Bringing Pop culture into the classroom

I identified with Leigh Hall’s article “How popular culture texts inform and shape students’ discussions of social studies texts.” She discussed how multiple ways in which non-traditional literacy (or “popular culture” as she calls it) can be used in the classroom to bridge the gap between students’ previously held knowledge and the curriculum that we’re attempting to teach. As Hall says, “Youths, however, often see knowledge from different parts of their lives as distinct from school knowledge. As a result, they don’t always see their existing skills and knowledge as legitimate for academic learning” (Hall, 2011.) This discrepancy in the minds of our students between “home knowledge” and “school knowledge” prevents students from making valuable connections and stretching their knowledge. While some students may come to class as History Channel fans and having scoured Wikipedia for every mention of the American Revolution, most students are coming to class with a very different body of popular culture knowledge. Nonetheless, every student comes to class with knowledge, and all of it is accessible and useable for social studies classes.

I would like to take the concepts of the article a step further (reminiscent of the SLS idea from the Shah article) and purposefully include popular culture in my social studies classroom, including “systematic instruction that allows them (students) to identify and deconstruct messages found in both types of texts (popular culture and social studies texts)” (Hall, 2011.) By including popular culture references and texts in conjunction with traditional or scholastic social studies texts, we teach students how to critically digest the popular culture that they’ll be faced with all their lives. Hall says that in the classrooms observed, “No questions were raised about the reliability of pop culture texts that were fictional or were not intended to communicate historical information” (Hall, 2011.) This lack of connection and questioning passes up an opportunity to teach students to be critical consumers of information, which is one of the main goals of a social studies classroom. As one of the students in the study said, “I learned a lot about video games and cartoons and how some of them have pieces of history in them. So now when I’m watching TV or something, I pay closer attention to see if I can learn something about history” (Hall, 2011.) Students will “learn to question and examine the ideas put before them” instead of being “passive recipients of information” (Hall, 2011.)

By extending the bounds of a social studies classroom beyond the typical social studies texts and into the realms of both popular culture text and “real world” texts such as news reports, we can expose our students to the skills necessary to be critical consumers of information beyond the walls of the school. The evidence that students already engage prior-held information from popular culture is proof that students are willing and capable of making this leap, connecting their knowledge basis from home to school. Leigh Hall’s study reinforces the value of this connection in the social studies classroom.