Emily Skinner’s text explores using popular magazines and movies as ‘mentor texts’ through which students could practice numerous skills. Skinner explains that students can be encouraged to critically consume popular texts and to use these texts to examine various social issues and aspects of there personal lives on a deeper level. Using popular texts not only can easily motivate normally reluctant students but can also allow students to enjoy learning something which I believe has been lost in many school systems. The ability to instill genuine intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn and improve can be accomplished in several ways, one of these ways being through using popular texts and images in the classroom. Basing writing exercises on popular materials encourages critical examination both of texts and of the writing and planning process in general. Although the use of these texts in the classroom would seem to be a wholly positive experience for students, their use would definitely need to be carefully monitored in order to keep students on task.
2 thoughts on “Using Popular Texts in the Classroom”
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I was also interested in the idea of using popular texts in the classroom too because it seems like a positive way to bridge the division between academics and life outside of school. One of the major themes this whole semester has been to expand the definition of literacy to include skills that are not usually valued by schools. Pop culture movies, TV shows, and magazines tend not to be used as “academic,” but blending the binary between pop culture and academics might be helpful in teaching students to be critical thinkers about the world around them.
I also thought it was interesting that the article is not actually about an academic class: Teenage Addiction is an afterschool club. This gave Skinner a lot more freedom because there were no curriculum standards she had to follow. I think that using pop culture texts in a public school classroom would look very different than how Skinner used them in her club. Although I agree that Skinner’s students learned valuable critical media literacy skills, I am still curious about how her process could be incorporated into a classroom where there are so many more restrictions.
I completely agree with Joe that popular texts are an excellent means of getting students more involved in reading and writing. It sparks an initial interest because the texts deal with things relevant to the students’ current situation. It avoids the backlash of “What does this have to do with me and my life?” that students often use to protest reading things that they consider outdated or irrelevant. However, I also agree with the point that dealing with popular texts can get out of hand. There are a lot of inappropriate and/or adult themes on the internet, in magazine articles and in novels that are not suitable for many age groups. This is up to the teacher to monitor and choose what is classroom appropriate.