The Future of Education

This paper is about the pedagogical force and consequence of popular culture. The materiality of popular culture, its multitudinous artifacts, forms, genres, media and platforms, is secondary here to the more profound and compelling capacities of popular culture to formulate, disseminate, produce, reproduce, negotiate, share and contest meanings. By demand and by necessity, the key, critical, and resonant site of current and emerging pedagogical attention and invention are the experiential dimensions of popular culture. Indeed, the question of popular culture resides at the very core of educational design and development and is an instigation and direction for pedagogical change in the urgent pursuit of relevance in globalizing circumstances and in dynamic digital culture. Popular culture has always been a powerful influence, constitutive experience, and organizing principle in the lives of the young, and never more so than in expansive and accelerated digital media environments where engagement with popular culture is for the young, ceaseless and foundational. With a comprehensive grasp of the decisive intersections of education and popular culture in the lived experiences of students, educators must be driven to develop and sustain pedagogies that properly attend to the appeals of, and power within popular culture to activate students. This analysis of popular culture is inflected necessarily with Freire’s insights and provocations around critical education (concientização).(Freire, 1970)[1]  In particular, his arguments for critical acuity in learning to engage with and ultimately challenge and oppose social, political and economic contradictions, motivate educational practices to move beyond knowledge in the abstract to knowledge in action; or as Bekerman observes, Freire’s call is “not only for cognitive alertness but also for practical activity, seeking to overcome the educational institutions’ traditional inclination to abstract knowledge for reality, that is, segregate knowledge from social activity.”(Bekerman, 2008)[2] This paper argues for the active and transformational capacities of popular culture in education because first, popular culture truly educates, and second, it is a critical means of mobilizing education toward actual social change. Simply stated, “popular culture” is more verb than noun, a practical action that brings lived experience substantively and consequentially into current and emerging educational priorities and practices.

Keywords: popular culture; critical education; lived experience; media and digital culture.

References:
[1] Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury.
[2] Bekerman, Zvi (2008). “Reappraising Critical Perspective in Popular Culture and Education”, in Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education, Counterpoints, vol 338, pp. 55-67. JSTOR. Accessed on March 25, 2020 at www.jstor.org/stable/42979221