Critical Pedagogy in Popular Culture

"An oppressive rendering of a culturally diverse text is still oppressive." (pg. 186)
-->> So true! We are told that we need to be culturally inclusive in the classroom, and a lot of teachers fall into the trap of then choosing literature that features a person of color as the main character and calling it good. That is not culturally inclusive though! We need to think outside the box. We can still use "classic" literature and see the struggles of the non-dominant and be culturally inclusive. Not to say that that will cover our bases, but classic literature is still a very important aspect of the English classroom and it still needs to be taught to our students. The fun part is that we can dive into it and talk about endless possibilities. We can encourage our students to think deeper and at the same time be critical and not make connections where they may not exist.

"...we are encouraging the creation of meaningful links between the worlds of the students and the worlds of canonical texts." (pg. 195)
-->> I think this one of our main jobs and goals of being a teacher. If we can incorporate both popular culture and canonical texts into our classrooms and curricula, our students will be engaged and will be willing to participate in classroom activities. We can help them make connections by providing the materials for them or we can encourage them to make their own connections by asking them to bring in popular culture ideas or texts and explore and defend the connections to canonical texts. Because the world is always changing and popular culture is almost never the same from one month to the next, we need to be sure to stay on top of things. We need to know how to use the current technologies, social media outlets, and who's dating who in the world of celebrity gossip. These things are important to our students and so they should be important to us as well. We will become disconnected from our students if we cannot talk with them about their interests.