Teaching historical literacies to digital learners via popular culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 147402222110505
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Evans ◽  
Sarah Midford
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital Learners ◽  
Digital Pedagogy

We argue that students can understand an historical period by building on the foundations of their existing knowledge. Specifically, popular media can be used to develop students’ historical literacies – that is their ability to engage with past societies vastly different from their own. Our methodology takes inspiration from the ancient Romans’ own partial literacies and utilises pedagogy drawn from Classical Reception Studies, which examines how the ancient world has been subsequently reinvented in everything from poetry to cinema. While traditional methods of teaching Classics potentially alienate learners and entrench the discipline’s elitism, we advocate learning about the past from a point of familiarity. Harnessing familiar texts and platforms to teach history can engage non-traditional learners and develop their historical literacies by leveraging pre-existing digital literacies. Furthermore, digital pedagogy fosters in students a sense that they can valuably contribute to disciplinary knowledge by recontextualising ancient sources.

scholarly journals Beyond “In Spring, the Dawn”: Redeeming The Pillow Book through Manga

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-273
Author(s):  
Gergana E. Ivanova
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
School Education ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Approaches To Teaching ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Heian Period ◽  
The Past

This paper examines three manga adaptations of The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi, early 11th c.) published in the past thirty years to show how popular culture challenges Japanese school education and its approaches to teaching classical literature. It argues that manga rewritings of the Heian-period text aim to increase modern interest in this ancient work and help to rectify misconceptions of it generated by national literature (kokubungaku) scholarship and traditional methods of teaching classical literature in Japan. Prioritizing the content instead of its formal features, these rewritings offer a new approach to the eleventh-century work by presenting the material in an engaging and relevant way that resonates with modern readers.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Maria Monk ◽  
People Today

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.

Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 423-439
Author(s):  
Beatrice J. W. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Cultural Myths ◽  
Biblical Texts

This essay explores pedagogical strategies for addressing rape culture in biblical studies courses, employing Genesis 34 and Judges 19–21 as primary texts. The first section discusses the nature of popular culture and its impact on gender. The following four sections highlight cultural myths about sexual assault by focusing on significant biblical texts and incorporating aspects of popular media to facilitate conversations about rape culture. The conclusion summarizes the main points and encourage further studies that combine the study of popular media and biblical texts. Overall, the essay contributes to the reading and teaching of the Bible within contemporary rape culture so that students become critical interpreters of biblical texts, as they become resistant readers of past and present rape culture.

scholarly journals Can studying a topic through a reception studies approach improve the quality of Year 7 students’ creative responses to the ancient world?

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (43) ◽  
pp. 4-21
Author(s):  
Rosie Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Girls School ◽  
Class Teacher ◽  
Course Of Study

The lessons planned in this essay were designed for a group of Year 7 students in an independent girls’ school in London. Their course of study for Classics in Year 7 was a general introduction, involving beginners’ Greek and the rudiments of Latin, but largely focused on learning about Greek mythology, Homeric epic and Roman culture. Wright's Greeks & Romans textbook was often used in class, but the content was chosen and materials designed by the class teacher. I began teaching this class just as they were finishing Greek mythology and beginning to study the Iliad and Odyssey. The sequence of four lessons, based around the Underworld was intended to provide a re-cap of the Homeric material after they had studied the two epics, as well as exploring in further detail episodes which I had skipped over for the sake of brevity in the previous sequence, such as the Odyssey's katabasis. It also looked forward to studying Roman material in the next module by introducing the Aeneid in translation.

Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422198976
Author(s):  
Darsana Vijay ◽  
Alex Gekker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Political Contention ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Potential Strategy

TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content, hate speech, and the lack of platform accountability in countering these issues. In this article, we analyze how politics is performed on TikTok and how the platform’s design shapes such expressions and their circulation. What does the playful architecture of TikTok mean to the nature of its political discourse and participation? To answer this, we review existing academic work on play, media, and political participation and then examine the case of Sabarimala through the double lens of ludic engagement and platform-specific features. The efficacy of play as a productive heuristic to study political contention on social media platforms is demonstrated. Finally, we turn to ludo-literacy as a potential strategy that can reveal the structures that order playful political participation and can initiate alternative modes of playing politics.

scholarly journals Trends in Americans’ food-related time use: 1975–2006

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1064-1072 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathleen D Zick ◽  
Robert B Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Energy Intake ◽  
Time Use ◽  
Food Preparation ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Grocery Shopping ◽  
Obesity Risk ◽  
Eating Time ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past

AbstractObjectiveTo describe how the time spent in food-related activities by Americans has changed over the past 30 years.DesignData from four national time diary surveys, spanning 1975–2006, are used to construct estimates of trends in American adults’ time spent in food-related activities. Multivariate Tobits assess how food-related activities have changed over time controlling for sociodemographic and economic covariates.ResultsBoth bivariate and multivariate estimates reveal that between 1975 and 2006, American women’s time spent in food preparation declined substantially, whereas the time spent in these activities by American men changed very little. On the contrary, grocery shopping time increased modestly for both men and women. The primary eating time (i.e. time when eating/drinking was the respondent’s main focus) declined for both men and women over this historical period, and the composition of this time changed with less primary eating time being done alone. Concurrently, secondary eating time (i.e. time when something else had the respondent’s primary attention, but eating/drinking simultaneously occurred) rose precipitously for both women and men between 1975 and 1998.ConclusionsThe total time spent in eating (i.e. primary plus secondary eating time) has increased over the past 30 years, and the composition of this time has shifted from situations in which energy intake can be easily monitored to those in which energy intake may be more difficult to gauge. Less time is also being spent in food preparation and clean-up activities. Future research should explore possible links between these trends and Americans’ growing obesity risk.

The Globalization of Superheroes: Diffusion, Genre, and Cultural Adaptations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Hammonds
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Retributive Justice ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
High Demand ◽  
Cultural Adaptations ◽  
Civic Values ◽  
The World ◽  
Entertainment Value ◽  
Industrial Societies

Superheroes are a global phenomenon. The superhero genre has been proliferated through modern industrial societies by way of movies, television, comics, and other forms of popular media. Although virtually every nation in the world has heroic myths, the modern superhero, as marked by the inception of recent American comics heroes in 1929, is a uniquely Western invention. Superheroes are “Western” insofar as they embody and exhibit Western civic values, such as democracy, humanism, and retributive justice. These characters have been communicatively incorporated into globalization processes by means of diffusion and thereby enact aspects of cultural imperialism. Even so, superhero figures have been in high demand across many populations for their entertainment value. As superheroes have diffused in non-Western cultures, they have not only been absorbed by new cultures but also refigured and adapted. These non-Western adaptations have had a recursive influence, such as the global popularity of Japanese manga. The recursive relationship between Western superheroes and their non-Western adaptations implies superheroes are an important aspect of cultural fusion in global popular culture.

Romantic Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Contemporary Media

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

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