As a teacher, I am always on the look-out for better (if not newer) ways of understanding and getting actively involved in my students’ cultural relations, within and especially without the parameters of the school environment. Whether it is a concert, a Play Station 2 tournament, an avant-garde film festival or a conversation over a cup of coffee relating last week’s episode of Dr. House or a South-American soap opera, I find it both instrumental and pleasing to attend, to participate, to become “one of them”. I agree with Henry Giroux and Roger I. Simon’s conceptualization of the classroom environment as a nurturing forum where both students and teacher(s) can engage in a multi-vocal discourse, listening and commenting on each other’s different views and understandings.
However, what I am interested in is gathering people’s thoughts on the subject of maintaining the multi-vocality of this space, without the application of popular culture forms. Can it be done, successfully?Another issue that I find myself debating on is the issue of popular cultural forms that “have crossed over” to the other side, becoming solidified, prime examples of revered “high art” forms. For instance, The Simpsons or Star Trek: no longer just a part of pop-culture, now perennial examples of the study of Jungian archetypes or Gramsci’s hegemony.
I ask, how do we approach the study of such cases? What do we make of their re-done identities?
There are indeed a lot of attempts within the academic community to come to terms with the place popular culture and its products should (or should not) take up in the formation and application of our respective cultural identities. I find (once again) Henry Giroux and Roger I. Simon’s assumptions quite practical, in their unique attempt to demonstrate how critical pedagogy can benefit from a postulated theory of popular culture. By using popular culture products as tools, to understand, better, how our students actively construct the categories of meaning, which they later employ in their production and response to classroom knowledge, Giroux and Simon allow for institutionalized learning to function as a process of cultural production and exchange. In this respect, the once ‘empty cultural form’ attests to the possibility of constituting a forum where students can be active participants in the extension of their human possibilities (think: the most recent Timberlake/Madonna video, ‘4 seconds’).
On the other hand, such bold practical application opens up the difficult question of how exactly this is to be carried out. What changes are to be made in our respective educational systems? Are we to begin with these practices at the elementary level? How do we go about training teachers for the tasks ahead? What is to become of the resources we already have? And if all succeeds, organization-wise, will our students be willing to participate? (Some of the best laid plans of ‘pop culture and education’, even by the most seasoned of educations, indeed can go awry).Then, how do we get them to blur the fine line between what is endured inside school and what is lived outside this environment? I’d like to open this up for comments from both ends of the educational-divide.
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