It’s all well and good to say that we as educators should incorporate popular culture into our classrooms, but what is the actual reality of doing this? And do students engage more deeply in their English classroom learning as a result?
This blog takes as its starting point the concepts of remixing – the practice of ‘taking cultural artefacts and combining them in new and creative ways,’ (Curwood, 2013, p. 84 in Bowmer & Curwood, 2016, p. 143) and the ‘literacy of fusion’, which Millard (2003) refers to as the process of ‘[fusing]’ aspects of school requirements and children’s interests,’ (in Bowmer & Curwood, 2016, p. 143). Given the inherent risks associated with any incorporation of popular culture texts into the classroom – what Grace and Tobin suggest is the risk of such texts ‘being purified, homogenized, and reconstituted as curriculum or motivational strategies,’ (1998, p. 46 in Alvermann et al, 1999, p. 31) – dipping your pedagogical toe into the waters of adolescent tastes is potentially fraught with danger. Not real danger, obviously, but the danger is that in trying to widen the repertoire of texts used in the classroom, we as educators have to tread carefully in that we don’t undermine or trivialise students’ tastes or pleasures in such texts, but at the same time still ensure there is opportunity for critical and creative engagement.
Enter my Year 10 English unit on canonical poetry and contemporary music. The unit’s purpose is to examine a selection of canonical poetry – that is, the works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Barrett Browning, Rossetti, Bronte, Frost, Blake – and then allow students to explore whether or not such poetry has enduring resonance given the thematic and aesthetic features of the modern songs they listen to. As is often the case, the students in my class struggled at various points throughout the early stage of the unit with the language in the canonical poems, even with guided annotations and discussion prompts to prompt their meaning-making. However, once I started modelling how to compare and contrast thematic representations in song lyrics with the poems – for instance, by examining the connections between Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover and Nick Cave’s Where the Wild Roses Grow – my students’ ability to unlock poetry gained traction. I was very conscious in my choice of song lyrics to discuss in this phase of the unit – I am clearly more than twice their age, and while I like to think that my musical tastes are fairly current, I purposely shied away from doing any sort of in-depth analysis of songs they would be listening to presently as I felt strongly that it was not my place to intrude on an area which they are most certainly the experts nor did I want to impose my tastes on them (Benson & Chik, 2014, p. 4).
Similarly, when it came to the students selecting their canonical poems and song lyrics for their assessment – a comparative feature article – I again had to tread carefully in relation to their choices. For instance, several students chose songs whose lyrics were quite simplistic and repetitive and perhaps a
typical reaction would be to persuade them to ‘choose again’, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this. Instead, I had open conversations with my students about why they connected with their song choices and helped them expand on their ideas in their writing, rather than falling into the pedagogical trap of imparting value-laden judgements on the texts they engage with.
At the end of the unit, whilst elements of the analytical and reflective processes were at times challenging for my students, they genuinely did appreciate the opportunity to engage with popular culture texts that actually meant something to them on a personal level. The take-away lesson for teachers is that if you’re going to incorporate popular culture, then avoid devaluing student choices otherwise you then inadvertently undermine the practice of merging such texts into the classroom in the first place.
References
Alvermann, D., Moon, J., & Hagood, M. (1999). Popular culture in the classroom: teaching and researching critical media literacy. International Reading Association.
Benson, Ohil & Chik, Alice(eds). (2014). Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Teacher Education: International Perspectives. Routledge: London & New York.
Bowmer, M., & Curwood, J. (2016). From Keats to Kanye: Romantic Poetry and Popular Culture in the Secondary English Classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(2), 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.550