Drawing On Pop Culture And Entertainment Media In Adult Education Practice In Teaching For Social Change

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the critical media literacy literature and related adult education literature to consider how to draw on popular culture and entertainment media in adult education settings when dealing with diversity and equity issues of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. It also provides some examples of from practice.

Popular culture and fictional entertainment media have an enormous influence on society. Whether in the genre of television sitcom or drama, or fictional stories in popular film, the entertainment media teach us something about ourselves as we map new meaning onto our own experience based on what we see and relate to; for good or for ill, it also teaches us a lot about others through fictional means.

In the past few years, there has been a growing discussion about the role of pop culture and the entertainment media in education (Giroux, 1997; hooks, 1994; Yosso, 2002); In these discussions, critical media education scholars note the tendency of the media to reproduce structural power relations based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; however, they also argue that some media challenge such power relations in their portrayals of characters. Thus, given that students are consumers of entertainment media, which serves as a significant way that people construct knowledge about their own and others’ identities and thus a significant source of “education”, they argue that it is important to teach critical media literacy skills—of how to deconstruct and analyze entertainment media through direct discussion of it in the classroom. Thus far most of these discussions and studies related to critical media literacy have focused on youth. Aside from general reference to the significance of popular culture to the media in our lives (Miller, 1999), discussion of the role of entertainment media in the education of adults has been absent. But given that adult learners and educators are also large consumers of media, it is also important that adult educators tend to issues related to media literacy, particularly in attempting to attend to diversity and equity issues. Therefore the purpose of this paper is two-fold: to provide an overview of the critical media literacy to consider how to draw on popular culture and entertainment media in adult education settings to teach critical medial literacy skills and to discuss issues of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation; and to explore how entertainment media can be used in teaching practice.