Changing Student Engagement One Meme at a Time

            It’s no joke. Student engagement is necessary for creating a productive learning environment for the classroom. As teachers, we want to be relatable and hope the students show at least half of our passion towards the topic. So how do we make learning fun and fruitful? The answer is simple: pop culture.

Your next question may be “What is Pop culture?” Well, I know what I think it is, but I decided to use some popular [cultural] websites to see what they had to say about it. These are some of my personal favorites that made me smile:

“Cultural activities or commercial products reflecting, suited to, or aimed at the tastes of the general masses of people.”

                  -dictionary.reference.com

“The cultural phenomenon that facilitates the definition of words on the internet. Pop Culture simply denotes a widely accepted group of practices or customs. Goths, preps, youths all are parts of its' embodiment, but so are you/we, internet users who slander others on websites.”

                        -www.urbandictionary.com

“Popular culture or pop culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century.”

                                    -en.wikipedia.org

To me, popular culture is basically information that is circulating through social channels that is interesting to certain groups. I recognize that it is much more in depth than that, but as the semester goes along, I will dig deeper into developing the definition and applying it to teaching.

According to Barkley (2010), “For new learning to take place, it has to be related to what the learner already know” (p. 30). What do students already know? Pop culture.

  

Through my personal teaching experience (very limited of about 3 weeks), I have found my references to social media, movies, music, and viral videos have made the students perk up and interact.

For example on using popular culture for student engagement, I created this is a slide on the contexts of communication. I had the students match the picture to the different communication context. Then the students had to decide whether the ice bucket challenge was an example of mass communication or public communication. This brought into discussion of how with technology the two contexts could be interconnected.

Using this reference allowed the students to connect with the information on a more personal note because if they had not participated in the challenge themselves, they had at least seen it (who hasn’t?) on their own social media.

Using popular cultural references can be very effective for keeping students interested and engaged in a lecture or participating in discussions.  As Barkley (2010) reminds us, “the greater the student’s involvement or engagement in academic work… the greater his or her level of knowledge acquisition and general cognitive development” (p. 4). As teachers, we can increase the level of student involvement with how we relate the information our students already know to the information we want them to know.  Therefore, to my fellow teachers, I encourage you to continue #doingpopculture in the classroom.

ST

Disclaimer: I recognize that popular culture is not the only way to increase student engagement. This is just one example of connecting your students with content.

Resources

Barkley, E. (2010). Student engagement techniques: A handbook for college faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Beaman, W. (2003, December 8). Pop culture. Retrieved September 11, 2015.

Pop culture. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved September 11, 2015, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pop culture

West, G. (2013). Popular culture. Retrieved September 11, 2015.