Popular Culture and Critical Media Pedagogy in Secondary Literacy Classrooms

The research article "Popular Culture and Critical Media" presents a very unique and interesting perspective on how to implement and utilize popular culture in the classroom. The document presents the idea of incorporating student suggestions as part of various lessons. By taking student suggestions into account, students can feel more valued as individuals. This can help create a welcoming and positive environment for students, and helps to foster opportunities for learning. By listening to students and factoring their opinions into lesson plans, teachers are better able to connect with their students. Additionally, it addresses the needs of other students that are in the classroom. As teachers, this can encourage students to learn and enables them to better understand and engage with the material.

Something that is particularly interesting to me is how this relates to engaging students based on their interests. Similar to incorporating graphic novels, incorporating popular media can help to hold interest. By using materials relevant to student interests, teachers can help students engage with lessons. This can also be used to allow students the opportunity to learn based on their own interests, as well as give students opportunities to work with various forms of media in a classroom environment. This is especially useful as students are interacting more regularly with technology.

It’s important to encourage students to critically think about the world and the media they engage with. While it can be easy to rely on a “banking” strategy to “teach” students information, it’s more important to teach students the critical thinking skills to analyze various forms of media they encounter on a regular basis. Especially with the wealth of information available with varying degrees of reliability, it’s important to give students the tools to decipher and interpret this information for themselves. By doing so, teachers help encourage students to develop the ability to think for themselves and promote growth in their students.