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Luke Rodseiler

Keywords

English classrooms, culturally relevant pedagogy, traditional literary texts, popular culture, literary resources

Submission Type

Research

Preview

The place for texts from popular culture— viewed here as “everyday culture” (Hagood, Alvermann, & Heron-Hruby, 2010, p. 9)—in the English language arts (ELA) classroom continues to be defined as literacy and English education scholars extol the benefits of incorporating such texts to support student learning (e.g., Beach & O’Brien, 2008; Dyson, 2003; Morrell, 2004, 2009; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2004, Sánchez, 2010). Despite the potential benefits that the classroom use of texts from popular culture has to offer, such as promoting culturally relevant pedagogy (Gay, 2000), providing greater motivation for students (Morrell, 2004), and tapping into students’ everyday funds of knowledge (Moje et al., 2004), some teachers may feel compelled to leave such texts out of the classroom. Given pressing curricular demands and an increasing emphasis placed on standardized test scores (Ravitch, 2010), some teachers may feel pressured to adhere strictly to the traditional literary texts required by their respective districts. Accordingly, in this article, I aim to present those teachers and others with an approach to instructional design that may allow them to account for pop culture’s influence in their students’ lives, to share space in the ELA classroom between both traditional literary texts and those from popular culture.

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