Welcome to my blog, in which I reflect upon material studied and researched as part of the LCN639 subject offered as an elective to the Masters of Teaching (Secondary) degree at QUT. I am currently a pre-service teacher in my final semester specializing in Film, Television and New Media, and Drama. I have experience with the public education sector and have completed all PEx requirements to date and have focused on performing arts education, behaviour management and literacy building during that time. I have a special interest in championing for the equal access to education for all students at curriculum, policy and pedagogical levels.
In this blog, I discuss Youth, Media and Pop Culture specifically in an educational setting following the thematic thread of use and access of Pop Culture in education and pedagogical practice.
I hope you enjoy my blog and leave a comment or a link to anything else I might find of interest!
I love gaming. But given that I have been studying for ten out of the eleven years I have been out of highschool, only taking a break to get married, I do not get much time for it these days, and there has been release after release of titles that I has caused me some heartache because I have had to simply forgo the pleasure in order to focus on my studies.
I feel in some ways, the issues that we have been discussing in this blog has culminated into a discussion about gaming and what I perceive as a pre-service performing arts teacher, to be some thing that teachers and educators in general need to know before gaming comes into the classroom. I’m not talking about the hardware or the software, but the culture that comes with gaming.
Let’s start by mentioning #GamerGate.
GamerGate opened up the reality of the gaming industry which made it apparent that although women were active participants in both the creation of games and active gamers, the industry (and technology in general) was still a ‘mans world’ with men seen as gatekeepers due to a false social narrative of male ownership and superiority over the use of technology (Salter, 2018). After the scandal had died down, it left many media and social commentators wondering where we went from here. What exactly were we supposed to learn from gamer gate?
I have only ever been mansplained to twice in my whole ‘career’ working within the creative industries. Once, when a male screen writing professor insisted to me that female characters could not be ‘unlikeable’, and when I have taught gaming as a preservice teacher. The most disappointing of them of course being the latter, as it was a Year 10 Media class that I had previously taught in the unit ‘Teen Films’. During the ‘Teen Films’ unit, the young men in the class were more than happy to respect the student teacher dynamic; I am a young woman in my late 20’s and we were watching Mean Girls. I was certainly in my element, but it was socially acceptable for me to be so. Teen films are often targeted at young women and therefore, the students were happy to accept the fact that I was able to teach the unit. When I came back for my second practicum ready to dive into gaming, I didn’t expect to come back to half the male students back chatting or trying to make me look stupid by getting me on technicalities, talking over me or flat out telling me my information was wrong. It became apparent that they didn’t trust me as someone who had the knowledge necessary to teach them the topic, and they didn’t respect the knowledge that I did have.
While I can’t speak for my students in knowing exactly why attitudes changed, its hard to ignore that gender perhaps had a hand in play in it. It’s always interesting as a young woman in the creative industries and who has majored in media, communication and cultural studies in a previous life to see the things that you have read happening to other women in different parts of the industry become mirrored in your teaching experiences. What Mortensen reminds us is that gaming culture is complex and is often far reaching into other aspects of digital culture and social media (2018). And while it may be annoyance to have certain male students constantly trying to ‘get’ you on the technicalities of what constitutes a quick time event, it’s unnerving to wonder what their online gaming presence is like to other gamers.
How am I supposed to defend my Prestige 6 level castle in real time in Clash of Kings without having the mobile platform? You know what, just unfriend anyone who shares this meme.
My advice? Be wary of game based pedagogies but understand that they can be hugely beneficial and don’t be put off by such attitudes. I was happy to hear that after the game design unit, students would be undergoing a gender and media unit in which all of this, and more would be covered. While we can explicitly teach and talk about these issues in Media Arts, it’s important for all teachers who might be thinking of using in class games to just keep an eye on behaviours and be prepared to counter them.
Youth culture in the classroom can be hard; we don’t want to be seen as gatekeepers, but we also don’t want to have to prove ourselves to students who don’t even realise that they are in fact gatekeeping themselves. We want to participate, but authentically. We want to be in the midst of new technologies, but at the pace the industry is moving it can be overwhelming. We want to be at the forefront of issues, but the 24 hour news cycle makes it difficult to digest all of it at once. But I would note that if this all overwhelms you, don’t panic. If you were anything like me, you befuddled your teachers with whatever youth culture was happening at the time (guilty as charged ex-emo kid here) and they somehow connected and successfully taught you. You will do the same.
References
Light, R. (2013). Game sense pedagogy for performance, participation and enjoyment . Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
I was often amazed on PEx on how far schools have come in the short (I like to think) time I have been away from high school since graduating. Of course, I do often remark with a tinge of jealously that I had a third world education, which is not completely incorrect but an education in a rural high school in the early 2000’s was certainly not the same as a metropolitan high school experience is now and from a teaching and learning perspective, this is even more evident in the library space.
Pictured: The second image on a Google Image Search of libraries. The first image had a link to something about occupational violence in libraries? Is there an epidemic of violence against innocent library staff that I am not aware of? More to come.
For those who can recall, participatory culture started to take rise in the early 2000’s with the popularity of Myspace, the invention of YouTube and the early days of websites such as Wikipedia beginning to take off. The internet was not just a space you visited; it was becoming a space you engaged in, created in and opinionated in. As Ito etal pointed out, just over a decade ago much of the staples of digital participation of today’s youth such as mobile smart devices and the accompanying apps and technology were barely present in the lives on youth (2019).
We were also a very long way from the digital gods blessing us with Spotify.
Recalling my own library, I remember being led into there for work during class time on research papers, but we weren’t allowed to use the internet. We were told that the information the internet (As a whole? Not sure to this day) was wrong and that the books in the library were the best source of knowledge and we were to only use them for information. I would eventually find myself eleven years later back in a school library standing in the virtual reality room with a head set on standing in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian Pharoah zooming in on the hieroglyphics on the walls of his tomb, studying the space carefully, trying to recall in my memory the names of the ancient gods painted on his tomb. Sorry Encyclopedia Britannica, but you ain’t got nothin’ on that experience!
As you left the virtual reality room on the wall there was a half-finished mural – a project by the senior art class. To the side, break out rooms with monitors and the ability to connect devices for presentations and information sharing. Libraries were no longer these silent places full of books and cranky Mrs M.’s telling everyone they needed their card to borrow out a book (for God’s sake Mrs M, I know you can just look up my name and then scan the book, I’ve been here for five years and this is a very small town with a very small school!).
But there would be now very few Mrs M’s I imagine, as the space that we consider to be the modern school library is now filled with teacher-librarians or librarians who are well versed and adept at navigating the technologies available for students. It seemed like a given to me, that these staff members would be highly prized additions to the school staff and so I was surprised by Benjamin Priess’ article which warned of the decline of these librarian staff members. Of course, given the benefits that having such members of staff have on literacy standards (and I would presume, not just traditional literacies, but digital and media as well) as outlined by Kay Oddone, it seems bizarre that schools would ever consider such staff members as extra-curricular to the budget. Given the roles that they now play in educating students on their research skills, navigating digital spaces, improving literacies and providing access to educational materials, I would think there would be a bigger push to not only retain these keepers of learning hubs in constant professional development, but growing in staff. With the constant evolution in how students change their interests and engagements in digital technologies it seems reasonable that dedicated staff should be onsite at schools to act as intermediaries between school and classroom culture and the outside world.
What have you seen in school libraries today that has blown your mind?
References
Hartzell, G. (2003). ‘Why should principals support school libraries?’, Teacher Librarian, 31(2), 21–23.
Itō, M, (Ed) (2019). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
In my previous post, I wrote about youth culture and ownership, specifically the issue of adults acting as ‘gatekeepers’ to youth culture. In expanding on this, I would like to discuss an issue that hit close to home as a performing arts pre-service teacher.
Let me begin with an anecdote. While I was on PEx gaining valuable experience in literacy and English classrooms, the discussions for year 8 curriculum requirements for the upcoming English topic titled something along the lines of ‘Digital World’. The recommended resource? The TV series Noah and Saskia.
Cue internal screaming.
Yes, this was lame when it first came out.
It is basic pedagogical practice to create units of study and lessons that are engaging and interesting for students, but how does gatekeeping negatively affect students when the gatekeepers are out of touch, or unwilling to find out, what it is that students are interested in? ‘Students have stated that the curriculum is disconnected from their lives [and] that teachers do not find ways to get involved in their own learning’ (Hall, 2011). It raises the question then, of how teachers and educators (especially those in the English/SOSE/Humanities/Performing Arts) can create engaging and relevant units of study that both satisfy curriculum demands and pique the interest of students.
Perhaps it’s easy as a future Media Arts teacher to see the constructivist approach to the incorporation of popular culture into curriculum – our subject and use of pop culture in teaching depends upon our ability to keep up to date with the industry in terms of both technology of media, communication and cultural studies issues. Performing Arts teachers are generally apt at creating a fluidity between the demands of the curriculum and the incorporation of student’s interest and engagement in pop culture.
By keeping a close eye on how students are engaging in pop culture in their everyday lives, teacher can support and extend students learning, especially in literacy (Dunns, Niens & McMillan, 2014). And Wallace is right, we do need to create a delicate balance between pop culture in the classroom for pure entertainment, and pop culture artefacts as the subjects of critical analysis (Wallace, 2009). The difficulty lies in the teachers use of pop culture and appropriation of it.
Pictured: Me, using the word ‘Yeet’.
Renniger and Hidi describe the process as creating a connection to content and outside of the classroom while facilitating deeper analysis as a way to boost student engagement and motivation (2016). I suppose depending on the age of the teacher and the relationship that they have with their students, embedding references to popular culture throughout a lesson in a classroom or a unit of work where it may not naturally fit could be problematic and create the opposite effect for students. The goal then, as pointed out by all the researchers referenced so far in this post is that students voices are important in understanding what engages them and it is up to us as educators to embrace these points of interest and find ways to marry curriculum, content and culture.
Dunn, J., Niens, U., & McMillan, D. (2014). “Cos he’s my favourite character!” A children’s rights approach to the use of popular culture in teaching literacy. Literacy, 48(1), 23-31. doi:10.1111/lit.12024
Hall, L. (2011). How popular culture texts inform and shape students’ discussions of social studies texts. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 55(4), 296-305
Renninger, K., & Hidi, S. (2016).Interest, motivation, engagement, and other motivational variables. In K. Renninger and S. Hidi (Eds.),The power of interest for motivation and engagement.(pp.71-95 ).New York,N.Y: Routledge.
Wallace, F. (2009). The Popular Culture Influence. Young Adult Literature in the 21st Century. Boston, McGraw Hill. 555-596.
‘Youth Culture’ is a term that is potentially as contentious as the term ‘Youth’ itself, but as a concept, we generally define youth culture as being those things which the ‘kids these days’ are into. Thus, from a marketing perspective, young adult content is driven by the … but as Beckon warns, the concept of ‘young adult’ as a marketable demograph is not static but is in a state of redefinition. (p. 2).
Interestingly, Beckon notes that it is in fact adults who are the ‘gatekeepers’ of young adult fiction (p. 4). This means that it is not necessarily young adults and youth who are producing, distributing or even creating the content by which their culture is defined academically.
Adults often act not only as gatekeepers, but critics of young adult work and, this means pop culture texts such as Twilight that are specifically aimed at young adult women, can find readership from critics for whom the work was not created to appeal to anyway. Putting aside critical arguments of Twilight as a text, it is interesting to note that the self ascribed gatekeepers often harshly criticise young adult female pop culture much harshly. Harry Potter, a story about a young boy wizard enjoys far less criticism, as does The Hunger Games and Divergent but all were extremely popular in their own ways gaining huge book readership and eventually movie franchises. Is the issue then that it is not only young adult, buy young female adult interests are being valued by society? Perhaps the issues of ‘gatekeeping’ (much often seen as the slightly less annoying cousin of mansplaining) are also prevalent in young adult fiction between genders just as much as it is between age groups.
And this is what I like about Jeffrey Wilhelm’s (2016) article. Not only does he lay out the importance of reading, but calls out scholars who have in the past, degraded popular genres such as romance and have gone so far as to say that it makes the readers dumber (the original opinion and Wilhelm’s description of it put it in much more academic language). Sure, there are many reasons people read, but we should all at some level find some type of pleasure out of it. Teachers and educators need to be proactive in breaking down some of these ‘gatekeeper’ type behaviours instead of becoming a part of the problem.
In reflecting upon what youth culture looks like today and fact that it is in a state of flux, perhaps it will be soon that young adults will have more freedoms over their own cultures and interests given the wide reach of social media networks, blogging sites and other websites that allow user generated content and that are dominated by youth participants. To answer the question ‘Who owns Youth Culture?’ lends itself to countless interpretations of what ‘young adult’ means in a literary, marketing and human development context. But generally, the ownership of youth culture seems to slowly being taken over by the youths themselves as fan fiction and discussion boards drive youth contributors to gain more control over their own content and potentially become its biggest contributors.
References
Beckton, D. (2015). Bestselling Young Adult fiction: trends, genres and readership. TEXT, v32.
Johnson, L. L. (2018). Exploring Youth, Race, and Popular Culture: A Critical Dialogue with Jabari Mahari. Language Arts; Urbana 96(1), pp 51-56. (QUT online)
Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. (2016). Recognising the power of pleasure: What engaged adolescent readers get from their free-choice reading, and how teachers can leverage this for all. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 39(2).References
This is a blog created to record my learning experiences as part of my course for EU50 (Master of Teaching – Secondary) at QUT. This is apart of the unit LCN639 – Youth, Popular Culture and Texts.
There was a lot of amazing and interesting content to engage with in this unit, but these are the areas that particularly piqued my interest. Check it out and leave comments!
Sarah Platz - LCN639 