Educational Studies

A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association

ISSN: 0013-1946 (Print) 1532-6993 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/heds20

Pop Culture Pedagogies: Process and Praxis

Julie Garlen Maudlin & Jennifer A. Sandlin
To cite this article: Julie Garlen Maudlin & Jennifer A. Sandlin (2015) Pop Culture Pedagogies:
Process and Praxis, Educational Studies, 51:5, 368-384, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2015.1075992
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2015.1075992

Published online: 07 Oct 2015.

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 51(5), 368384, 2015

C American Educational Studies Association
Copyright 
ISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 online
DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2015.1075992

Pop Culture Pedagogies: Process and Praxis

Julie Garlen Maudlin
Georgia Southern University

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Jennifer A. Sandlin
Arizona State University

As Miller (1999) explained, it is increasingly important for educators to take seriously the processes
by which media texts are produced and disseminated, and to understand the ways in which media
images and constructions pervade all our lives (p. 234). Taking popular culture seriously means
making a purposeful commitment to bring popular culture into the classroom. Rather than scripted
instructional strategies based on generalized research, context-driven critical approaches are needed
to empower particular learners to engage with popular culture in in meaningful ways. However, an
understanding of popular culture and its pedagogical functions is necessary to provide a foundation
for developing these approaches to bringing popular culture texts into classrooms. Toward that end,
in this article, we explore the depth and breadth of contemporary popular culture, describe some of
the ways that popular culture functions pedagogically, and outline a framework for self-study that,
when practiced by educators, can serve as a locus for instructional decision-making and a catalyst for
enacting critical teaching and learning approaches we call pop culture pedagogies.

As Hall (1992) asserted, studying popular culture can help build understandings about the
constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects
of language, about textuality as a site of life and death (p. 285). In other words, popular
culture itself has material consequences, as it helps constitute society and social life; through
our engagements with popular culture, we learn what the world is, how to see the world, and
how to experience and act within the world. We need only take a cursory glance at a few
current issueshow news media has presented recent racist violence in Ferguson, Missouri; how
true crime podcasts and documentaries such as Serial and The Jinx have influenced the legal
system, leading to cases being reopened or suspects being convicted; how Starbucks latest Race
Together campaign brands, commodifies, individualizes, and color-blinds discussions of race
and racism; how Disney is (re)imagining gender and girl power through movies like Frozen (Del
Vecho, Buck, & Lee, 2013) and the new live action remake of Cinderella (Disney, Geronimi, &
Luske, 1950); how the 2015 Oscars largely ignored actors and directors of color, including those
affiliated with the film Selma (Colson, Winfrey, Gardner, Kleiner, & DuVernay, 2014); and how
sexuality and domestic violence are constructed in the movie Fifty Shades of Grey (De Luca,
Correspondence should be addressed to Julie Garlen Maudlin, Georgia Southern University, Teaching and Learning,
P.O. Box 8134, Statesboro, GA 30460. E-mail: jmaudlin@georgiasouthern.edu

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Brunetti, James, & Taylor-Johnson, 2015)to grasp how popular culture has everything to do
with difficult knowledge that operates along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other
circulations of power. The study of popular culture helps us understand and perhaps intervene
in how we, through our interactions with popular culture, produces, reproduces, and reimagines
social life and everyday social practices and relations.
Steinberg (2009) argues that with regard to popular culture, it is the responsibility of educators
to prepare our student/citizens to learn how to use it, consume it, and to have personal power
over it. Empowerment comes when we are able to read media and make informed decisions
about what we have read (p. xiv). Duncan-Andrade (2004) cautions, however, that educators
run the risk of replicating the shortcomings of hierarchical pedagogy if they presume that there
are a fixed set of skills that will empower students to engage in critical action (p. 315). Rather
than scripted strategies based on generalized research, context-driven approaches are needed to
empower particular learners to engage critically in ways that are meaningful for their specific
contexts. However, an understanding of popular culture and its pedagogical functions is necessary
to provide a foundation for developing these approaches to bringing popular culture texts into
classrooms. As Miller (1999) explained, It is increasingly important for educators to take
seriously the processes by which media texts are produced and disseminated, and to understand
the ways in which media images and constructions pervade all our lives (p. 234). Toward that
end, in this article, we explore the depth and breadth of contemporary popular culture, describe
some of the ways that popular culture functions pedagogically, and outline a framework for selfstudy that, when practiced by educators, can serve as a locus for instructional decision-making
and a catalyst for enacting what we call pop culture pedagogies.

LOCATING POPULAR CULTURE

It is difficult to concisely define popular culture, because it encompasses so many different kinds
of goods, products, and experiences, particularly in the age of digital media, where the range of
cultural artifacts has expanded to include an endless list of processes and things, including text
messages, social media networks, and mobile apps. At its most basic level, however, popular
culture can be understood as the broad range of texts that constitute the cultural landscape of a
particular time and/or place, as well as the ways in which consumers engage with those texts
and thus become producers of new negotiated meanings. We view a text as any artifact or
experience that we can read to produce meaning. As Nealon and Searls Giroux (2012) explain,
Reading or interpretation is not primarily a matter of forming or reinforcing personal opinions
but rather a process of negotiation among contexts (p. 23). Thus, the meanings that are made
of texts are contingent upon the contexts in which they are produced and read. These texts have
multiple purposes and existences, produced anew by every individual that reads them. These texts
communicate information with which we interact (both actively and passively) through viewing,
listening, reading, feeling, consuming, and producing, and include, among other artifacts, books,
periodicals, films, television shows, music, web sites, podcasts, advertisements, and consumer
products and experiences. Of particular interest are those popular culture texts in which we invest,
which occurs in at least two ways: purposefully and peripherally. We purposely (actively) invest
in particular cultural products or experiences by devoting our time, money, and attention. With
peripheral (passive) investment, we have prolonged exposure to a particular cultural product

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without having purposely engaged with it, such as the way we are exposed to television shows
watched by family members, friends, or students, or the ways in which social media forces us to
interact with popular culture in which we may have no interest, or even actively loathe (like the
song Let It Go from Disneys Frozen).
According to Storey (2006), popular culture, in the Western context, has been conceptualized
in different ways over time since culture first became an object of critique and analysis, starting
with Matthew Arnolds (1869) Culture and Anarchy. To more fully understand the range of
perspectives on popular culture, Storey (2006) offers six views or definitions used by scholars
within cultural studies to think about what popular culture is and what it does. First, popular
culture can be thought of as culture that is popularculture that is liked by many people.
This conceptualization, however, is difficult to measure and quantify and thus becomes virtually
useless for analytical purposes (Storey, 2006, p. 4). Popular culture has also been conceptualized
as inferior culture, or what remains when we have separated out high culture (Storey, 2006,
p. 5). This view is grounded in the culture and civilization tradition popularized by Matthew
Arnold and F. R. Leavis (Storey, 1998), and which was the predominant perspective in studies
of culture from the 1860s until the 1950s. A third and related view is that popular culture is
hopelessly commercial, produced for the masses and consumed by passive, brain-numbed, and
ideologically manipulated consumers (Storey, 2006, p. 6). There are both politically conservative
and liberal versions of this argument; what is seen to be under attack is either the traditional
values of high culture, or the traditional ways of life of a tempted working class (p. 7). Storey
(2006) places within this tradition both the work of Frankfurt School critical theorists such as
Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer, who viewed popular culture as a way for hegemonic power
to maintain social authority through the manipulations of the culture industry; and structuralists
and poststructuralists such as de Saussure and Barthes, who viewed culture as an ideological
machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the dominant ideology (Storey, 2006, p. 7).
Within these mass culture perspectives, consumers of culture are seen as passive absorbers of
hegemonic messages who have little power to resist dominant meanings or produce their own
negotiations or readings (Wright & Sandlin, 2009.
A fourth way of seeing popular culture views it as originating with the people, rather than
being imposed from the upper classes or from the culture industries (Storey, 2006, p. 7). This
perspective emerges from what Storey (2006) terms the culturalism (p. 37) tradition, which arose
in reaction to the early, elitist, culture and civilization tradition that valued upper-class culture as
superior. This perspective focused on the active production, rather than passive consumption, of
culture. Within this tradition, popular culture is viewed not only as texts such as movies, popular
music, etc., but also as the everyday practices or lived experiences of individualsit sees popular
culture as a way of life. Biesta (2012) has recently retheorized this perspective, via Hannah Arendt,
in his work on the public sphere and public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the
public quality of human togetherness (p. 683), a vision of public pedagogy that retains focus on
both politics and education. This work explores how public artistic interventions can reignite the
public sphere through civic action when such interventions constitute forms of interruption that
keep the opportunities for becoming public open (p. 685), and thus create public spaces where,
in the words of Arendt, freedom can appear (quoted in Biesta, 2012, p. 686). These artistic
interventions are pedagogical interruptions that are not led, and thus controlled, by pedagogues,
but emerge as an enactment of human togetherness.

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A fifth way of viewing popular culture builds upon this culturalist view and is grounded in a
Gramscian framework, drawing upon such theorists as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. In
this perspective, popular culture does not consist simply of cultural commodities such as film,
television shows, and magazines (Storey, 1998, 2006). Rather, these commodities are seen as the
raw materials, provided by the culture industries that people then use to create popular culture.
Thus, popular culture occurs only in the interaction between individuals and the products from the
culture industries that they engage with. This perspective on popular culture thus conceptualizes
it as an active, rather than a passive, process and focuses, furthermore, on the intersections
between culture and power (Bennett, 1998), highlighting how popular culture is a site of conflict
where individuals resist, negotiate, and accommodate power relations around issues of race, class,
gender, and sexuality, among others.
Our understanding of popular culture is that it is created through the interactions between the
commodities produced by the culture industries and the individuals who make meaning of them.
We also recognize the ways that we derive pleasure from playful engagements with popular culture
that allow us to create and recreate our individual subjectivities. Finally, we position popular
culture as a site of struggle through which power operates to construct and circulate meaning.
As Guy (2007) describes, popular culture can be thought of as a complex interplay of cultural
products and meanings placed in circulation by differently positioned persons (p. 16). These
products, deeply embedded in the lives of learners of all ages, are simultaneously received and
acted upon (Dolby, 2003, p. 260). Popular culture texts, therefore, serve performative functions.
In other words, popular culture texts have the capacity not only to communicate information, but
also to construct and perform identities. More specifically, popular culture teaches us about race,
class, gender, and sexuality, reifying these differences as social relationships that are repeated
and thus constructed into social norms.
Within the massive economy of goods, services, and experiences that constitute the fabric of
our everyday lives, our understandings of ourselves and others are largely driven by the emotional
attachments we make to popular culture texts. Within this web of cultural commodities, which
Ahmed (2004) describes as an affective economy, emotions are mechanisms that mediate
relationships between consumers and corporations, between individuals, and between bodies
and spaces. Ahmed (2004) posits that, In such affective economies, emotions do things, and
they align individuals with communitiesor bodily space with social spacethrough the very
intensity of their attachments (p. 119). Those emotional attachments, as they are circulated and
repeated, normalize and solidify the social forms (family, femininity, patriotism, schooling) that
emerge from our interactions with popular culture (Ahmed, 2004). These social forms, through
our emotional attachments to them, are effects of repetitions; they are continuously recreated as
social norms are repeated, circulated, commodified, and consumed. As this process of repetition
occurs, social norms become ordinary and taken for granted and their very social constructedness
is disguised. As Justin Lewis, Professor of Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies at Cardiff
University explains when interviewed about the ways in which Disney films impact audiences,
popular culture does not immediately impact our thinkingwe do not simply watch one Disney
princess film and suddenly believe in normative ideologies of gender and sexuality (Sun & Picker,
2001). Rather, the impact is more subtle and occurs as an effect of repetition. In the documentary
Mickey Mouse Monopoly, he explains that popular culture does not have an immediate wiz-bang
effect, rather, it is a slow and accumulative effect, and much more subtle. Therefore, adopting

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a critical pedagogical approach to popular culture involves interrogating these taken-for-granted

social forms and our emotional attachments to them, to discover and disrupt the subtle effects of
repetition.

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THE PEDAGOGICAL MECHANISMS OF POPULAR CULTURE

The performative nature of popular culture is what makes it pedagogical; the repetitive processes
through which cultural artifacts construct and perform social relationships teach us particular
ways of knowing, doing, and being. However, just as there are many ways to describe what
popular culture is, there are multiple ways of understanding how popular culture functions
pedagogicallyhow it operates inside and outside the classroom as a method of teaching us into
particular understandings. Drawing upon a recent literature review on public pedagogy (Burdick
& Sandlin, 2013), we explore how popular culture pedagogies are conceptualized and enacted.
Three mechanisms of popular culture pedagogy emerged from the literature, organized according
to how the subject of pedagogy is considered, developed, and acted upon by educative processes.
The first strand, which we posit is exemplified by critical pedagogy, uses a metaphor of transfer
to understand how popular culture produces, constricts, and/or emancipates both individual and
cultural processes of identification. The second strand, which draws from feminist and arts-based
theoretical traditions, employs a metaphor of relation to understand how pedagogy operates. The
final strand of literature exploring the pedagogical mechanisms of popular culture embraces a
metaphor of encounters with the monstrous, and suggests that crucial pedagogical moments occur
when one is confronted with the radical other. Following Burdick and Sandlin (2013), we do not
construct a hierarchy in presenting these approaches, nor consider any one of them superior to
the others. As Burdick and Sandlin (2013) argue, there are no best practices (p. 171) in popular
culture pedagogies, but we can view them heuristically as guides to think about the varied and
possible ways popular culture acts pedagogically.

Popular Culture Teaches Through Transfer

The notion of popular culture as ideological transmission emerges from Marxian critical theory
and cultural studies and has historically been the most predominant view, which has been taken up
as critical pedagogy within the field of education. Specifically, this view has its roots in Adorno and
Horkheimers (1944/2000) culture industry (p. 3), which imagines popular culture as a sort of
factory producing commodities that are used to lull the populace into passivity. Critical pedagogy
adopts a philosophy that guiding learners in the deconstruction of the ideologies produced by
popular culture liberates them from oppressive social relations. By advancing an understanding
of the production and consumption of dominant ideologies through popular culture, the critical
pedagogue enables the learner to discover and, potentially, disrupt the transmission of norms
(Hickey-Moody, Savage, & Windle, 2010, p. 299). This liberatory ideal depends on humanist
assumptions about individual improvement, namely that the learner is a rational being who can
be enlightened through education.
This transmissive view of popular culture is exemplified in much of the work of Henry Giroux
(2001), who explored processes through which power is mobilized in filmic images, sounds,

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gestures, dialogue, and spectacle to structure everyday issues around particular assumptions,
values, and social relations (pp. 591592). Giroux (2002) also asserted that films and, by extension,
other forms of popular culture, operate pedagogically through the kinds of common sense
assumptions they embody, the affective investments they mobilize, and the absences and
exclusions that limit the range of meanings and information available to audiences (p. 539).
These available meanings are pedagogical in the ways they represent otherness, mobilize power,
and construct categories through which individuals fashion their identities and organize their
ideologies and politics (p. 552).
Giroux (2003) also articulates the role of the critical pedagogue as a transmitter of critical
cultural values, espousing a pedagogical process that works to deconstruct and rework theoretically sites of popular culture within a wider set of associations and meanings that can be both
challenged and rearticulated in order to strengthen rather than weaken a public politics, while
furthering the promise of democratic transformation (p. 61). Learners are taught to critically
analyze the ways that popular culture functions as a social practice that influences their everyday
lives and positions them within existing social, cultural, and institutional machineries of power
(Giroux, 2001, p. 588). This mechanistic perspective, reminiscent of the culture industry model,
is exemplified in Girouxs (2003) analysis of the movie Fight Club, in which he invites readers to
see films as teaching machine[s] . . . articulating knowledge to effects, purposely attempting to
influence how and what knowledge can be produced within a limited range of social relations (p.
60). Girouxs personification of the film as teacher constructs the film as an ideological machine
with a powerful pedagogical force that overshadows the agentic possibilities of the film itself
or its viewers. The consciousness raising that is at the heart of the work of Giroux and other
critical pedagogues (including ourselves, see Maudlin, Sandlin, & Thaller, 2012; and Sandlin
& Maudlin, 2012) depends on the acquisition of particular knowledges and dispositions needed
to engage in critical readings of popular culture that deconstruct hegemonic meanings through
dialogue, relying on traditional, linear views of learning, progress, and civilization.

Popular Culture Teaches Through Aesthetic and Embodied Relational Experience

A second way of understanding how popular culture acts pedagogically emerged to counter
the top-down transfer view of critical pedagogy. Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Ellsworth
(1988) critiqued the reliance on the tools of rationality, arguing that rational dialogue often
failed to loosen deep-seated, self-interested investments (p. 313) based on typically European,
White, male, middle-class, Christian, able-bodied thinking and heterosexual ideals. Instead of
seeing popular culture as transmitting ideologies that critical pedagogues then had to interrupt,
Ellsworth and other scholars (Chappell, 2011; Lacy, 1995) who adopt this second understanding
of popular cultures pedagogical mechanisms focus less on critical rationality, and more on
embodied, holistic, performative, intersubjective, and aesthetic aspects of pedagogy; they also
see learning from engagement in popular culture as more tentative and ambiguous.
Here, the metaphor of relation becomes important as a way of understanding how popular
culture teaches and how we learn from it. Although critical pedagogy relies heavily on critically
reading popular cultural forms such as movies, music, and television shows, scholars who see
popular culture operating more relationallywhile certainly also exploring the same forms as
critical pedagogyoften take up as objects of analysis forms of popular culture that are grounded

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in the performing arts, museums, and public and historical monuments, and that have often been
created or curated by artists and other guides with high degrees of critical intentionality. Instead
of focusing on how popular culture transmits established meanings as a pedagogical mechanism,
however, scholars who hold a more relational view of popular culture focus on those moments
in which popular culture and its participants intersect and interact, where meaning is generated
through those active and embodied interactions. In contrast to the more definitive readings of texts
conducted by some critical pedagogues, scholars who see popular culture as operating in more
relational ways eschew their authority when making statements about the meaning of popular
culture texts, recognizing that meaning is only ever determined in the process of negotiation. The
relationality of those moments when viewer and culture come together, and the openness and
tentativeness of meaning generated in those interactions are, in fact, key to how popular culture
can foster transformative learning, as those events create spaces that reshape both the self and
the other, the self and its lived relations with others (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 48).

Popular Culture Teaches Through Posthuman Monstrous Encounters

A third way of understanding how popular culture operates as pedagogy embraces the metaphor of
encounters with the monstrous. Scholars who view popular culture operating in this way (Carey,
2011; Kahn, 2011a, 2011b; Lewis & Kahn, 2010; Wallin, 2008a, 2008b, 2012) are grounded in
posthuman perspectives, and posit that transformative pedagogical moments happen as people
come into contact with sites of popular culture that problematize taken-for-granted categories
and operations of identity, language, and image, including the fundamental idea of the rational
human self that circulates in Western thought and practice. Like the view of popular culture
as relational pedagogy offered earlier, this posthuman perspective also seeks to counter the
cognitivist and rationalist workings of both traditional educational theory, as well as some critical
pedagogies. Scholars who explore posthuman sites of popular culture see pedagogical potential
in how they confront viewers with examples of living and being that reject predefined ways
of thinking about and enacting boundariesbetween self and other, friend and enemy, nature
and culture (Lewis & Kahn, 2010, p. x), us versus them, inside versus outside, human versus
animal, inclusion versus exclusion, destruction versus productionboundaries that create (too)
easily recognizable narratives (p. 139). These all too familiar boundaries hinder our abilities to
imagine new forms of freedom and new forms of unrepresentable common life that are key to
more democratic ways of living and being (Lewis & Kahn, 2010, p. x).
The sites of popular culture that these perspectives explore are those that disrupt and expose
the socially constructed nature of human ideological and material structures. Lewis and Kahn
(2010), for example, constructed what they call a critical bestiary (p. 12), which they state can
help readers imagine possibilities for new, heterogeneous forms of sociopolitical organization.
In doing so, they explored the pedagogies of human/animal boundary-crossing creatures such as
vampires, werewolves, Medusa, feral children, aliens, and faeriesand their manifestations and
representations in popular films, historical events, novels, myths, festivals, conspiracy theories,
and intentional communities. They also explored how films and television shows such as March
of the Penguins and Avatar teach audiences about humananimal relationships. Other scholars
examine the pedagogical possibilities of monsters, such as zombies, through exploring a wide
variety of zombie films and television shows, including AMCs The Walking Dead, Zombieland,

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Dawn of the Dead, and Resident Evil. Wallin (2012), for example, explores the productive potential
of zombies to provide previously unthought ways for us to think about difference, desire, and
consumerism. As Wallin observes, for example, the (un)dead dont shop and symbolize a
people yet to come (p. 265).
Both the sites of popular culture themselves and the exploration of these sites by critical
scholars enact posthuman pedagogies. The very exploration of the monstrous that these scholars undertake is a pedagogical process designed to expand the readers critical imagination
and to foster uncanny encounters with radical otherness. These authors simultaneously articulate how certain monstrous elements of popular culture also operate as pedagogies to dissolve
taken-for-granted boundaries. As authors explore these posthuman sites of popular culture, they
conceptualize their pedagogies as operating to create spaces that suspend laws of recognition,
identification, and belonging (to a particular class, race, gender, species) (Lewis & Kahn, p. 10),
and that reject the binaries of human/nonhuman, self/other, and Left/Right for deeply ecological
perspectives on justice, ideology, and resistance, thus opening possibilities for new forms of
democratic life and new ways of taking up radically ethical stances toward the Other. Rather
than drawing upon humanist ontologies that are grounded in divided subjectivities, posthumanist pedagogies seek to interrupt these binaries, evoking the monstrous qualities of uncertainty
and confusion.
POPULAR CULTURE AS CLASSROOM PRAXIS
These basic understandings of the pedagogical functions of popular culture provides insight into
the multiplicitous and shifting ways that our purposeful and peripheral investments in various
cultural commodities teach us into certain ways of knowing, being, and doing. Understanding
how we learn from popular culture provides us with a foundation for designing instructional
practices that allow learners of all ages to acknowledge, engage in, and critique those pedagogical
mechanisms. Rather than offering specific teaching strategies, which we believe should vary
according to the needs, interests, and cultural investments of particular students in specific
contexts, we present here a model for self-study that, when practiced by educators, can serve as a
locus for instructional decision-making and a catalyst for enacting critical teaching and learning
approaches that we call pop culture pedagogies. This model is not a theoretical framework
designed to define new ways that popular culture operates pedagogically. Rather, it is a set of
ongoing interrelated processes that builds upon the pedagogical functions of popular culture
described previously to inform classroom practices by offering a framework for negotiating
meaning across personal and pedagogical contexts. These processes are aligned with the areas of
popular culture research and practice in adult education identified by Wright and Sandlin (2009),
which we adapt here to apply to all levels of learning. Their research revealed six areas of research
and practice, which we broaden to describe three nonlinear, ongoing processes of self-study: (a)
exploring the cumulative cultural texts of teaching and learning, (b) interrogating normalized
beliefs about self and society, and (c) engaging students in (not just with) popular culture to
examine the performative power dynamics that regulate textual production, consumption, and
interpretation. This nonlinear, self-reflexive model for self-study draws from the theoretical
landscapes of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, which take seriously the critical analysis of
popular culture.

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Exploring the Cumulative Cultural Texts of Teaching and Learning

One component of the framework for self-study involves educators engaging in the self-reflexive
practice of examining and disrupting the normative narratives of teaching and learning that they
have constructed through their investments with popular culture texts. We do this by asking
ourselves how we have come to understand what it means to teach and learn. As children, for
example, we often learn a great deal about what to expect at school through early interactions with
television shows, games, and books. As Weber and Mitchell (1995) explain, Even before children
begin school, they have already been exposed to a myriad of images of teachers, classrooms and
schools which have made strong and lasting impressions on them (p. 2). Childrens literature is
one highly accessible form of popular culture that provides young learners insight into schools,
students, and teachers. In their study of the ways that teachers are represented in childrens
literature, Dockett, Perry, and Whitton (2010) analyzed 164 popular English-language picture
storybooks from Australia, New Zealand, the United States of America, Canada, the United
Kingdom, and Singapore. They found that the teachers featured in those books, which included
both classics and contemporary titles, lacked diversity in terms of gender, as well as cultural
and linguistic background. In most of the books, teachers were also depicted as keepers of
knowledge who failed to engage students in critical thinking, challenge rules, or resolve conflicts
(Dockett et al., 2010, p. 38).
These representations of teachers, when repeated across texts and coupled with other experiences in and outside of school, contribute to the construction of what Weber and Mitchell (1999)
refer to as cumulative cultural texts where representations are combined into collective images
that blend seamlessly and often undetected into our familiar, unquestioned everyday knowledge (p. 168). Picture storybooks and other cultural commodities depicting teachers connect
generations of teachers (former children) and children (as students and future teachers), marking experience with codes and signposts that are shared, passed down, and assimilated and,
ultimately taken for granted (Weber & Mitchell, 1999, p. 168). Through the subtle process of
repetition, our expectations for and feelings about teaching and learning circulate among people,
working to distinguish good teachers and students from bad ones, to affix particular kinds of people
(typically middle-class, White women) and practices (rule-following, transmitting knowledge) to
goodness.
Although Whiteness is typically associated with goodness across all genres, other standards for
goodness are differently constructed in texts produced for other kinds of audiences. For example,
The Disney Channel, a popular source of entertainment for older children and pre-teens, features
a variety of shows that take place in or around middle or high school environments and feature
teachers as major or minor characters. Interestingly, the good teachers (who also frequently serve
in some kind of administrative capacity) appearing in these shows are overwhelmingly White and
male (Cory Matthews in Girl Meets World, Herschel Laritate in Wizards of Waverly Place, Henry
Gibson, Zolton Grundy, and Mr. Zimbaldi in A.N.T. Farm) who are generally portrayed as quirky,
caring, and kind. By contrast, the bad teachers are typically White women in nonrecurring guest
roles (Amanda Folkemburg in Jessie, Solange Dupont in Dog with a Blog, Susan Skidmore in
A.N.T. Farm).
Similarly gendered depictions can be found in many of the feature-length films often cited for
their representations of teachers, including Blackboard Jungle (Brooks, 1955), To Sir, with Love
(Clavell, 1967), Stand and Deliver (Menendez, 1988), Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989), Lean

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on Me (Avildsen, 1989), Mr. Hollands Opus (Herrick, 1995), and School of Rock (Linklater,
2003), all of which feature male high school teachers as central characters and tend to reinforce
the cinematic trope of the White savior. Although there are some popular depictions of female
teachers, such as Dangerous Minds (Smith, 1995) and Freedom Writers (LaGravenese, 2007),
these characters are similarly troublesome in that they perpetuate the same white missionary
representation. As Dalton (2004) describes in The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies,
good teachers have traditionally been constructed in popular films as outsiders who are highly
involved with students, willing to learn from them and adapt the curriculum to their particular
needs, and often at odds with administrators or other authority figures. The bad teacher may not
be particularly well-liked, but is presented as being so embedded in existing structures of power
that s/he must be tolerated (Dalton, 2013). Bad teachers find students boring, are afraid of them,
or are eager to dominate them and follow the standardized curriculum, which they adhere to
in order to avoid personal contact with students, or they ignore curriculum altogether except for
personal gain (Dalton, 2013, p. 80).
These conflicting representations of good and bad teachers, in films, television shows, books,
and other sources, illustrate taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching and reflect the traditional views of gender that continue to dominate the teaching profession and frame the expectations of viewers/readers who see these patterns repeated across various media. Dalton (2013)
asserts that these depictions ultimately influence teachers, students, parents, and policymakers
by inviting viewers to dichotomize real teachers into camps of good and bad in ways that
are not only reductive but that also foster a lack of trust in teachers, their training, and their
professionalism (p. 86).

Interrogating Normalized Beliefs About Self and Society

In the next component of the framework, educators continue the self-reflexive process by examining how their beliefs about self and society have been influenced by their investments by
popular culture. This process involves analyzing their beliefs about normalcy to consider how
cultural texts construct particular narratives about race, class, gender, and sexuality that become
common sense through repetition. For example, educators might consider the role that marketing
plays in shaping race and gender norms, such us the way toy companies take for granted certain
assumptions about gender and race in how they market toys specifically to boys (action figures
or train sets) or girls (dolls and kitchen sets) or produce playsets (like Playmobil and Lego) that
feature mostly White figurines and often portray people of color as primitive or dangerous. As
Giroux (1999) explains, Media culture has become a substantial, if not the primary educational
force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms, that offer up and legitimate
particular subject positionswhat it means to claim an identity as male, female, White, Black,
citizen, noncitizen (pp. 23).
As one of the primary generators of cultural commodities through which these meanings and
values are constructed and regulated, both in the United States and across the globe, The Walt
Disney Company, in particular, demands the attention of educators seeking to understand how
popular culture regulates normative meanings and values. The goods, services, and experiences
produced by Disney offer an important site for analyzing how our beliefs about ourselves and
societyincluding our ideas about what it means to be particular kinds of raced, classed, and

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gendered citizensare shaped by our investments in popular culture because of its ubiquity. One
way in which Disney contributes to normalized beliefs about race and ethnicity, for example, is
through familiar theme attractions like Its a Small World, which was originally built in 1964 by
Disney for Coca-Cola, inscribing the iconic attraction in multinational global capitalism from the
very start (Nooshin, 2004). The ride, which celebrates a universe of round-headed, button-eyed,
cherry-cheeked children, identical except for skin shade and ethnic accessories (Howes, 1987, p.
68) exemplifies the patronizing depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies
characteristic of orientalism (Said, 1978). As Nooshin (2004) notes, The visitor becomes akin
to a colonizer on a voyage of discovery, mobile and empowered in contrast to the static dolls
(p. 245). The dolls, the natives safely displayed for the White traveler, are simultaneously
exoticized and infantilized (Warren 1999, p. 112). Its a Small World functions pedagogically
to center the White subject so that other cultures can only be understood in relation to the
White norm. Here, the centralized White subject, like the whitestream curriculum described by
Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013), begins to absorb and contain, consuming and erasing
the other, by always-already positioning the accumulated knowledge as other to, less refined,
more subjective and less reliable than the whitestream (p. 82). Willinsky (1998) calls this
imperialisms educational project (p. 56), teaching the Western subject how to see or gaze
upon the other (Pratt, 1992; Urry & Larsen, 2011).
Similarly, the exhibitionary pedagogy (p. 85) of EPCOTs World Showcase constitutes an
imperialism of a different order (p. 11), where visitors can enjoy an adventure through sights
and sounds of architectural reproductions, culture-bound food and artifacts, and live cultural
performances (Houston & Meamber, 2011, p. 180). By diminishing the conflicts and tensions
of poverty and imperialism through fabricated cultural experiences, the World Showcase allows
visitors to apprehend the Other pleasurably, without the complications associated with actual
travel. Houston and Meamber (2011) explain that the site immerses guests into a static, historical, ancient, and exotic world of stereotypes grounded in carefully screened native employees,
scaled-down architectural replicas, and culture-bound retail merchandise and dining experiences
complemented by live cultural performances (pp. 179180).
As educators, while we may not consciously ascribe to an attitude of orientalism in teaching, imperialism undergirds the foundations of public schooling, including its aims of assimilation and citizenship and its Eurocentric institutional and curriculum design. Even organized
efforts to embrace diversity, through multiculturalism and inclusion, achieved through strategies such as content integration, special cultural events, and sensitivity training, constitutes a
superficial approach that is largely based on stereotypes of Others as defined in relation to a
White norm. As Schick and St. Denis (2005) observe, An emphasis on multicultural display
obscures the fact that differential access to power is produced through racial formations and
not through lack of familiarity with the cultural practices of other people (p. 307). These
multicultural approaches to education reflect the failure of White people and institutions to
grapple substantively with our own racism at personal as well as systemic levels (Sleeter &
McLaren, 1995, p. 13) and legitimize ignorance of racializing systems including the production of white identities and the taken-for-grantedness of racial dominance (Schick & St. Denis,
2005, p. 307). Analyzing the ways that racism is perpetuated through popular culture products
and processes that construct notions of racial difference in relation to Whiteness is a necessary
component of beginning to grapple with our own complicity in personal as well as systemic
racism.

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Engaging Students In (Not Just With) Popular Culture

The final component of the self-study framework involves considering the classroom practices
that can be used to actively engage students in analyzing popular culture as a site of resistance
by examining the ways that texts are produced, consumed, and interpreted. As Duncan-Andrade
(2004) note, With the growing pervasiveness and persuasiveness of twenty-first-century youth
culture . . . traditional school curriculum, coupled with traditional pedagogies, stand little chance
of capturing the hearts and minds of young people (p. 317). We know that the use of popular
culture in educational settings can offer recognition of student individual identities and the things
they value, thus motivating them to be more engaged in learning (Dyson, 1997, 2003; Marsh,
2000; Marsh & Millard, 2000). According to Johnson (2012), teachers typically integrate popular
culture by incorporating popular texts to make connections with students, using movies and
popular music to teach canonical literature, or applying critical Marxist approaches to analyzing
texts or consumption behaviors. These approaches emphasize the need for educators to maintain
an awareness of the popular culture influences that interest learners to provide instruction that
will be relevant to their students. Johnson (2012) note, however, that these routine practices with
pop culture texts rarely include examination of the power dynamics that circulate micro-level
struggles for popular culture text meaning in school between students themselves or students and
teachers (p. 160).
Such a critical pedagogical approach involves not simply engaging students with popular
culture by using it as a learning tool, but rather engaging them in critical analyses of cultural
commodities that explore both the hegemonic aspects of popular culture, as well as the potential
of popular culture for effecting social change. Engaging students in popular culture analysis
involves helping learners deconstruct messages about race, class, gender, sexuality, and other
prevalent positionalities, and encouraging educators and students to become critical consumers
of mass media. Tisdell, Stuckey, and Thompson (2007) conducted research that illustrates the
limitations of pedagogical approaches that only engage students with popular culture and fail to
move them beyond the pleasure of entertainment into critical analysis. They found that although
students pleasurable investments in popular culture could help facilitate media literacy, it also
could hinder their ability to critically engage with media. Their research suggests that one way
to help learners internalize and practice new critical media literacy knowledge is to have them
engage with a practical project (Tisdell et al., 2007, p. 611) during which they teach others how
to analyze gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in films and television programs.
Another example of engaging learners in critically examining popular culture involves students
not only critiquing that culture but imagining, creating, and producing their own cultural products
and experiencesthat is, engaging in their own cultural production. According to GaztambideFernandez and Matute (2015), cultural production is any form of creative and symbolic exchange
that arranges and/or rearranges available materials through cultural practices in order to express,
create, and recreate ideas, feelings, and various aspects of cultural life (p. 3). The culture industries have long been invested in cultural production, creating popular culture that is received
in multiple ways by viewersin Stuart Halls (1993) model, for example, receivers accept the
dominant hegemonic position, negotiate that position, or respond in oppositional ways. Encouraging learners to engage in cultural production adds an additional way of critically evaluating
popular culture, emphasizing the fact that popular culture texts do not exist for themselves in
a vacuum, but rather, we encounter and engage with them in socially and historically situated

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ways that require active rather than passive engagement (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2007, p. 35).
As Hoeschsmann (2008) further explains, Youth today have at least the potential to express
themselves, to try to give voice to their inner thoughts, and to communicate and mobilize with
others (p. 69). Through cultural production, learners become active creators, rather than passive
receivers of culture, by engaging in creative work that reflects the particularities of material and
symbolic relations that shape peoples lives (Gaztambide-Fernandez & Matute, 2015, p. 3). As
Hoechsmann (2008) argues, youth practicing cultural production are at the vanguard of a new
era of impertinence, of talking back, speaking out of turn, of reclaiming the right to narrate the
future (p. 69).
Chou (2007) provides an example of one way learners can engage in cultural production
by analyzing the social codes embedded in fairy tales and radically rewriting familiar fairy
tales to reflect on how popular culture has influenced their ideas about race, gender, and other
social norms. Chou (2007) led her students in critically analyzing the cultural assumptions
and unexamined messages in texts (p. 58). Students compared various tellings of fairy tales
(for example, Disney and Grimm versions of the same tale, as well as feminist re-tellings) to
see culturally dominant scripts from new perspectives (p. 58). Students also engaged in their
own cultural production as they participated in the critical rewriting of familiar, but destructive,
cultural scripts (p. 59), a process she calls contaminating the tales. Although critical, productive
analyses of race, class, and gender are often absent from most classrooms where popular culture
texts are used as learning tools, such approaches are essential in negotiating power dynamics and
engaging in cultural production. These negotiations require learners and educators to analyze
the production, consumption, and interpretation of normative discourses to counter them. As
Johnson (2012) explains, Leaving micro-level negotiations of race, class, and gender, (i.e.,
performative politics) out of classrooms, pop culture text work ignores radical possibilities
these negotiations have to counter and confound reductive subjectivities in and beyond school
(p. 161).

TOWARD POP CULTURE PEDAGOGIES

As processes of modernization and globalization give way to evolving technologies and commodities from which emerge new ways of producing, consuming, and experiencing popular culture,
the ways in which we define popular culture and its pedagogical mechanisms and implications
are constantly shifting. Therefore, the enactment of pop culture pedagogies is not a static process by which educators attain a finite skill set that renders them henceforth experts in critically
engaging students in popular culture. Rather, the commitment to such critical forms of teaching
with popular culture must be ongoing to meet the demands of both the rapidly shifting cultural
landscape and the ever-evolving needs, interests, and desires of individual learners. It is neither
a perfect science nor a simple undertaking, as we ourselves have discovered in our own attempts
to understand, write about, and teach with popular culture. Such a commitment requires work
that is never finished, and that work is not only pedagogical, but also intensely personal because
it requires us, educators and scholars who are ourselves purposely and peripherally invested
in countless cultural commodities, to constantly interrogate our own reactions to and interactions with popular culture products to expose and renegotiate the ways we make sense of our
worlds.

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In spite of the inherent difficulties of enacting pop culture pedagogies as classroom praxis,
particularly in educational environments that are increasingly constrained by measures of
accountability and standardization, we see this work as an ethical imperative and an essential component of an approach to culturally responsive teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994) that
seeks not simply to use cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes (pp.
1718) but to engage students in cultural production by examining, deconstructing, critiquing,
and reimagining the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain
social inequities (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 162). As Duncombe (2002) asserts, Culture can
be, and is, used as a means of resistance, a place to formulate other solutions. In order to strive
for change, you have first to imagine it, and culture is the repository of imagination (p. 35).
However, in striving to enact critical pedagogies in classrooms, Williams (2008) notes that we
should be careful to value peoples abilities to understand their own experiences and work with
them to connect those experiences to the questions they raise, rather than shape them to any single
agenda (p. 83). If we adhere only to a transmission model of critical pedagogy, without also
considering relational and radical possibilities for learning as well as the emotional attachments
that make popular culture a site of pleasure, we run the risk of alienating learners by constructing
them as unfortunate dupes, powerless puppets of dominant ideologies. Even worse, the students
are made to feel silly for having enjoyed popular culture in the first place (Williams, 2008, p. 83).
Therefore, as we engage learners in disrupting normative narratives by examining individual and
collective experiences, we should seek not to rewrite those narratives in relation to our own experiences and beliefs but to create spaces within which learners can choose how to respond to those
narratives, which might mean that they choose not to rewrite them for themselves. As Williams
(2008) explains, to allow learners to make their own critical choices, whether they choose to
conform to or resist cultural expectations, we should desire that they be able to understand
those expectations more clearly, rather than bump into them by accident (p. 83). As we have
illustrated here, this is difficult work that requires ongoing and perhaps uneasy scrutiny of our own
normative beliefs as educators, citizens, and consumers. Yet, knowing that popular culture itself
has materialsometimes empowering, sometimes dire, but always powerfulconsequences for
the ways we understand, experience, and act within the world, it seems that, as educators, enacting
pop culture pedagogies is the least we can do.

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