Volume 3, Issue 1 — Popular Culture Pedagogy: Theory and Application in Academia
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Item Open Access LADY GAGA MEETS RITZER: USING MUSIC TO TEACH SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2016) Culton, Kenneth; Muñoz, José A.This paper presents methods for instructors to deal with student anxiety over theory courses. The method is an interactive class exercise that provides instructors with direction as to using popular music. The paper accomplishes this through the use of several cases for including music in order to spark discussion and suggestions for helping students to interpret the theory presented. Additionally, suggestions for incorporating writing assignments with the exercise are provided here. A table linking music to a theorist is also provided. Keywords: Music, Sociology, Theory, Teaching, Student Anxiety, Subculture, Class Exercise, Undergraduate, Popular CultureItem Open Access VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1 — POPULAR CULTURE PEDAGOGY: THEORY AND APPLICATION IN ACADEMIA(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2016) King, Lynnea Chapman; CohenMiller, Anna S.In early 2011, the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) Executive Team began discussions regarding a journal, which would serve as an outgrowth of the organization. We wanted to make more widely available some of the excellent scholarship that we were seeing on an annual basis at our February conference, as well as provide a venue for popular culture scholars outside of the SWPACA membership. At the same time, we knew that we needed to set ourselves apart from other publications focusing on popular culture studies; the result was a focus on pedagogy as well as popular culture, as indicated in the journal’s title. Simultaneous to these discussions, two areas within the SWPACA organization began to gain momentum—Popular Culture and the Classroom, and Pedagogies and the Profession—eventually combining to become Pedagogy and Popular Culture area, which has continued to thrive, becoming one of the largest areas at the annual meeting. To celebrate this momentum, in 2013 the organization established the Popular Culture Pedagogy award, which honors the organization’s late Executive Director, Phil Heldrich, a writer/professor with a passion for teaching. The award is presented each year for a graduate student paper which addresses an issue in the application of a new, engaging, popular culture teaching strategy in a specific area of popular or American culture The result of this growing interest is Dialogue’s Volume 3, Issue 1, Popular Culture Pedagogy: Theory and Application in Academia. This issue features several different approaches to the role of popular culture in the classroom, including case studies, curriculum development, applications, and reviews. The pieces variously incorporate research, theory, and best practices, ranging from classroom-ready exercises to reflections on the ever-increasing use of popular culture in secondary and higher education. The article section of this issue includes a sociocultural and socio-constructivist examination of learning, and by extension teaching, in Orange is the New Black, The Walking Dead, Megamind, Sherlock, Exit Through the Giftshop, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; three autoethnographic assignment reflections which demonstrate the utility of popular culture artifacts as a tool for teaching and learning writing; and two discussions of using music to teach sociological theory and media literacy. The applications section focuses on Harry Potter in higher education and the role of Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Walking Dead, and King of the Hill in an educational psychology course. We conclude the issue with our reviews, featuring a retrospective of the pedagogy panels at the 2015 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference, a discussion of the current state of online pedagogy, and a comparative analysis of adaptations of Much Ado about Nothing. With this first special issue on popular culture and pedagogy, we bring together insights into classroom practices in academia, providing a peek into the ways in which learning and teaching can be enhanced. We look forward to the continued expansion and discussion of the multifaceted ways in which education and popular culture interrelate.Item Open Access A FRAMEWORK FOR USING POPULAR MUSIC VIDEOS TO TEACH MEDIA LITERACY(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2016) McClain, Jordan M.This article discusses the use of popular music videos as a tool for teaching media literacy. First, the article addresses the importance of music videos as popular culture, what other music video research has examined, and what features make music videos a good fit for in-class work investigating media and popular culture. Then the article details a single-class activity for introducing and teaching media literacy through the use of music videos. To achieve this objective, the article also proposes a set of original music video-specific discussion questions. Finally, a particular music video is considered to illustrate possible results of this activity and the broader issues that may arise from class discussion. Keywords: Communication, Media, Media Studies, Popular Culture, Pedagogy, New Media, Digital Media, Media Literacy, Media Education, Music VideosItem Open Access REFLECTIONS ON BUILDING A POPULAR WRITING COURSE(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2016) Howson, Emily; Massenburg, Chris; Shelton, CeciliaComposition pedagogy has typically employed traditional academic texts in the instruction of first-year writing courses. In this article, three first-year writing instructors reflect on their experiences employing popular culture artifacts in lieu of more traditional academic texts in writing classrooms at a small, private, historically black institution (HBCU). By retrospectively analyzing the intersections between theory and practice, the instructors’ autoethnographic reflections explore the utility of popular culture artifacts as tools for teaching and learning writing, with an emphasis on rhetorical knowledge and transfer. Though preliminary, their conclusions point to the potential of popular culture for integration into traditional best practices in first-year writing pedagogy. Keywords: Teaching, Pedagogy, Culture, Writing, Transfer, Learning, Inquiry, Analysis, Popular, CompositionItem Open Access (RE)LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING: USING CASES FROM POPULAR MEDIA TO EXTEND AND COMPLICATE OUR UNDERSTANDINGS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO LEARN AND TEACH(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2016) Bippert, Kelli; Davis, Dennis; Hilburn, Margaret Rose; Hooper, Jennifer D.; Kharod, Deepti; Rodriguez, Cinthia; Stortz, RebeccaThis article utilizes sociocultural and socio-constructivist learning theories to analyze incidents of learning, and by extension teaching, in six different popular media selections. The authors describe their shared theoretical framework and the nature of the original analyses, which were completed as part of a doctoral course assignment. Each of the six excerpts is then described and discussed employing unique theoretical perspectives. The use of popular culture as the context for examining learning and teaching provides a space untethered from traditional notions of schooling through which typically accepted assumptions about pedagogy are revealed, re-examined, and reframed. Keywords: Sociocultural, Socio-constructivist, Learning, Teaching, Popular Culture, Media Studies, Pedagogy, Education, Communities of Practice