CI 5150 Week 1 - "My Little Pony? Mr. Filipkowski, you're OLD!"

Chapters 1-3 of Walker and White’s Tooning In have quickly brought to the forefront of my mind an argument that I believe is very easy for teachers, administrators, parents, and even students themselves, to forget – the argument that formal / traditional schooling as we currently know it is only one “source” of our childrens’ education. In other words, the process of education may be considered a much larger machine in which formal / traditional schooling is one of arguably many cogs. When considering the entire process of education, as well as what exactly it means to “be educated” in today's world, my colleagues and I have extensively considered the role that formal schooling as a cog does / should play in childrens’ overall education. Although I don’t think that any of us would deny that formal schooling is an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT piece of a child’s overall education, Walker and White Argue that it isn’t the ONLY piece:

“A strong argument can be made that popular culture has become the most influential education institution for our children in society” (4).

In addition to arguing that students construct their identities and perceptions of their worlds via input in addition to that found in the formal / traditional classroom, Walker and White take things one step further, arguing that input from popular culture may have a larger influence on children than what they during experience during formal schooling as we know it! As such, instead of immediately labeling popular culture as being destructive, poisonous, harmful, and so on and so forth to our children, Walker and White argue that “educators must accept that many of students’ understanding about the world are constructed through popular culture texts” (15).

Throughout my student teaching experience at Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights last spring semester (Go Spartans!), I attempted to design a several week media / pop culture studies unit around an enduring understanding that I would imagine Walker and White would support – the enduring understanding that pop culture texts viewed from birth are EXTREMELY powerful sources of “education” in addition to formal / traditional schooling. As such, my unit argued that as we become passive, desensitized consumers of these texts throughout our lives, it is important to become active, critical viewers of the texts that have surrounded us since birth. I proceeded to tweak my enduring understanding around the “dymestification” approach, asking my students to examine the “assumptions, attitudes and values underlying the production, mediation, and consumption… of such texts and how they position students to assume particular social, gendered, and racial positions as they invite them to explore a constructed world in particular ways” (16).

I then went out and found as many texts as I could in the form of print advertisements, television advertisements, and whatever else I could find that I thought would illuminate my enduring understandings and help students become critical vs. passive viewers of pop culture texts. For example, I used the following collection of toy advertisements in a discussion of how advertisements both reflect & create our perceptions of gender roles, norms, values, assumptions, and so on:





After viewing this collection of advertisements with my class, I posed questions such as…

-What gender stereotypes does product X reinforce? How can you tell?

-What gender stereotypes does product Y subvert? How can you tell?

-What values does product X "teach" children? How can you tell?

-And so on and so forth.

SO FLAWLESSLY PERFECT UNIT, RIGHT? WRONG…

Although I believe that I was on to a “good,” research supported unit design with carefully selected texts that worked fairly well to reinforce the point that our exposure to pop culture from an early age greatly influences our later perceptions of our individual identities and world, I perceived that there was still SOMETHING missing. Actually, it’s a very hard feeling for me to describe. In a nut shell, although I felt as though the majority of the class was “with” me, I felt as though a significant number of students still were not.

For days, I racked my brain as to why my overall unit, as well as the specific texts that I picked, weren’t working for more students in the room. In fact, until reading this chapter, I never really did “figure it out,” and ended up settling on the all too familiar excuse of “well, I can’t reach everyone! Can I?” Although there might be some truth to this conclusion, completing today’s assigned readings has offered me another possible explanation – the idea that I was choosing texts to examine from MY childhood pop culture sphere, vs. choosing, or even crazier, letting students choose, particular texts to examine from THEIR childhood / current pop-culture spheres. After all, Walker and White state that, “Teaching and learning can be more effective if students become emotionally connected with the information” (17). Although I have a strong emotional connection with the texts I choose to use in class (I remember making fun of girls playing with their “My Little Pony” toys and playing "house" very well), it is now clear to me that many of my students might not have shared such a connection. In other words, unless they were already EXTREMELY proficient with empathizing / taking on my perspective with the text, they may have had little to no emotional connection at all. Therefore, the entire point of the lesson could have been lost.

“Why didn’t I somehow poll students, and / or invite them to bring in pop culture texts of their choice?” I now ask myself. Well, after reading these chapters, I have a tentative conclusion to such a question; mainly, I was the “expert” on the particular texts I decided to use, and therefore felt at least more in control of where the discussion would go. In short, if I relinquished MY expertise on the textual material covered I would therefore relinquish my control of the classroom. Overall, I wonder to what degree such a fear shaped my design of my unit.

To foster a strong emotion connection while keeping critical about a particular text, Walker and White argue the following approach:

“…recognize the expertise that students bring to the classroom and offer them several frameworks (drawn from feminism, postmodernism, and cultural studies, for examining popular culture texts” (22).

Easier said than done, Walker and White! I’m only 25 years old, and I’m already finding it difficult to relate to my students who are not much younger than I am?!? Frankly, this is a very scary thought for a number of different reasons…

-As a young teacher, a HUGE goal of mine is to simply control my classroom. BUT… to what degree does this control squelch my teaching of students' critical literacy development?

-How, exactly, do I determine what texts are culturally relevant to my students? In other words, how do I determine the difference between a particular text relevant to MY pop culture sphere vs. my students'?

-And perhaps most important, if I let my students bring pop culture texts currently meaningful to them into the classroom, I WILL lose some control over where the discussion will lead. How do I become comfortable with this loss of control? How do I manage this loss of control? HOW DO I ACKOWLEDGE THE FACT THAT MY STUDENTS ARE THE EXPERTS, AND I’M NOT? How do I design a unit focusing on critical literacy if I’m not the expert?

These, and many, many, other questions are what I hope to continue to explore throughout this course.

Thanks for reading my first entry!