Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections to Lifelong Learning

When choosing a book for my book review, I wanted to read something that I could also apply to my classroom. I teach 8^th grade English, so anything that would help me to engage my students with any sort of reading that would help them to become more literate would be wonderful. I see my job in the classroom as a facilitator who is there to help students to find and make connections so that they may become more invested in their learning. Since I am interested in popular culture (which I will mostly refer to as pop culture), I decided that I should look for something that would help me to bring in all sorts of the media and culture with which my students are surrounded.

And low and behold I found a book, Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning, by Ernest Morrell. The book is broken into three different sections that I will outline through various entries: The Prospect, The Practice, The Possibilities.

Why literacy and pop culture you may ask? The answer is simple. Students are constantly surrounded by the media and the culture of their environment (later I will give the definitions of popular culture, as described by Morrell). In class, I find myself battling with the decline of the students’ writing as they use their text-messaging lingo in their papers, e.g., ur, l8r, lol, as well as their lack of critical thinking skills. Lately, I have begun thinking that perhaps I should not worry so much about whether or not my students read To Kill a Mockingbird or Fahrenheit 451, and rather, I should turn the focus onto items that THEY find interesting, whether it be movies, TV, or music. Perhaps the path to deeper understanding is to find the passion of the students and help them to apply the knowledge to a broader context.

And so, the journey begins…