Have you heard?! The live action remake of Lion King has released its teaser trailer, along with a date for the premiere, Summer 2019. Twitter has been in a uproar about this movie for the last few days. We are all so excited to relive our childhood memories of a classic movie, except maybe Mufasa's death? Yeah, don't know if I can emotionally deal with that again, in live action. Whew. Its too much to deal with. Too. Much. Ya hear?
The cast is amazing. James Earl Jones, Alfre Woodard, Seth Rogan, Donald Glove and Beyoncé to name a few.
Yes, Beyoncé. Not only is Lion King already a relevant classic Disney movie, that's exciting itself but what took the Twitter conversation to another level was adding Beyoncé to the mix. Mainstream pop culture has this effect.
Mainstream pop culture is impactful and makes material in the classroom relevant and applicable to the things students consume daily. Television shows, movies, albums and trends all cultivate culture and they engage students. On day 1 of my 1010 class, I shared with my students my love for Beyoncé. They all thought it was funny but not many of them actually are huge fans of hers and consume her daily, because of that, I don't show Beyoncé examples often because its not relevant for them. I make sure that the pop culture examples I find are things they are consuming and will enjoy. I went through that in high school, my teachers who were integrating pop culture in their classrooms didn't even consider what their students enjoyed. I mostly heard about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings in high school, two movies I've never seen a day in my life. It was frustrating to never understand the examples and have assignments crafted around these pieces of entertainment I simply didn't care about. Experiences like that make it even more imperative to consider the student first and give them agency over their learning in the classroom.
Pop culture is a big part of my pedagogy, not just because of the examples I can use to correlate to course material, but I often use pop culture as a way to connect with my students a few minutes before class. We will have conversations about their current line ups on Hulu and Netflix, and it makes the examples and the conversations about things in class more organic. #TheReal
I was looking for the “like” icon on your post, Kimmy. I definitely need to update my pop culture examples. The trouble is, I am “into” such niche, obscure genres of dark humor, so I don’t use popular examples from my “questionable” culture. I can totally feel your high school frustration with Star Wars and Lord of the Ring, and how those examples were just not relatable to you. #relatable #pleasedon’t
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, one popular cultural example at UNT is the 90’s TV show “Friends”. I’ve never willingly watched an entire episode of this defunct rom-com sitcom. I simply was not interested in it. The faces and places in the show were irrelevant to me; they seemed vapid and too different from me and my own socio-cultural context to be meaningful. However, the vapid ordinariness of “Friends” seems to be exactly what makes it so accessible and meaningful to my COMM 2020 students, who are 19 and 20 years old! Surprisingly, many of my students “know” that show.
Without an “acceptable for work” stockpile of popular culture, I started looking to my students for examples, especially during Rhetoric week when we dissected music videos as a class “drill” to prepare them for the assignment. Recalling that week, I can’t help thinking of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “…teacher is no longer just a teacher, but one who is taught in the dialogue” (p. 80).
I really like your pre-class conversations about their lineups on visual media platforms. I am going to borrow that strategic conversation topic to get pop culture example ideas from my students in an organic way. I did a CAT (Classroom Assessment Technique) on my 1010s to get a gauge on how I’m doing, what I need to keep up, what I need to update/fix/change, and the general consensus seems to be that I make the course topics relevant. I want to keep spilling that “pipin’ hot COMM tea” for my students.
BEYONCEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! I think what you said about making sure to find pop culture examples that are relevant to them is particularly important. I have also been in classes where some of the examples I had never heard of and the teacher didn't practice withitness to see that most of his students were absolutely lost.
ReplyDeleteI'm shocked Beyonce is not relevant to them, but that is neither here nor there. I've definitely had moments in the classroom where my pop culture examples have fell embarrassingly flat and it leaves me with listening to crickets until I realize there's no where to go but up!
I'm also absolutely stealing the idea to brush up on pop culture a couple minutes before class just to have some ready ideas in my hand to help me when I'm teaching :)