Final paper

Too often we read about the disengagement of our youth in school, staggering dropout rates in high school; place blame on the teachers, schools which fail to address the needs of these students. Part of this reasoning may be legitimate, due to lack of equipment, insufficient training of teachers or curriculum that could be dry and unrelated to students’ daily experience. Popular culture and technology is a daily part of that experience.

This article is a summary of an exploration in use of media literacy and pop culture in the traditional classroom, particularly social studies courses. The criterion was to investigate the most common courses that are taught in most comprehensive high schools: civics, history (world and U.S.), geography and how they incorporated media literacy and/or popular culture. The reason that I chose this topic was to explore how media literacy is being taught outside the language arts area, where most of the current MN state standards for media literacy are held, although there are some within the social studies standards. To find what types of media is often used within these areas whether it is films, music, or television. I also wanted to know how successful the instructors felt in achieving the objectives they set out with their incorporations and still meet state standards. Also, because of the reality of school funding, many schools do not have the choice to offer extracurricular classes that would offer specific focuses on media literacy and current popular culture unless they find grants or other non-profit sources to sponsor these programs, so I am seeking viable alternatives to incorporate media literacy and pop culture into traditional social studies courses. I also feel that bridging the gaps between disengaged youth and their schools begins with welcoming and using the media that comes with them.

I am also concerned with our lack of promotion of social efficacy, which the knowledge and understanding of our environment and people around us within our students (White). Even though social efficacy is something we value in our goals, it is not something we are enforcing within our schools very well. The movement in the schools is currently toward standardizing fact-based curriculum across and within districts, keeping teachers accountable in terms of what knowledge the student has acquired or learned. Due to the national law, No Child Left Behind, which emphasizes reading, writing, math and science, social studies, has been pushed into the margins. It is not seen as an area with much value other than civic and historical education. As a result, electives are pushed out that do not pertain to directly aiding students with passing the mandated NLCB state tests. At my own school, for example, our last elective psychology was recently cut with great regret to our department because of declining enrollment, and no staff available to teach it. It is hard to entice students to take classes that they do not see as requirements for graduation, plus those courses that are require or needed for NLCB take up the majority of students’ schedules with little room for anything else. All of our staff schedules are filled with required or mandated courses that students must take for graduation and we do not have the staff to offer electives that may add to gaining social or self-efficacy.

The reason that I focused on social studies education is due to my own interest and profession. I wanted to see how other social studies teachers were incorporating media literacy skills and popular culture into their classrooms. I purposely focused on literature that was published after 2001 and tried to find the most current pieces that focused on the integration of media literacy, pop culture and how NCLB has shaped what teachers are doing in their classes or if it has any effect at all. I was also curious to see how teachers were incorporating the technology they had available and what kind of resources did they use. I am all too aware of the technology gap within my own school and have experienced significant lack of technological equipment. I was also familiar with some techniques of pop culture integration, but in my own field I haven’t seen much integration of pop culture other that to evaluate some song lyrics, like those of the Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Stop the Fire” or to discuss the impact of Bob Dylan during the unrest of the 1960s or to watch a movie adaptation of an historical event. Most often in these instances, students are passive participants; they look for the instructor to interpret these items for them. The songs and their artists are dated in their perspectives and movies are often used to supplement what has been taught in class, or for a free day. I wanted to see more interactive assignments and activities where teachers were scaffolding to build critical thinking skills.

Our current society has made popular culture a cornerstone of cultural identity (White.pg 4). So why the resistance to include this within our curriculum? I feel there are several reasons for this. One reason is that we are anxious to impart core knowledge of the subject we are teaching, and there are limitations to how much time we have to impart all this knowledge. I see my students one hour a day, five days a week from September to May. That is not counting pep rallies, field trips, sick and workshop days (for both of us) and vacation days. I have students who are involved in many organizations that promote them going to higher levels of education, but take them out of school for college visits, academic tests, competitions and the like. In the end, the time we have together to insert all of the core knowledge is limited.

I also feel that many teachers believe that popular culture does not have enough to offer our youth, in terms of knowledge or insight about their world. I understand this perception, it is something I do I agree with to an extent. I would like our students to have some historical context to understand why we are in the state we are in the world today. To learn about the basic cultural information that connects and divides us from one another. My colleagues may see the television shows, movies and hear the music that our teens are consuming, but judge it as cheap or processed and having nothing to offer to enrich our students lives. Some of that may be due to lack of training on media issues, if you are not shown how to incorporate, it may be something that does not get implemented. In this world of mandates, some may feel it’s just one more thing to learn, to do that there just isn’t time or energy to do.

Even through this course, which I found innovative, there were some topics I struggled to find the relationship between the pop culture topic we would be discussing and how could I make it relevant to the courses I am currently teaching and still maintain the balance between rigor, content and pop culture. Some days it was a stretch to be creative with different mediums. However because the diversity of the students within the class, I think it enabled the majority of us to look at these mediums with different lenses and see the possibilities of their use.

The need for media literacy is great. The vast changing after school cyber-culture of teens: online chatting, podcasts, and youtube, clashes with the current climate in high school which is primarily text based: overheads, notes on the board, textbooks (Semali). There is a disconnect between the mediums students consider easy and enjoyable with those they consider work. There is also great disparity among students who have access to this technology and know how to use it. Our students themselves, despite their access to technology through social means (cell phones, email, text messaging, MySpace) may be able to communicate with others across the globe, but often are communicating with those whom live in the same city as themselves. Are they using technology to its full potential?

The Internet is the primary tool for research for our students, 85 % of 15-17 year olds go online to do their schoolwork (Kaiser). In my own situation, the students would rather go to the computer lab to do research than the library, even if I bring laptops to supplement the availability of computers in the library. They tend to view book resources and or the library as obsolete. There is an increasing amount of primary and secondary sources that are accessible to students are now online, which is why they may not feel the need to go. However, we as educators have a responsibility to educate and inform our student about the type of references they are using to cite for their schoolwork. We should be concerned that they are able find creditable resources. That they can conduct research and to be able to locate information and to disseminate it. I have come to the realization through working with my own students that many do not know how to find answers if it is not explicitly stated or have hard time understanding or summarizing what they are reading. Part of that is the downfall of the new technology, which pretty much allows you to type a query and produces a multitude of answers within seconds.

The plea to incorporate media literacy into social studies is not new, since it is a logical fit. However our state standards do not require an extensive amount of media literacy to be incorporated into our curriculum. Therefore, the urgency for social studies teachers to learn these skills is non-existent. At many of the media based classes and workshops I have attended that are free in our district, I am usually one of two social studies teachers in the room. Barton and Levstik’s in their 2001 article stated “If schools are to prepare students for active citizenship in a democracy, they can neither ignore controversy nor teach students to passively accept someone else’s historical interpretations.” It is our responsibility as social studies instructors to create and use culture as mediums to construct their own interpretations about the events and topics we are teaching them in our courses.

Media Literacy and integration of popular culture are essential to preparing our students for the type of citizens that we would like them to be. Especially those that are disadvantaged, like those from lower income families. If students from poor or working class families are only about half as likely to use the internet and are four times more likely to access the Internet only at school (Kaiser), then school is the only place where the levels of technological and critical thinking skills is going to be acquired. Although many educators themselves struggle with technology, we are the equalizers for many of these students. We have an obligation to learn and incorporate as much technology as we can.

Currently NCLB’s lack of incorporation of these skills is startling. There is more focus on the skills of reading math and science, understandably because of our competitions with other nations of the world to be a dominant and effective economy. However, because of the penalties that NCLB imposes on schools and districts who perform poorly on mandated tests that measure these skills, most of the resources in schools are devoted to improving these skills and test scores. Fundamentally I have no argument against this, we as nation should be devoting resources to such causes to improve student learning and retention. However, other areas of a school curriculum also promote these skills as well as those needed to adapt to a constantly changing technological world. There is also a lack of training on how to teach teachers to use media and popular culture in to their classes, and more emphasize on teachers to incorporate more reading and writing strategies without much engagement from media.

There are also varying perceptions on how we as educators should approach the media. According to Ladislaus Semali, there are three perceptions on how to approach or deal with media and pop culture that he observed through different media education units. A protectionist approach is to limit the amount of media that a child consumes, advocates censorship or regulation. The interventionalist approach focuses on the negative issues that pertain to the media, such as violence, gender role stereotyping or misleading information in advertisement. This approach looks at media literacy as a way to teach youth strategies to protect them from these issues. The cultural studies perspective looks at creation of awareness as a whole and to engage the audience in critical evaluation of the media that is presented and question the motivation behind the messages being portrayed. Democracy depends on a informed public, as stated by Robert Kubey. What better democratic process than to keep those whom are our informants accountable? That is our primary responsibility as social studies educators. The cultural studies approach looks media literacy skills and techniques as integral to the curriculum, not a separate entity.

One example of incorporating a common medium, films, that are used by many social studies teachers, is that of Adam Woelders, who uses motion pictures and documentaries as one of many sources that students use to construct and analyze an historical event in his world history course. His use of K-W-L (Know-Wonder-Learn) charts and anticipation guides help students guide through their historical inquiry by having students build on prior knowledge on an historical event . The anticipation guides are used to enable students to begin gathering information about the topic that they may not have familiarity with. Woelders also provides a viewing guide so that students can follow the films and able to follow the necessary information from it. The guides also helps them identify what information is left out of the film after they view it, and to speculate on why that information was omitted. These tools help enable students to be critical of the films they view. It also helps set up the structure for historical inquiry for the comparison of film with other sources. The students at the end of their research are to write a construction of the event in their own words. Although it was an example from a middle school perspective, it is an activity that can be adjusted with any secondary school level. Woelders himself wrote the article about his techniques because he was concerned with the lack of incorporation of media literacy skills for middle school students within the content area.

W. Dean Eastman, a government teacher who was concerned about the lack of political knowledge his students had coming into his course, began a collaboration with his school librarian who was concerned how students were legitimizing the news and online sources that they researched and whether or not they understood each outlet has its own perspective. Students in the course are involved in an ongoing process of learning about local history and its ties to what was happening in our nation at the same time. For the article, they highlight the unit of voting rights and had students exploring why residents in their own neighborhoods do not participate in the voting process. From there, they compared their results to national results. Eventually they created PrimaryReseach.org ( www.primaryresearch.org) a website that provides their students with web resources for the class such as assignments and study guides as well as reworked pieces of primary documents to accommodate various reading levels. It is tailored to meet the needs of the students, the local community and topic they are researching. However, the skills that students gain as being amateur historians and well as to critically look at the data

The chapter “Historical Thinking” from the book Tooning In: Essays on Popular Culture and Education argues the most history education is text driven and centers on covering on basic facts. Teachers often use film to teach or emphasize historical information, however that in terms of teaching critical thinking skills, it is not any more challenging than reading a textbook or listening to a lecture. It is, as I stated before, a passive activity. The authors advocate not just watching film, but having students evaluate a film through what content is present and in terms of the context it was made. For example, viewing the film Night of the Living Dead which came out in 1968 and relating the film to race relations within the United States at that time. How is the film symbolically used to illustrate race relations? What about the tactics used by those whom were advocating for civil rights at that time? Using the film as a context, you could discuss why the actions used by civil rights leaders were more confrontational than those of the earlier sixties. The entire chapter discusses how a class looked at films throughout the last forty years, and demonstrated how an instructor could have student research and discuss what may have been going on locally at the same time as well as national issues that were being faced.

Conclusion

Through the research I was able to conduct, there were many of examples of teachers incorporating popular culture and media literacy principles into standard social studies content courses. Many of these techniques were innovative, interactive and rigorous; they enhanced the research skills that instructors wanted their students to attain, yet often allowed students to add their own knowledge and process into the final product. Students felt engaged and empowered, because they were learning to do the work of historians and being able to add their own voices. Isn’t this the goal we all want as educators for our students? To understand that they can apply these skills to any task or job they may have to accomplish? Education in the 21st century is no longer about what we know, but how we learn, apply and being able to critically think about the information that we learn and understand its fluidity. Popular culture, with its own fluidity and the skills that media literacy promotes fit very well into the type of learners we are trying to create. As educators, our responsibility is to continue innovative teaching and modeling in these areas.






Bibliography

Kaiser Foundation Fact Sheet (2002) “Media Literacy” 13 May 2008
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/Media-Literacy.cfm

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