Pop Culture Literacies

This book illustrates how young people engage with pop culture—music, TV, films, fashion, dance, video games, memes, and digital content in its many forms—and outlines lessons that support them in engaging more actively, critically, and strategically.

Part One draws on qualitative research with young people, as well as close analyses of pop culture phenomena, to illustrate how young people already engage with pop culture, on- and offline. This research demonstrates that young people interpret and respond to pop culture texts in sophisticated ways and highlights the potential for supporting and challenging them to do so in ways that are even more active, critical, and strategic.

Part Two presents lessons that teach young people how to adopt intentional interpretive stances in relation to pop culture texts, identify and analyze hidden layers of story in these texts, and ultimately expand and refine their interpretations and responses. In the final chapter’s lessons, young people engage in a process of developing a multimodal autoethnography, a form of narrative composition that explores the connections between the personal and the cultural. The book provides options for teaching these lessons as standalone lessons, for enmeshing them in standards-aligned humanities curricula, and for teaching them in sequence as a unit of study.

This book is ideal for teachers who want to better understand how their students are engaging in and making sense of the pop culture texts that saturate the digital world and to help them reimagine who they are in and out of that world.