Week 2

Conducting the parent/ student teacher survey was useful as it allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of how another student teacher views popular culture and digital literacies in the classroom.
              The overall findings of the survey were that the student teacher strongly believed popular culture and digital literacies in the classroom are an effective way to stimulate curiosity with children, positively impacting learning.  
             I was pleased to hear that in the last school the student had visited, staff were excited about digital literacies and invested a lot of time and effort into how they could be used to support teaching, such as through iPads and a VLE (Virtual learning environment) easily accessible to a child from home.
            He continued to claim that having an understanding of current popular culture allows teachers to engage with the pupil’s interests, and draw upon these to plan meaningful contexts for lessons, but that the majority of the teachers he had previously observed didn’t use this due to perhaps a lack of confidence in doing so. Lambirth (2003) supports this view by arguing that many teachers would prefer to teach strictly based on the curriculum, disregarding children’s interests.

I was also intrigued to hear that he believed that the way in which society views popular culture and the stigma attached restricts practitioners, meaning that tools that could be used effectively in the classroom aren’t used as often as they could be. Marsh (2003) reinforces this and states that ‘popular culture is seen as taboo in schools and so student teachers do not want to use in case it reflects badly on them’. However, as discussed in the seminar, if used appropriately then popular culture can provide a meaningful context in which some textbooks cannot. So why does popular culture carry such a stigma?

             However, he did raise possible limitations of popular culture and digital literacies in the classroom. It is possible that if children do not have access to some of these technologies or are unfamiliar with the popular culture in question, such as a television program, then by using this as a basis for a lesson would be excluding those children, causing them to perhaps feel left out and unengaged. Based on this, he argued that popular culture has the potential to be powerful tool, but it not a substitute for a well planned lesson with a firm focus on the curriculum.

            From this, the implications for my future practice are that I would definitely like to incorporate popular culture into my lessons but I still feel without sufficient awareness of the risks involved I am reluctant to. However, I hope that undertaking this module will provide me with the necessary understanding I need in order to resolve this.
Bibliography

Lambirth, A. (2003) ‘”They get enough of that at home”: Understanding Aversion to popular cultures in schools’ in Reading literacy and language. pp 9-13.

Marsh, J (2005) Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer