Section 1: Introduction
In these pages of the website, you will be introduced to ways in which you can work with student teachers so that they reflect on the value of using popular culture in the literacy curriculum. A number of areas of popular culture are considered: television and films; books, magazines and comics; games and toys; sports; music and popular culture and role play. You will then be introduced to the concept of ‘third space’ and become familiar with the factors that promote successful engagement with popular culture in schools. First, however, we consider what popular culture is and why it might be important to include this material in the curriculum.
What is popular culture?
‘Popular culture’ is a phrase that can be applied to those cultural texts, artefacts and practices that are attractive to large numbers of children and which are often mass produced on a global scale. Popular culture can consist of a wide range of materials in children’s lives, as represented in Figure 1 (adapted from Marsh and Millard, 2000).
This list is not exhaustive, of course, but it does indicate the pervasive nature of popular culture in children’s lives. Popular culture is both consumed and produced. Children buy or are bought popular culture goods and artefacts, but they can also be creative in producing popular culture, for example in devising games or adapting commercialised themes to their own ends. In addition, popular culture can be both global and local. Globalisation occurs through the mass production of popular cultural narratives that cross national boundaries and become adopted on a worldwide basis, such as the Pokémon phenomenon. As Marsh (in press) argues:
This globalisation of children’s culture has inevitably led to concerns about the relationship between children’s culture and commercial interests (Kenway and Bullen, 2001).
Indeed, it is clear that the producers of popular films and games do develop strategic marketing plans in order to ensure maximum take-up of products, with some companies employing ‘localisers’ whose task it is to shape a cultural product originating in one country to the cultural climate of another (Tobin, 2004). However, children are not passive dupes of this process; they have considerable agency in the consumption of these products. In addition, popular culture is both consumed and produced. This means that we need to move beyond the binary of global/local to a recognition that popular culture is glocal (Robertson, 1992; 1995); children localise globalised products, fashioning their ideas to their particular contexts. Similarly, popular culture can be consumed and produced on both a mass and a small scale. Some popular cultural forms are distinct to specific social and cultural groups. For example, Kenner (2005) describes the popular cultural interests of the bilingual children she studied in projects that focused on the literacy experiences of children in minority ethnic communities in Britain and these included ‘Bollywood’ films, Thai karaoke videos and community-language newspapers.
Why use popular culture in the literacy curriculum?
There are a number of reasons why incorporating popular culture into the literacy curriculum is valuable. It can:
- validate the experiences children have outside of school and enable them to feel that their out-of-school knowledge is valuable;
- enthuse children and enhance their motivation for learning;
- offer material that is familiar to different groups of children, whatever their cultural or racial background, as most children engage with some forms of popular culture, thus providing common and shared interests;
- enable children to engage with multimodal texts that are part of their everyday worlds and so are familiar to them.
This is not to suggest that other texts should not be used. Children need introductions to more canonical, heritage texts. However, rather than viewing this as an ‘either/ or’ choice, student teachers should be encouraged to think broadly about the range of material they use in the classroom, drawing from popular and canonical texts in their planning. It is also worth remembering that texts can cross the high/ low culture divide – think of Shakespeare and opera!
For further discussion on the value of using popular culture, refer to the papers presented in the ESRC Research Seminar Series ‘Children’s Literacy and Popular Culture’, held at the University of Sheffield – http://www.shef.ac.uk/literacy/esrc
In the sections listed in this section of the website, you will be introduced to different aspects of popular culture and ways of working with popular texts with student teachers.
 
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