How Pop Culture Increases Student Engagement and Reading Comprehension

In this chapter, teachers will learn the importance of tapping into a child's prior experiences or background knowledge to help students gain the full understanding of a topic or subject matter. These practices help teachers recognize the background knowledge a student has on a subject matter; this information can assist them in their planning of a unit or specific learning objectives. This chapter provides elementary educators with practical ideas and a solid template or structure to help teachers brainstorm the countless ideas to weave pop culture into their instructional practices. Teachers should use these pages as a springboard to initiate the creative planning process to meet the needs of the students in their own classrooms. It is divided into sections of pop culture that are present in our 21st century society. As pop culture continues to change, teachers can use its appeal to get students excited about learning.

Cultivating Social Justice Through Explorations of Multimodal Pop Culture Texts

Middle level and secondary students' understanding of social justice can be cultivated through educators' inclusion of multimodal texts in the curriculum. By engaging in critical literacy through ongoing analyses of music lyrics, poetry, and prose related to social justice, students can develop a deeper understanding of the presence/lack of social justice in previous historical eras as well as its role today. Educators can ensure that formal explorations of issues surrounding social justice, such as race and socioeconomic status, become part of the curriculum through the inclusion of relevant multimodal texts. This chapter presents a variety of multimodal pop culture texts—including novels and song lyrics—that can be included in a middle school or high school curriculum focused on social justice education.

“I Can't Stop Singing”

There is a long history of research on theater and performance supporting literacy skills, especially fluency and comprehension. Most of this work is based on drama and plays and has been adapted to the classroom level in the form of Reader's Theater. Musicals, however, with their combination of acting, dancing, and singing, offer unique benefits to struggling literacy learners. This chapter will make the argument that modern musicals, particularly those rooted in popular culture and oriented toward children, allow for growth possibilities in all components of literacy.

Using Sports to Motivate Math Learners

Motivating 21st century mathematics learners is becoming increasingly difficult. Most students will no longer sit still and learn using the methods that were utilized in classrooms 100 years ago. Today, many teachers struggle to find ways to excite their students while teaching them mathematics. This chapter will present ideas for mathematics learning using sports, a particular area of interest for students of all ages. The rich variety of numbers generated by all types of sports, as well as connections to popular culture extensions, naturally provides opportunities for exploration in numerical literacy. Using real sports data, students can perform operations and calculations, do statistical analyses, and create charts or graphs to enhance their learning of both basic and advanced operations. Nearly every concept taught in a K-12 mathematics curriculum can be adapted to include sports information.

Interculturally Relevant Pedagogy

Although culturally responsive pedagogy has been geared towards students' cultures, interests, and needs, it does not meaningfully consider intercultural communication dynamics that are always existing in almost all classrooms, especially highly multicultural ones. This assumption is problematized by the current academic discussion on individuals' tendency to oscillate between different identities/cultures and the significance of intersubjectivity in the epistemological complexity of interculturality. This chapter makes a case for interculturally relevant pedagogy as an educational approach that recognizes the importance of considering students' cultures while emphasizing intercultural communication in K-12 classrooms procedures with the aim of simultaneously attaining social justice and scholastic achievement. It argues for the plausible need of integrating popular culture in order to present sociopolitical realities and accordingly enable students, along with teachers' guidance, to critically question the current power imbalances and the cultural hegemony of dominant group.

Embracing Video Games for Strategic Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication Skills Practice

According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) report, 70% of families have a child who is actively playing video games at home. This pop culture phenomenon has challenged the way teachers think about learning and engagement. This chapter explores how the nature, culture, design, mechanics, and logistics of video games shape the way classroom gamers think. It examines how video games provide a space for strategic practice, the 21st-century skills acquired, and the tools gamers use as experts. Presenting background and context to help better understand why and how video game environments develop strategic thinking, the purpose of this chapter is to encourage educators to embrace video games to harness pop culture experiences as a means to motivate students to develop 21st-century literacy practices and skills. Through the reflections and framework of a teacher's experience who is an active researcher, it also discusses how a popular mainstream video game in the classroom changed her teaching and opened her eyes to a new type of learner.

Videogames and Sensory Theory

The act of playing video games is a multimodal experience, immersing the gamer in a sensorial experience in the digital world. Video games incorporate sensory literacies such as haptics, graphics, sound effects, music, auditory dialogue, visual text, and character movement. The sensory literacies allow gamers to connect the digital world to the physical world, becoming engrossed in the world and story of the video game. Thus, due to the multimodal and sensorial nature of video games, they have the potential to be a beneficial tool for increasing student engagement within the classroom and assisting students in further increasing literacy skills and content knowledge. In addition, a review of literature of classroom use of video games as an instructional tool found increased engagement, use of video games as texts, cross-literacies that supported traditional literacy processes and skills.

“I Will Never Look at This Movie the Same Again”

This chapter describes self-study research that used qualitative methods to examine how films were incorporated into the secondary classroom. The study documents how popular culture movies were used in an urban high school history class to facilitate students' critical literacy. By viewing the film Enemy of the State, students were able to bridge their inside-of-school experiences with their outside-of-school practices. Incorporating popular culture movies into the history curriculum helped students shift their perspective of films from entertainment to sources of knowledge. Linking the film to the history curriculum helped students see how past events helped to shape contemporary life. Students were able to ask questions about broader social issues and engage in research to further explore topics raised in the film.

Sparking Engagement

The integration of social media, digital literacy, and its elements into the literacy classroom environment is a pairing that is necessary to keep students engaged in order to see the relevance of the skills in which they are learning. Students spend hours taking in popular culture and communicating their perspectives and ideas with the world while taking part in social media, but fail to see that they are learning and using similar skills when they are in the classroom. This chapter will demonstrate how educators can engage students with the skills they develop outside of the classroom, and apply those skills in lessons, tasks, and the classroom environment.

Using Fan Fiction to Bridge Students' Understanding of Science

The purpose of this chapter was to present current literature focused on integrating science and literacy and describe the teaching of a science unit of study that incorporated fanfiction literature in a fourth-grade classroom. Ms. Bardon's instructional techniques were focused on integrating science learning with reading and writing based within a fictional text read together as a classroom community throughout the unit of science study. The unit of study was presented alongside background literature to illustrate how such teaching is indicative of a larger movement in the educational field toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-based pedagogy and curriculum. The account of teaching was presented according to the close reading of the fictional text, the hands-on science activities, and the culminating student writing of a fanfiction narrative that constituted the assessment of science learning.