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Critical Literacies and Pop Culture

When thinking about the idea of critical literature, the first thing that came to mind for me was the idea of pop culture, and how we could possibly use it to help students gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds them. Social media, the news, current TV shows; they all have these issues intwined in them. Race, class, gender, and so many other things can be pulled out of these if you just take the time to look a little harder at them. 

 So, upon looking for some cool ideas for our students I found this article, Fostering Critical Literacy Through Popular Culture, that highlights a few ideas that we could use with our students. One of the main ideas of this article, written by high school English teacher Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko, is that we can take the TV shows our students are watching, like   black-ish for example, and use it to ask questions about things like race, gender, inequality, and so on. As a teacher, pick a specific episode, and pair it with the text that you are reading or want to highlight, and try and get students to pull out the sociopolitical issues that are present in both. 

This article also reminded me about using the daily news to give students a bit of perspective into the real world. One book that I would really love to read with my students is The Hate U Give, because it is something that is so, unfortunately, easily related to the news that our kids are exposed to all the time. Pairing some real news articles and events with this book would be a great way to get students critically thinking about their worlds and the reality of police brutality and the #blacklivesmatter movement that is extremely real to us right now. You could do a whole unit on some of these issues with the students, and start asking questions about the lives of blacks in America, and how have things really changed after all this time, and more. 

All of the ideas present in the article above are things that we as teachers can and should be using in our everyday practices. Of course, we won't always have the wiggle room in the curriculum that we are made to teach, but whenever possible we should try and remember the importance that thinking about the real world can make for our students. 

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