Part 4 of 10
How to Teach in Trump’s America [Bringing up Race, Immigration, Sexuality and everything else in
Higher Ed]
4 ENGAGE POP CULTURE
Where do you
get your news? Do you buy a
newspaper? Do you read magazines?
TV? Are you on your iPad skimming the
articles? Facebook (be honest)? Instagram? Buzzfeed? Twitter? How many of you turn to your textbooks when
you want to learn about up-to-date-real-time advances in your field? Probably none of us. Yet we expect our students to do just
that. With life happening right outside
our classroom we want students to turn all that off for the next hour and fifteen
minutes and learn about something that many of us refuse to link to what is
currently going on. It sounds ridiculous
when you see it explained that way, doesn’t it?
I love to
update my class readings every semester because facts are stranger than
fiction. Headlines rarely disappoint to increase readership so why not allow
those into the classroom? My discipline
is communication so analyzing the rhetoric that was used during the presidential
campaign is a natural link but isn’t that true in English as well? What about a
historical speech analysis that compares and contrasts past speeches with the
Oscars acceptance speeches? That works
for my communication classes but history too right? They are always ways of linking and when we
are passionate about our field those things become more and more obvious. We do it all the time, even when we’re
reviewing a film after just watching it. For instance when my husband and I
watched Arrival he was nerding-out in terms of linguistic anthropology
while I was sure it had been written by a communication scholar.
It’s not hard
to envision how pop culture can be used in our classroom but how easy it is to
have a new supplemental source that it is much more likely to enable students
to see our academic concepts reflected in art and real life.
How many of us
read journal articles regularly? If we
do, how many of us can refer it to a friend?
What if that friend isn’t an academic, can we expect them to read the
article and afterwards have a heated discussion with us? Then why are we teaching our students that is
the only way to go about learning and understanding? Bring in a Buzzfeed article as a
supplemental reading that relates to your chapter and see how much more engaged
your students are. Watch how students
that have never raised their hand before are suddenly interrupting you to add
comments.
Pop culture is
not the enemy, it is the social commentary.
When we separate ourselves from that, our lectures and course material
become outdated and useless which makes us very dangerous to our students. I also like pop culture because it allows for
a framework. Most of our students are immersed
in what is going on via a pop culture lens so when you say, let’s talk about
Katy Perry, they are immediately prepared with an opinion. You then use your
course material, let’s say in psychology, and discuss how her recent comments
about Britney Spears highlighted the stigmas that we place on mental health.
Give them a way to understand what is happening in the world around them. Let your students learn from a variety of resources,
allow them to have a diverse educational background so that they are better at
listening, better learners, and more equipped to succeed.
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