Contrasting Zones of

Comfortable Competence:
Popular Culture in a Phonics
Lesson
Betsy Rymes
125 Aderhold Hall, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA

The contrast between the current national skills-based reading agenda in the United
States and the complex forms of technology and entertainment available for children
today suggests a kind of future shock analogous to that identified by Toffler [Future
Shock, Random House, New York, 1970] during the rise of television in the 1960s. He
identified future shock as a disturbing recognition, in the face of rapid change, that one
has grown up with expectations for a world that no longer exists. Adult reactions to
future shock can take the form of a retreat to a comfort zone, in which one can deny
that the world is changing. Children, however, bring their own familiarities with new
media to the classroom, often in a way that can force adults out of this retreat, out of
the role of expert, and into the role of novice. This paper looks at the notion of future
shock as it becomes instantiated in language and interaction in a reading lesson with
second language learners. Bringing the concepts of communicative competence and
language socialization to a Vygotskian understanding of development, I suggest that
current educational policy encourages teachers and students both to retreat to differing
comfort zones, and that a policy which encourages them to depart from those retreats,
by taking advantage of students multiple communicative competencies, could more
adequately prepare students to take active roles in the current multimedia world.

INTRODUCTION
If you care about children and their learning, you might feel in these days of the
reading wars that you are being bombed back to the Stone Age. In the Bush-based
reading agenda, skills-based approaches to teaching reading are beginning to overwhelm the perspective widely accepted in higher education that literacy learning,
like any learning, is a complex, situated, and socially, culturally, and politically
Direct all correspondence to: Betsy Rymes, 125 Aderhold Hall, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602,
USA. E-mail: brymes@coe.uga.edu
Linguistics and Education 14: 321335.
Copyright 2004 Elsevier Inc.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

ISSN: 0898-5898

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contingent activity. A decontextualized, skills-based approach to literacy will buy

todays students very little in the new work order in which literacy is increasingly dynamic, varied, and multimodal (Alvermann, 2002) and in which people
are projected to have five or six different careers, often constructed out of positions
individuals devise on their own(Gee, Hull, & Lankshear 1996; Knobel, 1999). So,
literacy work in schools might prevent some students from being left behind for
awhile, but the kind of literacy instruction espoused by Bushs education plan
based on rote skills and virtually constant testing (Bracey, 2002)will not support
the production of relevant literacies for the New Media Age (Kress, 2003). Nor is
this curriculum likely to produce schooled identities congruent with agentive and
fulfilling positions within a current portrait of the New Work Order (Gee, 2002).
This is precisely the kind of future shock that Postman and Weingartner
(1969) warned teachers about in the 1960s: Students are being prepared for a world
which no longer exists but one in which a number of politicians and teachers
possibly advanced cases of future shock(p. 14)may be very comfortable. It
may happen that in such a state one continues to act as if his apparitions were
substantial, relentlessly pursuing a course of action that he[she] knows will fail
him[her]. Such cases will repeat over and over again the words that are supposed
to represent the world about them. (Postman & Weingartner, 1969, p. 14). This
year, in the United States, this repetition has taken the form of a new policy that
will leave no child behind, through a testing program that more than likely will
leave more and more children behind (Bracey, 2002).
Popular culture, however, when it enters into school classrooms, has the
potential to work against conformism to the mandates sent down by individuals
struck with such advance cases of future shock. Though frequently trivialized, the
occurrence of popular cultural references in the classroom can force teachers to
listen to and learn from kids who are not retreating from the future. However,
popular culture in the classroom can also make teachers very uncomfortable
perhaps in part because popular cultural references can displace a teacher from a
position of expertise regarding institutionally sanctioned, textually tidy (Dyson,
2003), and tested skills (King & OBrien, 2002).
In this article, I examine exactly such a situation: One interaction in which
popular cultural references by second language learners are effectively ignored in
favor of skill-based practice. Bringing the concepts of communicative competence
and language socialization to a Vygotskian understanding of human development,
I argue that looking at popular culture references in such interactions can reveal a
need to negotiate multiple and changing communicative competencies in todays
school communities. To work toward relevant language learning and forms of
literacy, both students and teachers will have to depart from what I will call their
Zones of Comfortable Competence. A look at how popular culture emerges in
classrooms can illustrate both what these comfort zones look like, and how teachers
and students can go beyond them to become fluent in multiple zones of competence,

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preparing each other to take up active, questioning, and humane roles in the multiple
interactional spheres that await them in todays world.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND
DEVELOPMENT
Communicative Competence and Language Socialization
To flesh out this idea of comfortable competence, I will first have to back up
30 years, to 1974, when Hymes coined the term, communicative competence.
Hymes developed this concept, in part, to counter Chomskys (1965) notion of
the ideal speaker which was based primarily on decontextualized, grammatical
competence. Competence within a society, Hymes suggested, was as much a matter of contextualized practices as it was of grammar. The categories of Hymes
Speaking Model provided a rubric to begin to examine and compare the development of this communicative competence cross-culturally (Hymes, 1974). The
names of the categories within this rubric conveniently correspond to the letters
of the word SPEAKING, S stood for Setting, P for Participants, E for Ends (or
goals), A for Acts (speech acts), K for Key (or tone), I for Instrumentalities (spoken, written, or other), N for Norms, and G for Genres (e.g., poem, story, lecture).
These categories were intended to represent the key contextual factors that inform
communicative competence. Hymes urged ethnographers of communication to use
the SPEAKING rubric to understand variable norms for speech events, and how
those norms fit within a cultural belief system. The SPEAKING model, then, has
over the years, sharpened perceptions and representations of cultural events and
the language that is needed to participate competently in them.
Building on Hymes work, studies in language socialization (Ochs, 1988, 1996;
Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin, 1990; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) have researched how these norms for interpretation are developed in a culture during the
process of language acquisition, and throughout a lifetime. Language socialization
research has examined how members of a society participate in cultural routines
(for example, story-telling during dinner conversation) through which they reproduce cultural roles (like an authoritative, detached father) (Ochs & Schieffelin,
1984; Ochs & Taylor, 1995). Recognizing the indexical, or context-dependent,
aspects of language is an important analytic tool for understanding how cultural
norms and expectations are socialized through these sorts of language routines.
Indexicality has been defined as the
subtle ways in which linguistic forms are existentially connected with the situations
in which they are used and the people who use them. (Duranti, 2001, p. 32)

Indexicality has been instrumental in conceptualizing how language use delineates distinct discourse communities and the routines and roles enacted within

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Figure 1. Chansey! Thats a Pokemon.

them (Ochs, 1996). For example, consider this word: Chansey. What does that
word refer to for you? Is it spelled correctly? The answer to these questions would
be different for different discourse communities. For example, most adults I have
polled say this is a misspelling of the adjective, chancy. But, second graders
caught in the moment of popular culture in the year 2000, might recognize this as
the correct spelling of the Pokmon character (see Figure 1).
Both of these responses are right, right? No and Yes. They are right in different
contexts. Identifying this word as the name of a Pokmon is not a legitimate answer
in a skill-based reading lesson. When I informally polled my classes of teachers
last year, most emphasized that Pokmon information does not count as knowledge
in the schools. Teachers tend to see references to Pokmon and discussions about
Pokmon characters as detracting from what is really the work of schoolteachers:
covering content (other content, that is). And, Pokmon cards are even officially
banned in some elementary schools in Georgia.

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In the year 2000, though, in a phonics class, among second graders, recognizing Chansey as a Pokmon was the key to getting it in the primary school
ESOL peer group I was observing. Among those friends, at that time, identifying
the word Chansey as the name of a Pokmon was a right answer. But now, of
course, Pokmon is dead. (Only my still nave 3-year-old son is proud to wear the
Pokmon hand-me-downs from the older and more culturally savvy sons of one
of my colleagues.) Those same second graders who found Chansey, the Pokmon,
to be a relevant interpretation of the word 2 years ago, when this interaction was
recorded, might even be embarrassed to admit a continuing affection for or even
an awareness of Chansey, the hard-to-find and puzzling Pokmon pictured here.
So, knowledge of this sort is fleeting, and constructed in very localized context.
Childrens ability to keep a finger on the pulse of these swaying local norms is
precisely the kind of complex contextual awareness students need to bring to their
literacy development. Appropriating, discarding, and reformulating relationships
with words like this are processes crucial to the developmental remix that creates
literacy (Dyson, 2003, p. 179).
The concept of indexicality illuminates these vibrant processes of language socialization underlying the development of literacy. Analyzing the indexical spectrum of individual words, like Chansey, allows us to explore how words develop
variable referential value in diverse discourse communities and across time. And,
recognizing the way the word can be used variably across these communities
involves different kinds of communicative competence. Developing competence
within one of these communities is a process of language socialization. Developing
the ability to traverse multiple forms of such competence is more complicated, but
I would argue, essential to ensure the successful and agentive futures of todays
children.
In todays classrooms, multiple discourse communities, including multiple
forms of popular and youth culture, are in contact. This reality demands a more
nuanced understanding of speech events and the kind of communicative competence needed to get through them. In the context of todays complex classrooms, it
becomes clear that communicative competence is never a stand alone competence,
neatly attached to predictable speech eventsit is negotiated each and every day,
moment to moment in every interaction. Building on both Hymes original work
and continuing research in language socialization, a contemporary Linguistic Anthropology of Education (Wortham & Rymes, 2003) is looking not so much for a
catalogue of immutable Speech Events and the kinds of Routines and Roles that
participants take up within them, but at convergences of speech events and clashes
of communicative competencies as learning opportunities. Changes in expectations
occur continually in interactions in classrooms and, for that matter, throughout a
lifetime. Learning in general, and I would argue, literacy development in particular,
is a continual, life-long project of socialization to and through communicatively
competent language use. Literacy development, like learning, is not a matter of

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simply acquiring certain skills, but of becoming humanethat is, becoming more
aware of other human beings and how to act competently among them (Ochs,
1996).
This means literacy development, as an embedded sociocultural practice, contingent on culturally normative processes of language socialization, is neither tidy
nor predictable. Within this conceptualization of literacy, students (and teachers)
are ever-developing social actors, with growing abilities to make relevant decisions within the ever-changing sociocultural fabric they will always be a part
of. Development within this conceptualization of learning, literacy, and humanity
entails a departure from the rigidity of stale mandates and rudimentary conceptualizations of the basics (Dyson, 2002, p. 192). It may mean, also, stepping
outside ones easy, but stagnant, comfort zone to accept the possibility that new
and perhaps better worlds, worlds in which fewer children are left behind, are, by
definition, negotiated with ones students and fellow citizens, not imposed upon
them.
Zones of Developmentor Comfort?
An understanding of learningincluding literacy learningas a dynamic form
of language socialization, when joined with Vygotskys understanding of learning
within a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), can illuminate the productive role of popular culture in the language classroom. This is because language
socialization provides us with the theoretical apparatus to reconceptualize the relationship between novice and expert, terms commonly used in association
with Vygotskys developmental theory. A careful look at language as a medium
for socialization within the ZPDincluding the indexical references and the roles
and routines that are implied and socialized through language, has the potential
to enrich an understanding of how development occursor doesnt occurin
such a zone. This reconceptualization is key to understanding how popular culture
references function within classroom interaction.
Recent neo-Vygotskian approaches to educational research (e.g., the collected
chapters in Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000, and research represented in the journal
Mind, Culture, and Activity published by the Laboratory of Comparative Human
Cognition) have also built on Vygotsky by recognizing the cultural foundations,
and as such, the variable kinds of expertise occurring in any ZPD. A key feature of
this kind of neo-Vygotskian work is the emphasis on mediation. Mediational
means (Wertsch, 1991, 1998) are often language practiceslike storytelling routines or forms of indexingbut can also take the form of non-verbal mediators like
the built environment, clothing, gesture, pictures, or other artifacts, like a candy
wrapper or a Pokmon key chain. Current researchers have used this concept to
understand how variable cultural practices and products are potentially important
variables in the process of human development. For example, Moll (2000) has built

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on Vygotsky to understand how childrens home language and practices can be incorporated into school-based literacy development, and Gutierrez and Stone (1996)
have shown how a mainstreamed student with a learning disability becomes an
expert in a book club group. Dyson has also, through rich ethnographic study
of childrens play, begun to illuminate how students actively develop their own
frameworks for learning through talk and cultural artifacts (Dyson, 1997, 2003).
This neo-Vygotskian research has begun to illustrate how expertise within the
ZPD is always shifting and the important role that childrens knowledge takes in
those shifts.
Similarly, from the perspective of language socialization, development is never a
unidirectional experience, in which one expert delivers the goods to the novice
learner. Instead, development into communicative competence is always a process
of give and take, in which both the novice and the expert are collaboratively constructing new ways of being competent (Schieffelin, 1990). Therefore, I stress the
need to look at both sides of any learning activitynot only what the novice is
doing, but also what the adult expert is doing. Vygotskys ZPD, or, the distance
between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem
solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem
solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (1978,
p. 86), initially sounds like a challenging and stimulating place for the novice.
However, the experience of the expert adult or the more capable peer. who is
guiding participation there needs more careful analysis. It is possible that the more
capable peer or adult might often be in a zonenot of developmentbut of comfort. And, this comfortable adult competence can lead to the total decomposition
of a fruitful developmental zone or ZPD.
I am referring here to this idealized, old-style, tidy familiarity with routines
and roles not as communicative competence, but comfortable competence. When
operating this way, individuals are participating in their zone of comfortable competence (ZCC). Within this zone, expectations are predictable and unproblematic.
Within this kind of rote predictability, communication is not an accurate description of the activity, and learning may not even be occurring. Within classrooms,
subtle variations of this kind of behavior, performed by both teachers and students, have been variably described as doing school (Knobel, 1999), studenting
(Fenstermacher, 1986), procedural display (Bloome, Puro, & Theodorou, 1989),
or passing (Rymes & Pash, 2001).
But, while it is common to critique this behavior, it is also difficult to avoid.
As a teacher, for example, I, too, occasionally stray into my zone of comfortable competence and, when there, I try to entice students into it. I like it there.
I play out a knowing, authoritative role, enacted through familiar routineslike
the mini-lecture and the examand I use words that resonate with meanings
familiar to my discourse community of, say, applied linguists, or some other set of
peers. But students often are tied to their own ZCC. There, they occupy comfort-

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able roles, enact familiar routines, and use words that index a different, but shared,
discourse community.
I am arguing here that we need to get beyond these separate and comfortable
ZCCs. When popular culture referenceslike Chansey the Pokmoncome up
in the classroom, this might be a situation that potentially disrupts a teachers
ZCC by revealing a student ZCC that has very different norms, routines, roles,
and indexical meanings associated with it. I will illustrate this with an example in
which the word chancy came up during a phonics activity.
BACKGROUND TO THE INTERACTION
The interaction I am about to discuss is part of a larger 2-year case study of one
second language learner, whom I call Rene. Rene came to the United States from
Costa Rica as a kindergartner. The study began when Rene was repeating second
gradedue to difficulties in reading. During the fall of the first year, I observed
Rene in school once a week and read with him after school. Then, during the
second semester of each year, I recorded Renes reading group once a week.
During the first year of the research period, some very general observations
about Renes participation became important. His spoken English was fluent and
communicative. He had many friends in the class, and was always active playing
with them during recess. However, during reading activities, Rene became shy.
In this context, Rene repeatedly would wait, as the teacher narrowed initially
open-ended questions into narrower and narrower yes/no questions, often, ultimately, supplying Rene with the right answer (Rymes, 2003; Rymes & Pash, 2001).
During the second year of the study, Renes school hired an English for Speakers
of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher. During this year, Rene and other second- and
third-grade peers were pulled from their mainstream classroom for 50 min each
morning for specialized small-group instruction. For this period, the ESOL teacher
chose to use a popular phonics program (The Phonics GameTM ) that consists of
a series of carefully sequenced phonics card games, each introducing a new rule
for understanding how to sound out words. Within the context of the game, these
rules alone are to aid in the pronunciation of the word. There are no pictures on
the cards that would give away the word, nor are there any pictures or hints in
the ad hoc ESOL meeting room. The teacher, new to the ESOL field, deliberately
chose to use this phonics game. She asked the principal and was granted permission
to order it specially for this ESOL group. The purchase was easy to justify: the
frequent assessments included in the phonics program aligned neatly with the
literacy benchmarks in the Georgia Quality Core Curriculum. Thus, while this
choice of curriculum may be said to be negotiated, it was a negotiation between
the cultural knowledge of the teacher (who responded to TV adds for the phonics
game) and the mandated curriculum guided by the state, which is in turn guided
by federal guidelines.

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The students, despite their absence in the choice of official curriculum materials,
still managed to bring their own interests even to the rigidly structured procedures of
the Phonics Game. During the playing of this card game, Rene and his classroom
peers frequently made references, unprompted, to external contextreferences
which, in the context of this tightly controlled curriculum, were always constructed
as off task. Within these non-sanctioned interactions, however, students began
to reveal their own particular senses of humor and cultural allegiancesand their
familiarity with pop culture.

THE INTERACTION: CONTRASTING ZONES OF COMFORTABLE

COMPETENCE
In the excerpt below, students are playing the phonics game with their ESOL
teacher. As this excerpt begins, Rene has pulled a card with the word chancy
written on it and the teacher is helping him to sound it out:
CHANCY/CHANSEY
Teacher:
Student:
Rene:
Teacher:
Rene:
Teacher:
Rene:
Rene:
David:
Teacher:
David:
Teacher:
Rene:
Rene:

-c- -h[- says.

[(ca:n)
a:n (.) (cha:n)
Cha:n (.) c- -y-.
(2.0)
Chances.
Cha:n::c:y.
Chancy.
Ohp! ((looking at Dante and smiling)) [Pokemon.
[Its a Pokemon.
And you have to tell me [why the a- is sho:rt.
[Chancy. (.) I got it.
You need to li:sten. ((looking at David))
Cause the c:(1.0)
The y-.

This pop culture referenceto Chansey the Pokmonmakes it apparent that

there are two Comfortable Competencies in play. Dividing the transcript makes
the disparity between teacher and student ZCCs even more vivid. Below, I have
included utterances that attend to the teachers definition of chancy and the
routine of seeking pronunciation through cues to phonological context within the
teachers column. Any utterances that attend to the student definition of Chansey,

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I have included in the students column:

Column A: teachers zone of
comfortable competence
Teacher:
Student:
Rene:
Teacher:
Rene:
Teacher:
Rene:

Column B: students zone of

comfortable competence

c- -h[- says.
[(ca:n)
a:n (.) (cha:n)
Cha:n (.) c- -y-.
(2.0)
Chances.
Cha:n::c:y.
Chancy.
Rene:

Teacher:

And you have to

tell me why the
a- is sho:rt.

Teacher:

((looking at
Dante)) You need
to li:sten.
Cause the c:(1.0) The y-.

Rene:

David:

Ohp ((looking at Dante

and smiling)) Pokemon.
Its a Pokemon.

David:

Chancy! I got it.

Within the teachers zone of comfortable competence, the teacher uses routines
(like known-answer initiation questions) that make her role as teacher apparent.
And, her words index the discourse community in which she is competent and
comfortable. In contrast, the Childrens language routines (on the right side) afford
comfortable non-academic child roles as consumers and purveyors of Pokmon
knowledge, and their language indexes their involvement in this discourse community. These two distinct competencies remain distinct throughout this interaction
(see Figure 2).
Where do the students do well? In their own zone of comfortable competence.
Rene struggles in Column A, in the teachers zone of comfortable competence,
to provide answers that satisfy the rules of the pronunciation game. But he is the
master of meaning in Column B, his own zone of comfortable competence. And,
while in Column B David is thrilled with his own recognition that he got it
(Renes reference to Chansey), in Column A he is scolded for this recognition.
The teacher reminds him, You need to listen. Davids participation shows that

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Figure 2. Teachers and students ZCCs compared.

he has been listening carefullybut to Renes side of the transcript. Even though
the students always do poorly or are scolded in the teachers ZCC, they continue
to be compelled to participate in that zone. In contrast, the teacher is completely
absent from the students ZCC.
Within any classroom, there are multiple occasions during which student
discoursesoften not so clearly tied to pop culturereveal the competencies of
the students, and undermine the discourse within which the teacher is competent.
I am arguing that recognizing these zones can be productive for both students and
teachers. Raising awareness of these zones could even provide a map for a teacher
and student explorers into unknown territories of competence.
POKMONS POTENTIAL
What kind of exploration could this Pokmon reference lead to? One option would
be to appropriate this card and use it to create curriculum: The Pokmon card
that Rene references (see Figure 1) could provide a curricular map for even
the most skill-oriented teacher. The categories like pronunciation, element,
type, height, weight, techniques, lend themselves to creative appropriation and elaboration. Even within the phonics lesson, the pronunciation, category, complete with a loosely phonetic version of Chansey, could lead to the
discussion of some phonological rules and their exceptions, or even to a discussion of how to read the phonetic section of a dictionary entry. Also, teachers and

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students together could read and critique the caption under the picture, describing
Chansey as a hard-to-find and puzzling Pokmon . . . building an understanding
of and appreciation for descriptive language. The Pokmon card also suggests spin
off activitiesstudents could, for example, invent their own Pokmon, using the
Chansey card as a template.
It is probably not coincidental that this card seems to lend itself to curriculum
planning. As Gee (2002) has pointed out, products that are marketed to children often have sophisticated learning theories behind themperhaps more sophisticated,
contextualized, and relevant than some of those taught, learned, and endorsed in
schools of education. Gee explicitly makes this point by discussing computer-based
shooter games, in which players have to make complex, situated decisions, based on
a continually accumulating set of information about available tools, weapons, and
shooting environments. The point can be carried over to any youth obsessionlike
Pokmonin which children are encouraged to become more involved with and
extremely knowledgeable about an imagined world that marketers are producing,
and, they hope, selling.
I am not suggesting, however, that teachers (in addition to students) become
pawns of marketers, seeking out and buying more and more products. I am not even
suggesting, necessarily, that teachers begin to design elaborate pop culture lessons
like design your own Pokmon. This sort of lesson, could, after all, continue to
position the teacher as expertan expert who has incorporated student culture into
his own customary and comfortable practices. I am suggesting, instead, that teachers learn how to position themselves as learners or novices, and their students as
teachers or expertsespecially when popular culture (or any youth-specific reference) emerges during lessons. It is likely that this kind of occasional repositioning
can take both teachers and students in new and worthwhile directions. They will,
potentially, be learning about each other, more about the world, and about how
what they learn in class has to do with the world they are being taught to be a
productiveand humanepart of.
IMPLICATIONS: THE SOCIALIZATION OF A HUMANE WORLD
For most adults, the suggestion that we willingly forego our expert status, even
partially, can be disconcerting. We spend most of our adult life attempting to pull
off this expert status, interactionally positioning ourselves as the holders of right
answers. So, naturally, the suggestion that students be positioned as experts, and
further, that childrens popular culture be deemed a domain of valuable expertise,
can be disturbing for a teacher. Much of teachers work as expert is also very
comforting, reassuring work. Skills-based literacy activity, for example, of the
kind we saw in the excerpt above, is work that occurs within the teachers ZCC, in
which the teacher is continually, repeatedly, interactionally positioned as the expert.
These days, however, participation in this skills-based comfort zone is unlikely to

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produce a relevantly educated citizenry. It is not enough to simply entice students

over to our own ZCCs. The mastery of literacy skills like phonics pattern drills
provides only the lowest base from which to participate in society.
A contemporary communicative competence is not simply the ability to reside
inertly within a comfort zone, but the ability to enter into other ZCCsto, for
example, mediate between the world of Chansey and the world of chancy.
This means readers like Rene and his teacher will have to be able to find meaning
in words, and to understand the multiple meanings words hold across discourse
communitiesand be able to bridge those disparate meanings. Teachers might
need to become novices in a field about which they know very little. They might be
coaxed into their own ZPD, in which students are the more capable peers. From
this perspective, responsible teaching is not defined as dispensing sanctioned skills
and information, but as effectively mediating between the discourse communities
that support student meanings, and those that are supported by the infrastructure
promoting skills-based phonics drills and accountability measures.
Becoming a momentary novice does not mean teachers must abdicate their responsibility and simply look to children and mass marketers for new curricular
templates (even designing-your-own Pokemon could be perceived as a suggestion
painfully lacking in imagination and grossly guided by mass-marketing!). I am
suggesting instead, that popular culture has the potential to highlight teachers
responsibility by augmenting our awareness of the sociocultural context in which
students participate. Popular culture forces parents and teachers alike to teach
and to learn about the emotionally and morally charged imaginative worlds, many
constructed out of popular culture, children inhabit. Adults, despite minimal awareness of the myriad characters children bring to life in the classroom, have other
forms of expertise that contribute to continual negotiation of classroom curriculum.
Through popular culture, childrens imaginative sources become part of this curricular negotiationnot commodities purchased and played out. The interaction
in classrooms has the potential to breathe life and learning into cultural artifacts,
to weave them into a lively cultural surfaceone in which students need and
desperately want to participate actively, successfully, and knowingly.
Literacy is almost universally perceived as a means to achieve an active role
in society over a lifetime. The written word is nothing if not a means for a new
generation to participate in, play with, enjoy, and shape society in new ways.
Seven- and 8-year-olds who bring a Pokemon card to class will likely turn a deaf
ear to discussions of the evils of mass-marketing and the death of creativity. But
they will jump at the chance to use the cultural resources they have available to
them creativelyto talk about them, make jokes about them, recombine them, and
use them in active, critical and insightful ways to connect with each other and to
understand their connection with the world. It is unlikely that mass-marketing and
crudely motivated capitalism will ever go away. But it is not necessary to reproduce
that mentality within our classrooms and within massive scale one-size-fits all

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literacy campaigns (and literacy packages like the Phonics Game) that soothe our
societies need to be in control, but which simultaneously stifle our creative agency
to change the aspects of society we need to.
Policy makers too would do well to depart from their own skills-based (and
mass-marketed) understandings of human development. The United States
administrations current reading and testing policy, I would argue, is based on the
needs of politicians and the public today to return to their own comfort zones
where success is accomplished through rote, predictable routines and static roles,
and where they can nurse along the comfortable, cultural illusion that national
skills-based literacy benchmarks will produce a fully and responsibly educated
citizenry (Knobel, 1999, p. 198). Clearly, however, comfortable routines and roles
will not prepare students to take up active questioning roles within todays marketplace. Students learning to read today in school will not hold a job for 40 years,
gradually moving up the ranks through a careful application of rote skills. So, if
they learn only the rote skills that Bush will be testing them on, they will not have
the familiarity with multiple discourse communities needed to navigate the different roles they will have to play to be active participants in their world in the future.
The only way students and teachers will ever be able to resist this widget-like
identity, however, will be to depart from their comfort zonesto be willing to
become learners in a new and changing world. It is reasonable, then, to expect
that a national reading policy attend to these contemporary demands, rather than
retreat from them.
As Ochs (1996) has written, the socialization of a humane world depends on a
continual human willingness to assume the status of novice as parents, as teachers,
and as culture travelers. (p. 432). The need for this kind of human willingness
is critically revealed in those cases in which popular culture enters the classroom.
Popular culture potentially provides an explicit opportunity for a teacher, a parent,
or any kind of culture traveler to depart from a static and comfortable zone of
competence and to take on the role of novice. In this role, an individual has an
opportunity to learn about the world, rather than retreat from it in a state of future
shock, and to share that learning with others. It is possible that, in the process,
classrooms can go beyond their existence as places of skill acquisition, to becoming
places of socialization (for adults and children both) into a modern and humane
world.
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