Pop+culture

michael rockbrand monday class topic: music: explore the lyrics of pop culture

What Technology-Crazed Adolescents Tell Us About Teaching
This article describes a study where Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) were integrated into two eighth grade social studies classrooms to create a bridge that connected traditional textbook teaching with new technology. This article will explore the motivation for this type of integration, give specific details about the study, and share what we learned from students about how using the technology gave them control over their reading, connected to their lives, and gave a new spin on the old in terms of content area literacy strategies. Finally, this article will conclude with future directions for educational implications for research and practice. []

**MEDIA TEXTS**
We don’t mean to over-simplify, but we think it’s important to recognize the word “literacy” as part of the phrase for two reasons: 1) to note the real and symbolic relationships between media literacy and theoretical and pedagogical notions of print literacy that have been a part of education studies for over fifty years; and 2) to begin to understand how the concept of “literacy” has evolved (and continues to evolve) in the discipline of English education since the 1960s when cognitive theories of reading comprehension become widely accepted by educators. We believe that media literacy (and its helpmate and pedagogical tool, popular culture) is a continuation of this evolution, as the field of English Education re-conceptualizes literacy for the 21st century. []

LITERACY AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
What sorts of reading knowledge, processes and strategies do young people draw on in playing computer games? I want to begin by looking at two groups of young people playing computer games in school, and talking their way through as they play. Both excerpts are taken from a year eight class, where computer games were incorporated into the English curriculum in a study undertaken by a group of secondary teachers, []

MEDIA LITERACY: AUDIENCES NEGOTIATE MEANING
The media provide us with much of the material upon which we build our picture of reality, and we all "negotiate" meaning according to individual factors: personal needs and anxieties, the pleasures or troubles of the day, racial and sexual attitudes, family and cultural background, and so forth. []

HARRY POTTER: POPULAR CULTURE AND EDUCATION
Of course, this also means detractors have come forward, who are mainly responding to the high/low culture divide, believing that anything with such broad mass appeal can’t warrant serious educational attention. Nick Seaton, from the Campaign for Real Education in Britain, hit out stating: ‘It does not merit a course at one of the country’s top universities.’ But to quote another popular culture figure: ‘Au contraire, baby.’ Not only do the Potter books harken back to older legends, such as King Arthur, Greek and Roman myths and the works of J.R.R.Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, they also explore the rites of passage associated with burgeoning adulthood in sensitive ways. Using Joseph Campbell’s notion of the ‘hero’s journey’, Rowling takes Harry on a quest, to not only destroy the great evil of Voldemort and his cabal of Death Eaters, but to vanquish his inner demons and, in doing so, learn how to be a decent man, friend and partner in a complex world. []