Popular Culture and Entertainment Media in Adult Education (review)

Popular Culture and Entertainment Media in Adult Education attempts to remedy the sparse attention that popular culture has received formally in the discipline of adult education despite the apparently wide pedagogical use of aspects of popular culture in classrooms. This book provides a variety of approaches for the formal and informal consideration of the impact of popular culture on learning and literacy, and as an effective part of educators’ arsenal of critical techniques for use in their classes.

Using examples from films, television, cartoons, hip-hop, and culture jamming, this book highlights the effectiveness of utilizing popular culture as a source for the critical exploration of self and society. It illustrates this purpose through examples that focus on diverse populations and different approaches, thus demonstrating the influence and impact of popular culture on learning both in and out of the classroom.

In the opening chapter, E. J. Tisdell introduces readers to relevant theoretical perspectives of popular culture and critical media literacy. The book’s theoretical perspective is predicated on assumptions that popular culture is a site of dominant and alternative messages, that viewers can critically pull apart these messages, and that doing so is meaningful.

In the following chapter, Guy builds on these ideas, specifically discussing popular culture as pedagogy. This chapter outlines the pervasiveness of cultural products in our lives and provides examples of structured class activities designed to help students analyze the messages embedded in popular culture, particularly those concerning race, class, and gender.

Chapters 3,4, and 5 draw more directly on the formal application of entertainment media in class situations using very different examples. Chapter 3 shares the perspectives of an instructor and student from a class focused on the role of entertainment media in learning. Fascinatingly, hip-hop is the compelling source of popular culture in Chapter 4. Mary Stone Hanley takes the reader on a journey from her own introduction to hip-hop, her attempts to learn more about it, and finally her use of it as an innovative way of engaging her students in critical, creative explorations of self and society. She claims that as a pedagogical tool hip-hop can “model dialogic instruction” (p. 36), instill “creative agency” (p. 36), and help students develop their critical skills. Her examples include ways she engages students both as observers and creators of hip-hop in her research and class practice.

Chapter 5 draws on two instructors’ experiences teaching a humanities class structured around an analysis of The Simpsons. Their motivation lies in seeing the cartoon as a form of social critique, one which can be analyzed and used to reinforce learning in ways which that students find interesting and entertaining as well as insightful. They discuss several ways in which they incorporate the program in the classroom.

The next three chapters describe popular culture as informal sources of learning and literacy. Chapter 6 specifically focuses on the influence of popular culture in building literacy, where literacy is more broadly conceived of and defined as “social practice[s]” (p. 57), allowing people to more successfully navigate their world.

The cult British television series The Avengers is the subject of Chapter 7. This absorbing contribution outlines Robin Redon Wright’s research in this area, describing the series, its context, the reactions toward it, and its impact the show had on viewers. She illustrates how the portrayal of one character, Dr. Catherine Gale, had a lasting impact on some women, transforming their options, choices, and behaviors.

Chapter 8 introduces readers to the phenomenon of “culture jamming,” a type of activism that resists consumerism and can be interpreted as a form of public pedagogy. Jamming involves activities such as reclaiming billboards, shopping-intervention, and performance as ways to highlight the impact consumerism has on our environment and ways of thinking and being. Sandlin advocates the educative power of culture jamming as a tool for...