity of their attachments” (p. 119). Those emotional attachments, as they are circulated and

repeated, normalize and solidify the social forms (family, femininity, patriotism, schooling) that

emerge from our interactions with popular culture (Ahmed, 2004). These social forms, through

our emotional attachments to them, are effects of repetitions; they are continuously recreated associal norms are repeated, circulated, commodified, and consumed. As this process of repetition

occurs, social norms become ordinary and taken for granted and their very social constructedness

is disguised. As Justin Lewis, Professor of Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies at Cardiff

University explains when interviewed about the ways in which Disney films impact audiences,

popular culture does not immediately impact our thinking—we do not simply watch one Disney

princess film and suddenly believe in normative ideologies of gender and sexuality (Sun & Picker,

2001). Rather, the impact is more subtle and occurs as an effect of repetition. In the documentary

Mickey Mouse Monopoly, he explains that popular culture does not have “an immediate wiz-bang

effect,” rather, it is “a slow and accumulative effect, and much more subtle.” Therefore, adopting


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a critical pedagogical approach to popular culture involves interrogating these taken-for-granted

social forms and our emotional attachments to them, to discover and disrupt the subtle effects of

repetition.

THE PEDAGOGICAL MECHANISMS OF POPULAR CULTURE

The performative nature of popular culture is what makes it pedagogical; the repetitive processes

through which cultural artifacts construct and perform social relationships teach us particular

ways of knowing, doing, and being. However, just as there are many ways to describe what

popular culture is, there are multiple ways of understanding how popular culture functions

pedagogically—how it operates inside and outside the classroom as a method of teaching us into

particular understandings. Drawing upon a recent literature review on public pedagogy (Burdick

& Sandlin, 2013), we explore how popular culture pedagogies are conceptualized and enacted.Three mechanisms of popular culture pedagogy emerged from the literature, organized according

to how the subject of pedagogy is considered, developed, and acted upon by educative processes.

The first strand, which we posit is exemplified by critical pedagogy, uses a metaphor of transfer

to understand how popular culture produces, constricts, and/or emancipates both individual and

cultural processes of identification. The second strand, which draws from feminist and arts-based

theoretical traditions, employs a metaphor of relation to understand how pedagogy operates. The

final strand of literature exploring the pedagogical mechanisms of popular culture embraces a

metaphor of encounters with the monstrous, and suggests that crucial pedagogical moments occur

when one is confronted with the radical other. Following Burdick and Sandlin (2013), we do not

construct a hierarchy in presenting these approaches, nor consider any one of them superior tothe others. As Burdick and Sandlin (2013) argue, there are no “best practices” (p. 171) in popular

culture pedagogies, but we can view them heuristically as guides to think about the varied and

possible ways popular culture acts pedagogically.

Popular Culture Teaches Through Transfer

The notion of popular culture as ideological transmission emerges from Marxian critical theory

and cultural studies and has historically been the most predominant view, which has been taken up

as critical pedagogy within the field of education. Specifically, this view has its roots in Adorno and

Horkheimer’s (1944/2000) “culture industry” (p. 3), which imagines popular culture as a sort of factory producing commodities that are used to lull the populace into passivity. Critical pedagogy

adopts a philosophy that guiding learners in the deconstruction of the ideologies produced by

popular culture liberates them from oppressive social relations. By advancing an understanding

of the production and consumption of dominant ideologies through popular culture, the critical

pedagogue enables the learner to discover and, potentially, disrupt “the transmission of norms”

(Hickey-Moody, Savage, & Windle, 2010, p. 299). This liberatory ideal depends on humanist

assumptions about individual improvement, namely that the learner is a rational being who can

be enlightened through education.

This transmissive view of popular culture is exemplified in much of the work of Henry Giroux

(2001), who explored processes through which “power is mobilized” in filmic images, sounds,


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gestures, dialogue, and spectacle to “structure everyday issues around particular assumptions,

values, and social relations (pp. 591–592). Giroux (2002) also asserted that films and, by extension,

other forms of popular culture, operate pedagogically through the kinds of “common senseassumptions” they embody, the “affective investments they mobilize,” and the “absences and

exclusions that limit the range of meanings and information available to audiences” (p. 539).

These available meanings are pedagogical in the ways they represent otherness, mobilize power,

and construct categories “through which individuals fashion their identities and organize their

ideologies and politics” (p. 552).

Giroux (2003) also articulates the role of the critical pedagogue as a transmitter of critical

cultural values, espousing a pedagogical process that works to “deconstruct” and “rework theoret-

ically” sites of popular culture “within a wider set of associations and meanings that can be both

challenged and rearticulated in order to strengthen rather than weaken a public politics, while

furthering the promise of democratic transformation” (p. 61). Learners are taught to critically

analyze the ways that popular culture functions as “a social practice that influences their everydaylives and positions them within existing social, cultural, and institutional machineries of power”

(Giroux, 2001, p. 588). This mechanistic perspective, reminiscent of the “culture industry” model,

is exemplified in Giroux’s (2003) analysis of the movie Fight Club, in which he invites readers to

see films as “teaching machine[s] . . . articulating knowledge to effects, purposely attempting to

influence how and what knowledge can be produced within a limited range of social relations” (p.

60). Giroux’s personification of the film as teacher constructs the film as an ideological machine

with a powerful pedagogical force that overshadows the agentic possibilities of the film itself

or its viewers. The consciousness raising that is at the heart of the work of Giroux and other

critical pedagogues (including ourselves, see Maudlin, Sandlin, & Thaller, 2012; and Sandlin

& Maudlin, 2012) depends on the acquisition of particular knowledges and dispositions neededto engage in critical readings of popular culture that deconstruct hegemonic meanings through

dialogue, relying on traditional, linear views of learning, progress, and civilization.

Popular Culture Teaches Through Aesthetic and Embodied Relational Experience

A second way of understanding how popular culture acts pedagogically emerged to counter

the top-down transfer view of critical pedagogy. Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Ellsworth

(1988) critiqued the reliance on the tools of rationality, arguing that rational dialogue often

failed “to loosen deep-seated, self-interested investments” (p. 313) based on typically European,

White, male, middle-class, Christian, able-bodied thinking and heterosexual ideals. Instead of seeing popular culture as transmitting ideologies that critical pedagogues then had to interrupt,

Ellsworth and other scholars (Chappell, 2011; Lacy, 1995) who adopt this second understanding

of popular culture’s pedagogical mechanisms focus less on critical rationality, and more on

embodied, holistic, performative, intersubjective, and aesthetic aspects of pedagogy; they also

see learning from engagement in popular culture as more tentative and ambiguous.

Here, the metaphor of relation becomes important as a way of understanding how popular

culture teaches and how we learn from it. Although critical pedagogy relies heavily on critically

reading popular cultural forms such as movies, music, and television shows, scholars who see

popular culture operating more relationally—while certainly also exploring the same forms as

critical pedagogy—often take up as objects of analysis forms of popular culture that are grounded


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in the performing arts, museums, and public and historical monuments, and that have often been

created or curated by artists and other guides with high degrees of critical intentionality. Instead

of focusing on how popular culture transmits established meanings as a pedagogical mechanism,however, scholars who hold a more relational view of popular culture focus on those moments

in which popular culture and its participants intersect and interact, where meaning is generated

through those active and embodied interactions. In contrast to the more definitive readings of texts

conducted by some critical pedagogues, scholars who see popular culture as operating in more

relational ways eschew their authority when making statements about the meaning of popular

culture texts, recognizing that meaning is only ever determined in the process of negotiation. The

relationality of those moments when viewer and culture come together, and the openness and

tentativeness of meaning generated in those interactions are, in fact, key to how popular culture

can foster transformative learning, as those events create spaces that reshape “both the self and

the other, the self and its lived relations with others” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 48).

Popular Culture Teaches Through Posthuman Monstrous Encounters

A third way of understanding how popular culture operates as pedagogy embraces the metaphor of

encounters with the monstrous. Scholars who view popular culture operating in this way (Carey,

2011; Kahn, 2011a, 2011b; Lewis & Kahn, 2010; Wallin, 2008a, 2008b, 2012) are grounded in

posthuman perspectives, and posit that transformative pedagogical moments happen as people

come into contact with sites of popular culture that problematize taken-for-granted categories

and operations of identity, language, and image, including the fundamental idea of the rational

human self that circulates in Western thought and practice. Like the view of popular cultureas relational pedagogy offered earlier, this posthuman perspective also seeks to counter the

cognitivist and rationalist workings of both traditional educational theory, as well as some critical

pedagogies. Scholars who explore posthuman sites of popular culture see pedagogical potential

in how they confront viewers with examples of living and being that reject predefined ways

of thinking about and enacting boundaries—between “self and other, friend and enemy, nature

and culture” (Lewis & Kahn, 2010, p. x), “us versus them, inside versus outside, human versus

animal, inclusion versus exclusion, destruction versus production”—boundaries that create (too)

“easily recognizable narratives” (p. 139). These all too familiar boundaries hinder our abilities to

imagine new forms of freedom and “new forms of unrepresentable common life” that are key to

more democratic ways of living and being (Lewis & Kahn, 2010, p. x).

The sites of popular culture that these perspectives explore are those that disrupt and exposethe socially constructed nature of human ideological and material structures. Lewis and Kahn

(2010), for example, constructed what they call a “critical bestiary” (p. 12), which they state can

help readers imagine possibilities for new, heterogeneous forms of sociopolitical organization.

In doing so, they explored the pedagogies of human/animal boundary-crossing creatures such as

vampires, werewolves, Medusa, feral children, aliens, and faeries—and their manifestations and

representations in popular films, historical events, novels, myths, festivals, conspiracy theories,

and intentional communities. They also explored how films and television shows such as March

of the Penguins and Avatar teach audiences about human–animal relationships. Other scholars

examine the pedagogical possibilities of monsters, such as zombies, through exploring a wide

variety of zombie films and television shows, including AMC’s The Walking Dead , Zombieland ,


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Dawn of the Dead ,and Resident Evil. Wallin (2012), for example, explores the productive potential

of zombies to provide previously unthought ways for us to think about difference, desire, and

consumerism. As Wallin observes, for example, the “(un)dead don’t shop” and symbolize a“people yet to come” (p. 265).

Both the sites of popular culture themselves and the exploration of these sites by critical

scholars enact posthuman pedagogies. The very exploration of the monstrous that these schol-

ars undertake is a pedagogical process designed to expand the reader’s critical imagination

and to foster uncanny encounters with radical otherness. These authors simultaneously articu-

late how certain monstrous elements of popular culture also operate as pedagogies to dissolve

taken-for-granted boundaries. As authors explore these posthuman sites of popular culture, they

conceptualize their pedagogies as operating to create spaces that suspend laws of “recognition,

identification, and belonging (to a particular class, race, gender, species)” (Lewis & Kahn, p. 10),

and that reject the binaries of human/nonhuman, self/other, and Left/Right for deeply ecological

perspectives on justice, ideology, and resistance, thus opening possibilities for new forms of democratic life and new ways of taking up radically ethical stances toward the Other. Rather

than drawing upon humanist ontologies that are grounded in divided subjectivities, posthuman-

ist pedagogies seek to interrupt these binaries, evoking the monstrous qualities of uncertainty

and confusion.

POPULAR CULTURE AS CLASSROOM PRAXIS

These basic understandings of the pedagogical functions of popular culture provides insight into

the multiplicitous and shifting ways that our purposeful and peripheral investments in various

cultural commodities teach us into certain ways of knowing, being, and doing. Understanding

how we learn from popular culture provides us with a foundation for designing instructional

practices that allow learners of all ages to acknowledge, engage in, and critique those pedagogical

mechanisms. Rather than offering specific teaching strategies, which we believe should vary

according to the needs, interests, and cultural investments of particular students in specific

contexts, we present here a model for self-study that, when practiced by educators, can serve as a

locus for instructional decision-making and a catalyst for enacting critical teaching and learning

approaches that we call pop culture pedagogies. This model is not a theoretical framework

designed to define new ways that popular culture operates pedagogically. Rather, it is a set of

ongoing interrelated processes that builds upon the pedagogical functions of popular culture

described previously to inform classroom practices by offering a framework for negotiatingmeaning across personal and pedagogical contexts. These processes are aligned with the areas of

popular culture research and practice in adult education identified by Wright and Sandlin (2009),

which we adapt here to apply to all levels of learning. Their research revealed six areas of research

and practice, which we broaden to describe three nonlinear, ongoing processes of self-study: (a)

exploring the cumulative cultural texts of teaching and learning, (b) interrogating normalized

beliefs about self and society, and (c) engaging students in (not just with) popular culture to

examine the performative power dynamics that regulate textual production, consumption, and

interpretation. This nonlinear, self-reflexive model for self-study draws from the theoretical

landscapes of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, which take seriously the critical analysis of

popular culture.


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Exploring the Cumulative Cultural Texts of Teaching and Learning

One component of the framework for self-study involves educators engaging in the self-reflexivepractice of examining and disrupting the normative narratives of teaching and learning that they

have constructed through their investments with popular culture texts. We do this by asking

ourselves how we have come to understand what it means to teach and learn. As children, for

example, we often learn a great deal about what to expect at school through early interactions with

television shows, games, and books. As Weber and Mitchell (1995) explain, “Even before children

begin school, they have already been exposed to a myriad of images of teachers, classrooms and

schools which have made strong and lasting impressions on them” (p. 2). Children’s literature is

one highly accessible form of popular culture that provides young learners insight into schools,

students, and teachers. In their study of the ways that teachers are represented in children’s

literature, Dockett, Perry, and Whitton (2010) analyzed 164 popular English-language picture

storybooks from Australia, New Zealand, the United States of America, Canada, the UnitedKingdom, and Singapore. They found that the teachers featured in those books, which included

both classics and contemporary titles, lacked diversity in terms of gender, as well as cultural

and linguistic background. In most of the books, teachers were also depicted as “keepers of

knowledge” who failed to engage students in critical thinking, challenge rules, or resolve conflicts

(Dockett et al., 2010, p. 38).

These representations of teachers, when repeated across texts and coupled with other experi-

ences in and outside of school, contribute to the construction of what Weber and Mitchell (1999)

refer to as “cumulative cultural texts” where representations are combined into collective images

that “blend seamlessly and often undetected into our familiar, unquestioned everyday knowl-

edge” (p. 168). Picture storybooks and other cultural commodities depicting teachers “connectgenerations of teachers (former children) and children (as students and future teachers), mark-

ing experience with codes and signposts that are shared, passed down, and assimilated” and,

ultimately taken for granted (Weber & Mitchell, 1999, p. 168). Through the subtle process of

repetition, our expectations for and feelings about teaching and learning circulate among people,

working to distinguish good teachers and students from bad ones, to affix particular kinds of people

(typically middle-class, White women) and practices (rule-following, transmitting knowledge) to

“goodness.”

Although Whiteness is typically associated with goodness across all genres, other standards for

goodness are differently constructed in texts produced for other kinds of audiences. For example,

The Disney Channel, a popular source of entertainment for older children and pre-teens, features

a variety of shows that take place in or around middle or high school environments and featureteachers as major or minor characters. Interestingly, the good teachers (who also frequently serve

in some kind of administrative capacity) appearing in these shows are overwhelmingly White and

male (Cory Matthews in Girl Meets World , Herschel Laritate in Wizards of Waverly Place, Henry

Gibson, Zolton Grundy, and Mr. Zimbaldi in A.N.T. Farm) who are generally portrayed as quirky,

caring, and kind. By contrast, the bad teachers are typically White women in nonrecurring guest

roles (Amanda Folkemburg in Jessie, Solange Dupont in Dog with a Blog, Susan Skidmore in

A.N.T. Farm).

Similarly gendered depictions can be found in many of the feature-length films often cited for

their representations of teachers, including Blackboard Jungle (Brooks, 1955), To Sir, with Love

(Clavell, 1967), Stand and Deliver (Menéndez, 1988), Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989), Lean


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on Me (Avildsen, 1989), Mr. Holland’s Opus (Herrick, 1995), and School of Rock (Linklater,

2003), all of which feature male high school teachers as central characters and tend to reinforce

the cinematic trope of the White savior. Although there are some popular depictions of femaleteachers, such as Dangerous Minds (Smith, 1995) and Freedom Writers (LaGravenese, 2007),

these characters are similarly troublesome in that they perpetuate the same white missionary

representation. As Dalton (2004) describes in The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies,

good teachers have traditionally been constructed in popular films as outsiders who are highly

involved with students, willing to learn from them and adapt the curriculum to their particular

needs, and often at odds with administrators or other authority figures. The bad teacher may not

be particularly well-liked, but is presented as being so embedded in existing structures of power

that s/he must be tolerated (Dalton, 2013). Bad teachers “find students boring, are afraid of them,

or are eager to dominate them” and “follow the standardized curriculum, which they adhere to

in order to avoid personal contact with students, or they ignore curriculum altogether except for

personal gain” (Dalton, 2013, p. 80).These conflicting representations of good and bad teachers, in films, television shows, books,

and other sources, illustrate taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching and reflect the tradi-

tional views of gender that continue to dominate the teaching profession and frame the expec-

tations of viewers/readers who see these patterns repeated across various media. Dalton (2013)

asserts that these depictions ultimately influence teachers, students, parents, and policymakers

by inviting “viewers to dichotomize real teachers into camps of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in ways that

are not only reductive but that also foster a lack of trust in teachers, their training, and their

professionalism” (p. 86).

Interrogating Normalized Beliefs About Self and Society

In the next component of the framework, educators continue the self-reflexive process by ex-

amining how their beliefs about self and society have been influenced by their investments by

popular culture. This process involves analyzing their beliefs about normalcy to consider how

cultural texts construct particular narratives about race, class, gender, and sexuality that become

common sense through repetition. For example, educators might consider the role that marketing

plays in shaping race and gender norms, such us the way toy companies take for granted certain

assumptions about gender and race in how they market toys specifically to boys (action figures

or train sets) or girls (dolls and kitchen sets) or produce playsets (like Playmobil and Lego) that

feature mostly White figurines and often portray people of color as primitive or dangerous. AsGiroux (1999) explains, “Media culture has become a substantial, if not the primary educational

force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms, that offer up and legitimate

particular subject positions—what it means to claim an identity as male, female, White, Black,

citizen, noncitizen” (pp. 2–3).

As one of the primary generators of cultural commodities through which these meanings and

values are constructed and regulated, both in the United States and across the globe, The Walt

Disney Company, in particular, demands the attention of educators seeking to understand how

popular culture regulates normative meanings and values. The goods, services, and experiences

produced by Disney offer an important site for analyzing how our beliefs about ourselves and

society—including our ideas about what it means to be particular kinds of raced, classed, and


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gendered citizens—are shaped by our investments in popular culture because of its ubiquity. One

way in which Disney contributes to normalized beliefs about race and ethnicity, for example, is

through familiar theme attractions like “It’s a Small World,” which was originally built in 1964 byDisney for Coca-Cola, inscribing the iconic attraction in multinational global capitalism from the

very start (Nooshin, 2004). The ride, which “celebrates a universe of round-headed, button-eyed,

cherry-cheeked children, identical except for skin shade and ethnic accessories” (Howes, 1987, p.

68) exemplifies the patronizing depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies

characteristic of orientalism (Said, 1978). As Nooshin (2004) notes, “The visitor becomes akin

to a colonizer on a voyage of discovery, mobile and empowered in contrast to the static dolls”

(p. 245). The dolls, the “natives” safely displayed for the White traveler, are “simultaneously

exoticized and infantilized” (Warren 1999, p. 112). “It’s a Small World” functions pedagogically

to center the White subject so that other cultures can only be understood in relation to the

White norm. Here, the centralized White subject, like the whitestream curriculum described by

Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013), “begins to absorb and contain, consuming and erasingthe other, by always-already positioning the accumulated knowledge as other to, less refined,

more subjective and less reliable than the whitestream” (p. 82). Willinsky (1998) calls this

“imperialism’s educational project” (p. 56), teaching the Western subject how to “see” or “gaze

upon” the “other” (Pratt, 1992; Urry & Larsen, 2011).

Similarly, the “exhibitionary pedagogy” (p. 85) of EPCOT’s World Showcase constitutes “an

imperialism of a different order” (p. 11), where visitors can enjoy an adventure through “sights

and sounds of architectural reproductions, culture-bound food and artifacts, and live cultural

performances” (Houston & Meamber, 2011, p. 180). By diminishing the conflicts and tensions

of poverty and imperialism through fabricated cultural experiences, the World Showcase allows

visitors to apprehend the Other pleasurably, without the complications associated with actualtravel. Houston and Meamber (2011) explain that the site “immerses guests into a static, histor-

ical, ancient, and exotic world of stereotypes grounded in carefully screened native employees,

scaled-down architectural replicas, and culture-bound retail merchandise and dining experiences

complemented by live cultural performances” (pp. 179–180).

As educators, while we may not consciously ascribe to an attitude of orientalism in teach-

ing, imperialism undergirds the foundations of public schooling, including its aims of assimi-

lation and citizenship and its Eurocentric institutional and curriculum design. Even organized

efforts to embrace diversity, through multiculturalism and inclusion, achieved through strate-

gies such as content integration, special cultural events, and sensitivity training, constitutes a

superficial approach that is largely based on stereotypes of Others as defined in relation to a

White norm. As Schick and St. Denis (2005) observe, “An emphasis on multicultural displayobscures the fact that differential access to power is produced through racial formations and

not through lack of familiarity with the cultural practices of other people” (p. 307). These

multicultural approaches to education reflect the “failure of White people and institutions to

grapple substantively with our own racism at personal as well as systemic levels” (Sleeter &

McLaren, 1995, p. 13) and legitimize “ignorance of racializing systems including the produc-

tion of white identities and the taken-for-grantedness of racial dominance” (Schick & St. Denis,

2005, p. 307). Analyzing the ways that racism is perpetuated through popular culture products

and processes that construct notions of racial difference in relation to Whiteness is a necessary

component of beginning to grapple with our own complicity in personal as well as systemic

racism.


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Engaging Students In (Not Just With) Popular Culture

The final component of the self-study framework involves considering the classroom practicesthat can be used to actively engage students in analyzing popular culture as a site of resistance

by examining the ways that texts are produced, consumed, and interpreted. As Duncan-Andrade

(2004) note, “With the growing pervasiveness and persuasiveness of twenty-first-century youth

culture . . . traditional school curriculum, coupled with traditional pedagogies, stand little chance

of capturing the hearts and minds of young people” (p. 317). We know that the use of popular

culture in educational settings can offer recognition of student individual identities and the things

they value, thus motivating them to be more engaged in learning (Dyson, 1997, 2003; Marsh,

2000; Marsh & Millard, 2000). According to Johnson (2012), teachers typically integrate popular

culture by incorporating popular texts to make connections with students, using movies and

popular music to teach canonical literature, or applying critical Marxist approaches to analyzing

texts or consumption behaviors. These approaches emphasize the need for educators to maintainan awareness of the popular culture influences that interest learners to provide instruction that

will be relevant to their students. Johnson (2012) note, however, that “these routine practices with

pop culture texts rarely include examination of the power dynamics that circulate micro-level

struggles for popular culture text meaning in school between students themselves or students and

teachers” (p. 160).

Such a critical pedagogical approach involves not simply engaging students with popular

culture by using it as a learning tool, but rather engaging them in critical analyses of cultural

commodities that explore both the hegemonic aspects of popular culture, as well as the potential

of popular culture for effecting social change. Engaging students in popular culture analysis

involves helping learners deconstruct messages about race, class, gender, sexuality, and otherprevalent positionalities, and encouraging educators and students to become critical consumers

of mass media. Tisdell, Stuckey, and Thompson (2007) conducted research that illustrates the

limitations of pedagogical approaches that only engage students with popular culture and fail to

move them beyond the pleasure of entertainment into critical analysis. They found that although

students’ pleasurable investments in popular culture could help facilitate media literacy, it also

could hinder their ability to critically engage with media. Their research suggests that one way

to help learners internalize and practice new critical media literacy knowledge is to have them

engage with a “practical project” (Tisdell et al., 2007, p. 611) during which they teach others how

to analyze gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in films and television programs.

Another example of engaging learners in critically examining popular culture involves students

not only critiquing that culture but imagining, creating, and producing their own cultural productsand experiences—that is, engaging in their own cultural production. According to Gaztambide-

Fernández and Matute (2015), cultural production is “any form of creative and symbolic exchange

that arranges and/or rearranges available materials through cultural practices in order to express,

create, and recreate ideas, feelings, and various aspects of cultural life” (p. 3). The culture in-

dustries have long been invested in cultural production, creating popular culture that is received

in multiple ways by viewers—in Stuart Hall’s (1993) model, for example, receivers accept the

dominant hegemonic position, negotiate that position, or respond in oppositional ways. Encour-

aging learners to engage in cultural production adds an additional way of critically evaluating

popular culture, emphasizing the fact that popular culture texts do not “exist for themselves in

a vacuum, but rather, we encounter and engage with them in socially and historically situated


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ways that require active rather than passive engagement” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2007, p. 35).

As Hoeschsmann (2008) further explains, “Youth today have at least the potential to express

themselves, to try to give voice to their inner thoughts, and to communicate and mobilize withothers” (p. 69). Through cultural production, learners become active creators, rather than passive

receivers of culture, by “engaging in creative work that reflects the particularities of material and

symbolic relations that shape people’s lives” (Gaztambide-Fernández & Matute, 2015, p. 3). As

Hoechsmann (2008) argues, youth practicing cultural production “are at the vanguard of a new

era of impertinence, of talking back, speaking out of turn, of reclaiming the right to narrate the

future” (p. 69).

Chou (2007) provides an example of one way learners can engage in cultural production

by analyzing the social codes embedded in fairy tales and radically rewriting familiar fairy

tales to reflect on how popular culture has influenced their ideas about race, gender, and other

social norms. Chou (2007) led her students in critically analyzing the “cultural assumptions

and unexamined messages in texts” (p. 58). Students compared various tellings of fairy tales(for example, Disney and Grimm versions of the same tale, as well as feminist re-tellings) to

see “culturally dominant scripts from new perspectives” (p. 58). Students also engaged in their

own cultural production as they participated in the critical “rewriting of familiar, but destructive,

cultural scripts” (p. 59), a process she calls “contaminating” the tales. Although critical, productive

analyses of race, class, and gender are often absent from most classrooms where popular culture

texts are used as learning tools, such approaches are essential in negotiating power dynamics and

engaging in cultural production. These negotiations require learners and educators to analyze

the production, consumption, and interpretation of normative discourses to counter them. As

Johnson (2012) explains, “Leaving micro-level negotiations of race, class, and gender, (i.e.,

performative politics) out of classrooms, pop culture text work ignores radical possibilitiesthese negotiations have to counter and confound reductive subjectivities in and beyond school”

(p. 161).

TOWARD POP CULTURE PEDAGOGIES

As processes of modernization and globalization give way to evolving technologies and commodi-

ties from which emerge new ways of producing, consuming, and experiencing popular culture,

the ways in which we define popular culture and its pedagogical mechanisms and implications

are constantly shifting. Therefore, the enactment of pop culture pedagogies is not a static pro-

cess by which educators attain a finite skill set that renders them henceforth experts in criticallyengaging students in popular culture. Rather, the commitment to such critical forms of teaching

with popular culture must be ongoing to meet the demands of both the rapidly shifting cultural

landscape and the ever-evolving needs, interests, and desires of individual learners. It is neither

a perfect science nor a simple undertaking, as we ourselves have discovered in our own attempts

to understand, write about, and teach with popular culture. Such a commitment requires work

that is never finished, and that work is not only pedagogical, but also intensely personal because

it requires us, educators and scholars who are ourselves purposely and peripherally invested

in countless cultural commodities, to constantly interrogate our own reactions to and interac-

tions with popular culture products to expose and renegotiate the ways we make sense of our

worlds.


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In spite of the inherent difficulties of enacting pop culture pedagogies as classroom praxis,

particularly in educational environments that are increasingly constrained by measures of

accountability and standardization, we see this work as an ethical imperative and an essen-tial component of an approach to culturally responsive teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994) that

seeks not simply to use “cultural referents” to “impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (pp.

17–18) but to engage students in cultural production by examining, deconstructing, critiquing,

and reimagining “the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain

social inequities” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 162). As Duncombe (2002) asserts, “Culture can

be, and is, used as a means of resistance, a place to formulate other solutions. In order to strive

for change, you have first to imagine it, and culture is the repository of imagination” (p. 35).

However, in striving to enact critical pedagogies in classrooms, Williams (2008) notes that we

should be careful to “value people’s abilities to understand their own experiences and work with

them to connect those experiences to the questions they raise, rather than shape them to any single

agenda” (p. 83). If we adhere only to a transmission model of critical pedagogy, without alsoconsidering relational and radical possibilities for learning as well as the emotional attachments

that make popular culture a site of pleasure, we run the risk of alienating learners by constructing

them as “unfortunate dupes, powerless puppets of dominant ideologies. Even worse, the students

are made to feel silly for having enjoyed popular culture in the first place” (Williams, 2008, p. 83).

Therefore, as we engage learners in disrupting normative narratives by examining individual and

collective experiences, we should seek not to rewrite those narratives in relation to our own expe-

riences and beliefs but to create spaces within which learners can choose how to respond to those

narratives, which might mean that they choose not to rewrite them for themselves. As Williams

(2008) explains, to allow learners to make their own critical choices, whether they choose “to

conform to or resist cultural expectations,” we should desire that they “be able to understandthose expectations more clearly, rather than bump into them by accident” (p. 83). As we have

illustrated here, this is difficult work that requires ongoing and perhaps uneasy scrutiny of our own

normative beliefs as educators, citizens, and consumers. Yet, knowing that popular culture itself

has material—sometimes empowering, sometimes dire, but always powerful—consequences for

the ways we understand, experience, and act within the world, it seems that, as educators, enacting

pop culture pedagogies is the least we can do.

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Documents

Pop Culture Pedagogies