Notes on Alvermann and Xu: Children's Everyday Literacies
- Adults find it difficult to believe that children might have the ability to create their own meanings of the popular culture they consume.
- Parents and teachers alike often blame the media for children’s problems
- Popular culture in terms of children’s everyday illiteracies is not something to be shunned, set aside, or kept at a distance.
- When children are not taught to become critically aware of media-produced popular culture texts, their thinking about such texts goes unchallenged.
- By reading from these opposing positions, the children were able to put themselves into the “storyline”
- Popular culture texts can be useful tools to teachers who are interested in developing their students’ critical awareness
o Explore their own knowledge of popular culture interests both for adults and children
o Use children’s popular culture interests to make home-school connections for linguistically and culturally diverse learners
o Use pop culture interests to teach reading and language arts concepts and skills
o Use pop culture to teach literacy across the curriculum
o Use pop culture interests to teach critical literacy
o Create pop culture surveys for them and their students to fill out and then later discuss
o Dora the Explorer- the teacher and students can make a book of Spanish and English words, and compare and contrast sounds of the same letter in English and in Spanish
o Compare and Constract the book, The Cay with the movie, Cast Away.
o Maria used several activities to connect her students’ interest in Pokemon with the district’s curriculum objectives
o Teachers might engage students in a discussion about a particular group of firefighters, police officers, airplane passengers, and others who saved real peoples lives on 9/11. By connecting students interests in pop culture with actual events that happened in a broader context, teachers are developing children’s critical awareness of how the media portrays heroic deeds, both mythically and in reality.
- I was not so keen on integrating pop culture into the classroom before reading this article. I felt like it was an intrusion to the classroom and curriculum and would serve as nothing more than a distraction to the students. After reading this article, I realized I was very much mistaken. I now have a better understanding of how pop culture can be extremely motivating to students learning. The teacher just needs to do his or her research, and find components from that tv show, movie, trading card, etc. that will correspond to the curriculum. As we previously learned, text books are not the only form of literacy. Through the use of pop culture, children can more easily relate to the subject and therefore have a bigger interest in learning new language arts, math, and science concepts instructed in the curriculum.
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