Week 2 Blog

Annabel Wilson 24/01/2010

The interviewee of my survey was a parent and an early years practitioner, they said that they were concerned about the amount of influence popular culture had on children but that they should be taught and made aware of it so that they can fit in, in their society. When listening to other’s survey results I was surprised that many parents and teachers felt that popular culture should be taught within schools. This differed to the view presented by Lambirth (2003) in which teachers felt that popular culture was in opposition to the objectives and aims that they had a duty to teach, such as traditional reading and writing skills. 

For my own practice, I believe I will be using popular culture to teach different areas of the curriculum firstly because it is an ever growing influence on children’s society and they need to learn how to use it correctly and be made aware of the possible dangers that popular culture can present. In a study conducted by Arthur (2005) one issue raised by parents was stereotyping seen in some Disney films which can influence how a child sees people. This implies that we as teachers need to be aware of this and should perhaps find ways to challenge this such as using films with African princesses rather than the blonde haired blue eyed princesses which would therefore prevent children from following a stereotype.

The second reason why I believe that popular culture will influence my own practice is because there are many good resources provided by popular culture which can be used to develop and enhance different concepts of the curriculum such as Horrible Histories for History, Science and Geography. On SE3 I observed the use of The Snowman and the Snowdog to teach children how to describe a setting and then used it myself to teach speech bubbles and speech text, the popular story enabled the children to focus their writing and they were able to relate to the topic. Another example I observed was Kung Fu Panda which was used to teach punctuation using Kung Fu actions (TES, 2010). In a later writing activity one child repeated the actions as he was self-assessing his work checking he had full stops, commas, exclamation marks and speech marks. While some teachers might be unsure of the ‘violent’ implications Kung Fu has the use of the popular film enabled the children to put a physical action to a punctuation mark and so better understand its uses and when to use it in their own writing.

Bibliography

Arthur, L. (2005) ‘Popular Culture: views of parents and educators’ in Marsh, J. (2005) Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer

Lambirth, A. (2003) ‘”They get enough of that at home”: Understanding aversion to popular cultures in schools’ Reading 37(1) pp.9-13 (pdf on LN)

TES (2010) Kung Fu Punctuation accessed from http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Kung-Fu-Punctuation-6061700/