Making pop culture a STANDARD in the classroom

Public school education is driven by standards and standardized tests. Unfortunately, for teachers and students, this mainly has a negative impact on education. For the most part, standardized tests aren’t created by teachers, or scored by teachers. In addition, they categorize all students as the same. How is it fair to expect students with disabilities to score the same as regular ed students? Ok, this was a rant...this is not about NCLB or even testing. It is about how teachers can still incorporate popular texts into the classroom despite the limitations imposed by testing.

The conclusion to Morrell’s book speaks to mainly teachers and what we can do to incorporate strategies into our classrooms that benefit our students. It is not an easy road, but teachers need to work to help preserve our autonomy in our classrooms. We need to become textual producers and action researchers who investigate with students, multiple outcomes associated with innovative classroom practices. We cannot be passive observers, following the crowd of what has been done in the past. We need to step put of our comfort zones, to a point, and find the passions of our students. What do their passions bring to the classroom? What popular texts are the surrounding our students? Vygotsky stated that we need to draw on everyday experiences to help us learn. What is more social than the culture that surrounds us all? Even of a teacher is unfamiliar with a popular texts that students are obsessed with, think about the wonderful opportunities this allows to build a relationship with students.  

I enjoyed this book. I recommend it to anyone in education, who wants to help improve literacy. Although his target is the youth of America, I think that the teaching of pop culture could help anyone of any age. Morrell is engaging through his examples of his own experiences and he clearly addresses what he believes is important to incorporate into classroom teaching. He never states that classical texts should not be used, but he does point out that many of these "classics" are filled with topics and themes that are used as reasons AGAINST the teaching of popular texts: racism, violence, profanity, sex. 

As a somewhat seasoned teacher, this book made me reflect on my own teaching and the opportunities my students and I are missing out on by not incorporating more popular culture into the curriculum. Morrell references many lessons that he had pre-service teachers work on and I firmly believe that if we also did this through all universities, our new generation of teachers would be better equipped, thus helping students to become more literate members of society. 

My plans??

I am going to create online literacy discussions (thanks also to Dr. Pence for this idea) so that my students can discuss what they are reading, viewing, or listening to. I also plan to add more contemporary advertisements to the discussions of propaganda, rather than relying on historical examples. I'm also toying with the the idea of "Media Mondays" where we would discuss what the students did over the weekend (movies, TV, games, sports), allowing us the opportunity to discuss the impacts these activities have on students.  

The World Series of Classrooms

""The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." ~ Babe Ruth 

Each year, it seems as though I have more students involved with sports, whether it is soccer, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, or tennis. Some of these students spend hours after school with practice. When my daughter was a varsity cheerleader, she would have practice after school from 3-6, but during competition season (which I swear never ended!) she would have it 3-5 and then again 7-10...during the week! 

When Morrell coached a girls’ basketball team, he was a grad student as well as a tutor at an Athletic Study Center. Although he had not incorporated sports in his classroom to promote literacy, he decided to try it with the students he tutored and the girls on the BB team. 

Caleb was a student who Morrell tutored, who was considered not too bright by his teachers. He was an avid fan of football, as well as being a player himself. What Morrell noticed was that although Caleb’s teachers, and Caleb himself, claimed that he was a weak reader, when he would meet with Morrell, he would have the sports page clearly annotated with notes about players, teams, and stats. He possessed a vast knowledge of many NCAA Division I football teams, to which he could add his critical commentary. He was critically reading and analyzing the stats, just not in the way his teachers wanted. Morrell’s goal was to transfer these skills to the broader context of school.

With his basketball team, Morrell created mandatory study sessions for the girls and he stocked the playroom with various magazines, books, and biographies related to sports. He would also record as many basketball games as he could so that the players could check the tapes out to analyze. If they checked out a tape, they were required to show Morrell the notes that they took pertaining to the plays, as well as the players. Morrell used this time with his players to also help them deconstruct the limited gender roles for women that are supported by the mass media and public institutions, like schools. 

As a teacher, I know that sports are important but it is irksome when students receive Cs, Ds, and even Fs, because they seem to have no time for school work. Morrell takes another perspective on this that uses the students’ interest in sports to help them develop stronger literacy skills. My problem is that classroom teachers have less ability to do this than the students’ coaches, and until coaches incorporate these strategies into their practice schedules, I don’t think that students will receive the most they can from sports. Morrell suggests that for teachers who are not coaches, we need to establish powerful relationships with coaches at the school. We should see them as allies and offer suggestions as to how they can incorporate literacy skills into their practices. By adding the topic of sports to the classroom, English teachers can also have critical dialogue about the relationships between sports and society. His argument is “The development of critical literacy entails not only a reading of the world but a rewriting of that world.” (114)

Mass Media

“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.” 

~ William Bernbach

Media, no matter what kind, has a huge influence on youth. Whether a student sits to watch the evening news, or is simply surrounding by media through the commercials and advertisements targeted to adolescents, the youth of America are “learning” many things about their identity, gender roles, or life-style images. Morrell states that we need to help provide students the skills to critically question mass media. They need to be able to deconstruct the messages, and to do this, we need to teach them the analytical skills necessary.

Morrell mentions two types of mass media, media advertising and major news reporting; however, the majority of his focus was on the latter. In conjunction with others, Morrell created a summer research seminar entitled “Education Access and Democracy in Los Angeles: LA Youth and Conventions 2000”. This was designed to apprentice 30 urban youth as critical researchers of urban issues, within the context of the Democratic National Convention. Through the unit, the goal was for the students to develop research and literacy skills necessary for college success. 

The project consisted of four weeks. The first two were dedicated to research if the issues and topics that would be debated and discussed at the conventions. During the third week, the students interviewed politicians and community leaders about popular issues. To wrap it all up during the last week, the students went back to the university to analyze the data. The focal areas for the students were on youth access to media and media access to youth. Their concerns were that youth were not portrayed positively in the media, nor are the youth that are shown representative of the majority. Their conclusion from the study was that many students read and interact with the media without thinking about the perspectives, the truth, the author’s positionality, or the expertise of others. Most fail to consider how decisions are made in the media regarding youth and youth issues. 

This project was ideal with helping students with writing for empowerment and this is what I want to take into my classroom. My first semester curriculum is about issues and challenges in society and how they impact us. We first read Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver, and beginning in a couple of weeks, we will move towards a unit concerning the affect the media has on us. The students will read Animal Farm as we discuss propaganda techniques and rhetorical strategies and we will then move on to read The Hunger Games. (This is about a futuristic America where the country is broken into 12 “districts” and a Capitol. To remind people of the past uprisings that resulted in the new division of America, each district is to send one boy and one girl each year to the Hunger Games, where they fight to the death until there is only one survivor. During this time, the games are televised and it is considered mandatory viewing. It is such a good book!) With both Animal Farm and The Hunger Games, we will be discussing current media and propaganda and how it truly does shape of views and opinions. For example, the students will be analyzing commercials and advertisements, looking for the purpose behind them. I will probably add ideas from Morrell and have the students create pamphlets, newspapers, and websites that will help develop and hone their critical lenses of looking at media. 

For more reading, Morrell references Douglas Kellner’s Media Culture: Cultural Studies; Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern Media Culture and Peter McLaren’s Rethinking Media Literacy: A Critical Pedagogy of Representation.

A Place for TV and Film in the Classroom?

"Carpe Diem! Seize the day... Make your lives extraordinary." 
~ John Keating, Dead Poets Society


Many us remember the days of substitutes in the classroom, which often times translated into MOVIE DAY! Unfortunately, this is not in the past and there are still times when a movie is the easiest sub plan. On the first day back from winter break last year, my daughter (who was a high school senior) had a sub in two classes...and watched two movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Princess Bride. And before you ask, no there wasn't a lesson attached to the movies; they were just to watch them. 


Changing this belief that a sub day is the only time to show a movie is probably the hardest thing to overcome for teachers today, who actually use film as a tool of analysis and critique in the classroom. Morrell builds a case for movies in the classroom though his descriptions of two units his employed in his high school English classes. His four main reasons to support the use of film in the classroom are(90):

1. It increases motivation.
2. It taps into background knowledge.
3. It improves awareness.
4. It fosters sociopolitical philosophy.

In Morrell's units, the goals were to have the students critically analyze the films, then discuss how the themes are also seen in the literature. The first 20-25 minutes of class was watching the film, with The LIGHTS ON, and then the remainder of the period was given to analysis and discussion. Who would have thought to pair The Godfather (the film) with The Odyssey and Native Son with A Time to Kill (the film)? Certainly not me. Don't get me wrong. I love the use of film in the classroom. I think it helps build engagement and motivation, especially since many 8th graders believe that they aren't doing any work if there is a movie playing. 


Through The Godfather and The Odyssey, the students are asked to think about the following: 

1. The treatment of women and the world view of femininity
2. the voyage to manhood
3. role of religion
4. the epic hero and his journey

Through Native Son and A Time to Kill, the students focused upon:

1. equality and justice
2. racism and prejudices
3. simplistic notions of right and wrong

Within the units the students began to use the world as a text also, as they began to take the themes from the literature and films and apply them to their own world. The A Time to Kill/Native Son unit was a powerful unit for the students since many were minorities themselves and had personal experience with injustice, inequality, and racism. They were so moved by the unit that as a class, they decided to dedicate the final 6-weeks of school to creating a magazine that exposed the injustices the students faced on the school campus; thus taking a theme from a movie and applying it to their own world. 

Like everything else in education, using movies isn't a cure-all. Morrell still had disengaged students, as well as issues with truancy; however, the students in class found the use of contemporary movies teamed with classical texts rewarding because it allowed them to tap into their own background knowledge as well, in order to critique the texts.

For me...
The new curriculum that we have implemented at school, SpringBoard, using many different movie clips, in conjunction with the texts being used in the classroom. I have used movie clips for many different reasons (the first 8 minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark to help teach climax, The Corpse Bride for mood, Westside Story's Jets/Sharks scene as a companion to The Outsiders Socs/Greasers rumble) so this hasn't taken me out of my comfort zone too much, but other teachers in the school now think that all I do is "watch movies", more so than I already did.

What I find interesting are the messages/themes/allusions that students see in a film that I myself sometimes fail to notice. When Terminator Salvation came out in theaters, we were finishing a unit on the Holocaust. Many students came back from the opening weekend, sharing how they believed there were allusions to the Holocaust throughout the movie, e.g., when Kyle Reese and other humans are rounded up and taken to Skynet, via a flying "cattle car." Or, after talking about Star Wars, the conversation the students had concerning the connections between the movie and Nazi Germany. (The stormtroopers were named after the Nazi stormtroopers, and the Empire was modeled on Nazi Germany.) I grew up with Star Wars and absolutely love it, but my appreciation of it grows each year as the students and I talk about its implications in society.

In case you are interested, another great book I found concerning film in the classroom is Reading in the Dark: Using Film As a Tool in the English Classroom by John Golden. It provides clear examples that can be used in almost any English classroom. 

Morrell, E. (2004). Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.