Monday, December 5, 2016

CRITICAL LITERA CY AND POPULAR CULTURE

By bringing pop culture into the classroom, as teachers, we are showing our students that we are willing to interact and incorporate their everyday culture into our class. This offers them a sense of comfort and hopefully influences them to participate. As Morrell states, “The role of literacy research, then, is to simultaneously design and investigate the outcomes associated with pedagogies of popular culture in the process of developing grounded theories of practice that can inform literacy pedagogy, literacy policy, and the preparation of future literacy teachers.” Once it is a part of the classroom it is the teacher’s duty to decide if it actually works and adjust their teaching pedagogies where they see fit. Teachers need to do their research about the pop culture they want to bring in and assess if it is really effective and most importantly appropriate.
The problem with pop culture is that it is a broad spectrum of culture that can be accessed. A lot of students don’t have the same interests as one another, and what one student finds interesting another student will not. The teachers responsible for finding a common ground our common culture of the individual classroom. They need to find the common values and interests of their students in order for this to actually work. This is important in order to get everyone engaged and willing to participate.

There is something about moving away from traditional teaching that fascinates me. As teachers, something is not working with our young students. More and more students are finding that they do not need an education or do not find the will to want to expand their knowledge. By assimilating pop culture in the class we can get students to want to be there. We can bring in things that they enjoy and use that along with traditional teachings in order to expand their knowledge in the classroom. Pop culture in the classroom can work, it’s all up to how the teacher offers it. 

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