Popular Culture: Childhood in the Digital Age

Explore the outcomes of your parental/student teacher survey. Did any responses surprise or challenge you? What might be the subsequent implications for your future practice? Make links to the in-session discussion and to any relevant readings.

 

 

Using popular culture in the classroom creates opportunities and challenges for teachers in the classroom but it also opens up possibilities for children to be actively engaged in their learning.  Merchant (2007) believes it is also important to stress that an education system has a responsibility to provide children with the tools and understandings necessary for interpreting the world of popular culture around them and to be able to provide a critical view (Merchant, 2007).  It is important to recognise the fact that the children will be engaged critically with popular culture when it is used in the classroom and it should not be seen as something used as a reward to children; a judgement with which previous generations may view this practice. As Lambirth (2003) argues, by using popular cultural texts to enhance learning and motivation in the classroom it can capture the interest of children as well as empower them to continue their learning outside the classroom. These popular cultural texts, which can be accessed through new media, used alongside traditional texts may make some children feel more comfortable and welcomed into an environment that could have been inadvertently alienating them, through instilled beliefs from previous middle class culture (Lambirth, 2003).

 

The concerns for the use of popular culture in classroom mainly focus on consumerism and issues on ideology. I came across these views during my survey as parents can still view using popular culture as consuming school time to promote or advertise products. These views are born out of culture fuelled on consumerism and can be understandable if the parents are not aware of the context popular culture is used in the classroom (Arthur, 2005).  Another negative view by using popular culture in the classroom are long held views gender ideology. Dyson (1997) describes males as having agency, power and independence while females are generally defined to roles that ‘privilege romantic relations’ (Dyson, 1997: 178). Arthur expands on these popular perceptions as positive male characters are more numerous to female characters in television and video games (Arthur, 2005).  An alternative view drawn out from my survey is that traditionally brighter children use books as a stimulus (Lambirth, 2003).  Though I think there may be changing perceptions regarding children’s levels of engagement with popular culture alongside their intellectual capacity and attainment.

 

Through my readings and discussions in seminars, implications for my future practice include how new technology can help to establish more varied collaborative relationships within the classroom particularly when learners recognize that skills and knowledge can be distributed between themselves and that their teacher may not necessarily be the expert. (Burnett, Dickenson, Myers, Merchant, 2006).  I believe children bring a wide experience of texts to their school work from their own experiences growing up, from expecting to read images as well as print through to expecting to use computers in seeking information. When they come to express ideas and to participate in classroom work, children readily draw on their experience of popular culture to create multimodal texts using words, diagrams and pictures (UKLA, 2005).  Dean (2010) argues we as teachers should begin to rethink literacy, from the outdated attitudes to class and culture, by embracing new media and popular culture in today’s society to aid and enhance children’s learning.  Therefore, teachers will be helping children to become digitally literate which is becoming increasingly important in today’s digital world (DfE, 2013).

 

 

 

References

 

Arthur, L. (2005) ‘Popular Culture: views of parents and educators’ in Marsh, J. (ed) (2005) Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood. Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer

 

Burnett, C., Dickenson, P., Myers, J., Merchant, G. (2006) ‘Digital connections: transforming literacy in the classroom. Cambridge Journal of Education. Vol 36 (1) pp.11-29

 

Dean, G. (2010) ‘Rethinking Literacy’ in Bazalgette, C. (ed) (2010) Teaching Media in Primary Classrooms. London: Sage

 

DfE. (2013) Computing programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2. National Curriculum in England. DfE

 

Dyson, A (1997) Writing Superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture and classroom literacy. New York: Teacher’s College Press

 

Lambirth, A. (2003) ‘They get enough of that at home’: Understanding aversion to popular cultures in schools’. Reading Vol. 37 (1) pp.9-13

 

Merchant, G. (2007) ‘Writing the future in the digital age’. Literacy Vol. 41 (3) pp.118-128

 

UKLA. (2005) More than words 2: Creating stories on page and screen. QCA. [Online] http://primary-english.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/2/5/8725723/more_than_words_2.pdf