POPULAR CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Honor Moorman

Using Popular Culture Texts and Multi-Modal Literacy to Teach Strategic Reading
As a teacher, I live for the "light bulb" moments - those moments when the synapses firing in a student's brain are visible as a flash of recognition in his or her eyes. Hungry for those moments, I also love the challenge of reaching, stretching, searching for ways to explain things to students that will cause their "light bulbs" to turn on. Over time I've discovered that I get the best results when I create an analogy or choose an example that is relevant to students' lives. So when I want to light up the classroom, I make connections - and invite students to make connections - to popular culture. Incorporating Popular Culture Texts Like many teachers, I initially used popular culture "as a 'hook' or 'attention grabber' in the classroom to draw students into the traditional elements of the English curriculum" (Callahan and Low, 2004, p. 56). I began by inviting students to analyze and discuss song lyrics in conjunction with the works of literature we were studying in our twelfth-grade English class. For example, we listened to Dan Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band" (1981) with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1964), The Cure's "Killing an Arab" (1980) with Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942), and Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977), with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866). (For additional pairings of music and literature, visit the SIBL Library, a searchable database of "Songs Inspired by Literature" on the Artists for Literacy website, http://artistsforliteracy.org/display/famous.php.) Another tried-and-true approach to using pop culture texts in the language arts classroom is to draw on them for studentfriendly examples of poetic devices and other literary techniques. For example, in "Feeling the Rhythm of the Critically Conscious Mind" AnJeanette Alexander-Smith (2004) describes using hip-hop music to introduce the concept of tone, and other teachers have used television shows, such as South Park, and movies, such as Shrek, to help students understand satire (Hunt & Hunt, 2004; Wright, 2002-2007). Susan Carmichael outlines a lesson called "Stairway to Heaven: Examining Metaphor in Popular Music" in which students find metaphors in popular music lyrics and then illustrate and explain them to their classmates (2002-2007). (Additional lesson plans of this nature are available on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum website at http://www.rockhall.com/ programs/plans.asp.) Inviting students to bring their own pop culture texts into the classroom is a way of "letting students know that what they think and know is important" (Shaw, 2004, p. 88). Given adolescents' lifelong engagements with television, movies, music, the Internet, video games, and so on, secondary students' experiences with pop culture texts far exceed their experiences with traditional print texts, and they have much more pop culture knowledge than they do other kinds of knowledge. Therefore, by incorporating pop culture texts into the curriculum, we can help them connect the new to the known. Showing students how the reading, writing, and thinking skills of the language arts curriculum translate across various media piques their interest, heightens their engagement, and deepens their learning.
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I quickly realized, however, that the value of using popular music went far beyond that of a "hook" or "attention grabber." Analyzing and discussing thematic connections between the song lyrics and the literary works deepened the conversation and brought new perspectives and insights to both texts. Additionally, once I opened the classroom discourse to nonprint media by introducing songs, students began to bring in their own examples of music, TV shows, movies, and other pop culture texts that they felt related to the curriculum. Thus, I modeled and supported students in making text-to-text connections across diverse media and various types of texts.

Honor Moorman is a National Board Certified teacher with eight years of experience teaching ninth and twelfth-grade English at the International School of the Americas in San Antonio, Texas. She is currently working as a secondary literacy specialist for the North East Independent School District, and she has presented workshops at numerous venues including TCTELA and NCTE. Honor is also a teacher consultant with the San Antonio Writing Project, the newsletter editor for the San Antonio Area Council of Teachers of English, and the associate editor for Voices from the Middle. She has published two articles in English Journal, "Teaching with Passion, Learning by Choice" (March 2007) and "Backing into Ekphrasis: Reading and Writing Poetry about Visual Art" (September 2006).

English in Texas | Volume 37.1 | Spring/Summer 2007 | A Journal of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts

Drawing on students' home and community resources, which include their knowledge of popular culture, is also an important aspect of a culturally relevant pedagogy. Bringing popular culture into the classroom can help bridge the gap between home and school literacies. Donna Alvermann and Shelley Xu (2003) advocate "using children's popular culture interests to teach reading and language arts concepts and skills" explaining that "because popular culture texts are part of students' everyday literacies, they hold powerful and personal meanings for students" (pp. 148, 150). Connie Zitlow (2004) notes that the "familiar worlds of our students, constructed with both print and nonprint media, include many elements that can be tools for learning and objects of extended inquiry" (p. 96). Likewise, Tonya Perry (2004) points out that popular culture can be used to enhance students' learning in the English classroom (p. 95). Building on Visual Literacy Using pop culture texts in the classroom is an important way to integrate visual and multimedia texts into the curriculum. Alvermann and Xu (2003) assert that "[b]ecause many popular culture texts make use of multimedia, they can be helpful in extending school literacy teaching and learning beyond traditional print-based materials" (p. 152). Matt Copeland and Chris Goering (2003) emphasize that it is important to include new forms of literacy in the classroom in order to "better prepare students for the skills life demands" (p. 441). Certainly, the increasingly visual nature of our culture demands that we incorporate visual, media, and multimodal literacy into the language arts curriculum. In 1996, NCTE offered the following rationale for the addition of "viewing" and "visually representing" to the English Language Arts standards: To participate in a global society, we continue to extend our ways of communicating. Viewing and visually representing . . . are a part of our growing consciousness of how people gather and share information. Teachers and students need to expand their appreciation of the power of print and nonprint texts. Teachers should guide students in constructing meaning through creating and viewing nonprint texts (NCTE Board of Directors). Similarly, in "The Third Eye," Ali Eken (2002) argues that given the pervasiveness of various kinds of media-including film, television, and music-and the need for students to be able to interpret and decode them, educators should reconsider their definitions of literacy to include nontraditional forms of "reading" (p. 221). And Elliot Eisner (2003) concurs, stating that literacy "can be thought of, not as limited to what the tongue can articulate, but what the mind can grasp" (p. 342). Observing how children use multimodal literacies to make

meaning, Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984) call for educators to abandon the "verbocentric" view of literacy and adopt a semiotic one (p. 168). From a semiotic perspective, all creative disciplines-art, writing, photography, filmmaking, dance, drama, and so on-share a common underlying process in which a message is expressed, conveyed, and understood through one or more sign systems-images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, and so forth. Harry Noden's Image Grammar (1999) offers a writing pedagogy based on the similarities between the visual and the verbal arts in terms of the correlations between what artists and writers do to create meaning. The other side of this analogy is the correlation between what viewers and readers do to make meaning from an image or print text. As John Golden (2001) asserts, "the skills [students] use to decode the visual image are the same skills they use for a written text" (p. xiii). Therefore, visual, multimedia, and pop culture texts can be used to scaffold students' growth as readers of traditional print text. Jerome Evans (2004) suggests that "[a]rtifacts of pop culture serve as advanced organizers for students, who can then connect new material . . . to their own experiences" and "[s]tudents can more readily practice critical-thinking skills. . . with familiar material, and they will be better equipped to tackle literature new to them and discover ideas they have never thought of before" (pp. 33, 37). In Reading in the Dark, Golden (2001) advocates using film clips to "practice the reading and analytical skills that we want our students to have and then turn to the written text" (p. xiv; italics in original). Golden (2001) explains: Its visual nature often makes film more accessible than print for students. When film and literature are used together in the classroom, student can transfer techniques they use as active viewers (which often come more naturally) to their experiences with literature. This enhances their skills as active readers and enables them to respond to a variety of media with more depth (p. xiii). Golden recommends using film clips to teach predicting, responding to text, and questioning the text, as well as analyzing character, setting, point of view, symbolism, and irony. Using this approach with his students, Golden (2001) observed that "the watching and analyzing of movies seemed to greatly affect their ability to read and critique literature" (p.xiv). Scaffolding Reading Comprehension Another way of capitalizing on students' pop culture interests and visual literacy skills that I have found effective is the use of visual and multimedia texts to scaffold instruction in reading comprehension. Working with adolescent readers, I have consistently observed that drawing analogies between

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English in Texas | Volume 37.1 | Spring/Summer 2007 | A Journal of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts

the reading strategies proficient readers use and the viewing strategies viewers use boosts students' confidence and builds their competence as strategic readers. This pairing of popular culture with more traditional literacy instruction provides a "meeting place where students and teachers can share their expertise" (Callahan & Low, 2004, p. 52). Best practice in the teaching of reading includes explicit instruction in the use of metacognitive comprehension strategies. In order to make the invisible processes of reading and thinking while reading visible for students, we must not only model "what good readers do" when we read, we must also articulate and explain the strategies we are using to make the text make sense. And because teaching reading comprehension involves making something invisible visible, we naturally tend to use visual aids, such as graphic organizers, as well as metaphors and analogies, to help students understand the abstract concepts involved in the reading process in a concrete way. To help students become more strategic readers, Ellin Keene (2006) advocates guiding them to "scrutinize their own reading process," to think about what they do when they read. Students can also gain insights into the meaning-making process by scrutinizing their viewing strategies, thinking about what they do when they view and make sense of images and multimedia texts. By first introducing a comprehension strategy using a visual media, we can encourage students to think critically about their viewing strategies, and then build on their strengths and experiences as viewers to help them transfer those strategies to print texts. In addition to creating an anchor chart listing the strategies good readers use, a second column can be added listing the analogous viewing strategies we use when "reading" pop culture texts (see Table 1). The idea is to start with the strengths and skills students bring to the classroom-from their experiences "reading" television, movies, the Internet, comic books, and so on-to deepen their understanding of the literate practices good readers use through analogies to the visual literacy practices the students are familiar with, and to help them transfer this metacognitive awareness to their reading of written texts. Channel surfing while watching TV Watching a movie preview Following hyperlinks on the internet Reading comic books/ graphic novels

Establishing a Purpose/Selecting a Text In order to establish or identify a purpose for reading, we must make an appropriate match between the type of text we will be reading and what we need or want to get out of it. Proficient readers do this quite instinctively and subconsciously, picking up or abandoning a text for a variety of complex motives based on sophisticated analysis of each reading situation. A useful pop culture analogy for this reading behavior is surfing the Internet or channel surfing while watching TV. Take channel surfing for example. Most people make split-second decisions about whether or not to stop and watch each program as it flashes by on the screen. These decisions are at least partly based on the viewer's judgments about the genre of each television show and whether or not that genre fits the viewer's mood, needs, or purposes at that time. To facilitate students' thinking about how selecting a text is similar to the channel surfing they do naturally at home, have them participate in the following activity. First, give students about three minutes to brainstorm as many different television shows as they can. Have students write the title of each show on a different sticky note or small slip of paper. Encourage them to think of as many different kinds of shows as possible. Next, have students work in small groups to sort and classify their television shows by genre. Have students create a threecolumn chart with the following column headings: TV genres, examples, reasons for watching (see Table 2). Students discuss why people choose to watch each type of TV show as they fill in their charts with the genres and examples they have brainstormed. Guide students to move beyond the generic "to be informed" or "to be entertained" descriptions of purpose, to express more specific reasons a viewer might choose to tune into each type of show. Also, encourage them to think of multiple purposes for watching each genre. After students have completed their charts in small groups, invite them to share some of their thinking with the whole class. Introduce the topic of channel surfing into the discussion. Ask students to consider the following questions: How do you decide whether to stop and watch something or keep flipping the channels? (Encourage students to move beyond superficial responses and think more deeply about their own motives and decision-making process.) How are you able to determine what kind of show it is so quickly? (This relates to previewing the text and accessing background knowledge about the show in particular or the conventions of that genre in general.) Based on a given purpose (give examples), what kind of TV show would you choose?

Establishing a purpose

Previewing the text

Making connections Visualizing and making inferences

Table 1. Analogous reading comprehension strategies and pop culture viewing strategies

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TV Genres Comedy

Examples
Scrubs, Friends, That 70's Show, Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld Grey's Anatomy, The Gilmore Girls, The Sopranos, Law and Order, Smallville, One Tree Hill, House, Heroes, CSI, Desperate House Wives, 24 Dateline, 60 Minutes, Today, Anderson Cooper 360, Good Morning America, Sports-Center, Entertainment Tonight The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, Sponge Bob Square Pants, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Deal or No Deal, 1 vs. 100, Jeopardy, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Cribs, The Bachelor, Survivor, MTV Real World, My Super Sweet Sixteen, American Idol, Project Runway, Bounty Hunter, What Not to Wear The Oprah Winfrey Show, The View, Dr. Phil, Live with Regis and Kelly, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman

Reasons for Watching

Entertainment: to laugh and relax; to forget your worries Entertainment: to see what happens next; to get caught up in the story; to find out what's happening in the life of your favorite character Information: to keep up with the latest news, trends, human interest stories, sports reports, and celebrity gossip Entertainment: for fun; to relax; also for the satirical humor and commentary on society Entertainment: for excitement; to see if the contestant will win; to play along Entertainment: to see how your favorite contestant is doing; to keep up with the latest drama; to see how other people live Information & Entertainment: to learn about a subject that interests you; to see how movie stars will respond to interview questions

Drama

News Cartoons Game Shows

Reality TV

Talk Shows

Table 2. Purposes for watching various kinds of television shows

How would your purpose for watching affect how you watched that show? (Think of several people all choosing the same show, but each for a different reason.) Finally, relate the conversation back to the reading of print text. Ask students to reflect on how their approach to a given reading situation affects their reading. Previewing the Text As part of a class discussion about the goals and benefits of previewing a text, a natural connection to popular culture is the movie preview. Ask students whether they would be willing to pay to see a movie without knowing anything about it. Most will say, "no." The purpose of this lesson is to convince them that there are similar reasons to previewing a written text. To establish a common point of reference, start by showing a movie preview to the class (available from websites such as movies.com). This activity works best if the preview is for a movie the students have not seen. Ask students to "think-ink-pair-share" what they have learned about the movie based on the preview. In other words, have students consider the question individually, record their thinking, share their ideas in pairs, and finally discuss their responses as a whole class. Answers will likely include information such as the title, actors, genre, and so on. List these on the left side of a T-chart and invite students to fill in the right side of the T-chart with the analogous information to be learned from

previewing a written text (see Table 3). Have students preview a selection in their literature and/or content area textbook while completing this step of the activity. Referring back to the similarities evident on the T-chart, facilitate a class discussion about how previewing a written text, whether fiction or nonfiction, can improve our understanding and/or enjoyment of it in some of the same ways watching a movie preview can. Encourage students to comment on how their reading experiences, as well as moviewatching experiences, have been affected by previewing or not previewing the text first. Using examples of movies students have seen, extend the discussion the ways in which movie previews can sometimes lead us to have expectations that are not fulfilled when we watch the entire movie. For example, a few years ago I selected The Family Stone as a film to watch with two female friends, thinking it would be a romantic comedy we would all enjoy. An hour and a half later, as I wiped the tears from my face, I realized that I was not only saddened by the tragic events happening on the screen, I was also shocked and disappointed by the difference between my expectations based on the preview and the actual movie. Ask students to comment on why this happens and how this relates to previewing a written text. Be sure to have students consider how a movie preview is carefully constructed as a marketing ploy, as well as how editors and authors select the text features such as headings, bold-faced words, and illustrations that our eyes are drawn to when we preview a written text.

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English in Texas | Volume 37.1 | Spring/Summer 2007 | A Journal of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts

Watching a Movie Preview

Previewing a Written Text

Title

Title

Actors/director

Author

original article they read. This helps students articulate the various kinds of connections they might make while reading a traditional print text and analyze the various effects those connections can have on their comprehension. Point out that the connections available to us on the Internet are limited to the hyperlinks provided by the webpage author(s). On the other hand, when we read a print text and make our own connections, those connections are limited only by the range of our own background knowledge and prior experiences. For the second part of the activity, provide students with a short print text to read. Instruct students to insert their own "hyperlinks" when they come across a word or phrase that prompts them to make a connection. This can be done electronically using the "Insert Hyperlink" feature in Word or with paper and pencil simply by annotating to indicate imaginary hyperlinks. Have students compare the different kinds of connections they made, as well as the different words and phrases that prompted those connections in order to raise their metacognitive awareness of how making connections contributes to individual differences in comprehension and interpretation. Visualizing and Making Inferences Students often have trouble conceptualizing and enacting the strategies of visualizing and making inferences. The pop culture connection I recommend for teaching these strategies involves the use of comic books or graphic novels. First, model for students how to read and think aloud while making meaning from a page of a comic book or graphic novel. Explain to students that the white space between frames is called the gutter, and emphasize what you are visualizing and inferring to fill in the gaps. Then have students read with a partner, taking turns thinking aloud as they visualize and infer to create a movie in their mind. As an extension, students can draw or write descriptions of what they visualize and infer is happening in between frames. Debrief the exercise in a whole class discussion and continue to reinforce students' use of visualizing and making inferences in future reading situations. Helping Students Develop Multi-Modal Literacy Using pop culture texts in reading comprehension instruction raises student engagement, builds on their expertise with visual media, and empowers students to be more strategic readers of all texts - written, visual, and multimedia. Ideally, when pop culture texts and visual/multimedia are included in the language arts classroom, students' interests, experiences, and literacies are validated and valued. This practice has the potential to decenter the traditional authority of the teacher and the literary canon, making the learning environment more student-centered and the curriculum more culturally relevant. However, teachers must be mindful of how the various texts

Genre

Genre

Setting

Setting

Characters

Characters (fiction), people (nonfiction) Premise (fiction), subject matter (nonfiction) Selected scenes - illustrations, etc.

Plot premise

Selected scenes-highlighted moments

A few key lines of dialogue

Headings, pull quotes, etc.

Table 3. T-chart with "information to be learned from . . ."

Making Connections To help students think about the thinking involved in making connections while they read, the Internet provides a useful metaphor. Making connections while we read a traditional print text is somewhat like to following hyperlinks when we read on the Internet. Guiding students to explore this idea further begins with acquiring Internet access for students in the class. If there are not enough computers for each student to have one, this activity can also be done in pairs. Have students choose a news article or other nonfiction article from a typical multi-purpose website such as Yahoo! or MSN, and warn them that they will need to surf the web much more slowly than usual because they will be recording each step along the way. Instruct students to create a three-column chart where they can record each hyperlink they choose to follow, why they are choosing to click on that link, and information about the webpage it takes them to next. In a whole-class debrief of this activity, ask students to reflect on how making connections by following various hyperlinks did or did not enhance or enrich their understanding of the

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are positioned in the curriculum. If pop culture texts are only ever used to introduce a concept before moving on to the "real" literature, the desired impact on student engagement and empowerment will be less likely. When integrating pop culture texts, they should be aesthetically appreciated and critically analyzed alongside the more traditional texts with equal respect and attention. Linda Adler-Kassner (1998-2007) defines multi-modal literacy as "metacognitive strategies for developing literacy practices that can be carried across multiple sites/texts/media, rather than a set of practices tied to specific sites". The lessons described above address multi-modal literacy by 1) facilitating students' critical thinking about their "reading" of pop culture media, 2) helping students articulate the meaning-making process and develop greater confidence in their own meaningmaking abilities, 3) giving students a vocabulary for the thinking strategies they already use when "reading" television shows, movies, the Internet, comic books, and so on, 4) drawing analogies between viewing strategies and reading comprehensions strategies, 5) giving students insights into the reading process and effective use of comprehension strategies, and 6) supporting the transfer of students' metacognitive strategies from visual to print texts. As a result, students find these lessons engaging, enjoyable, and enlightening.

Dostoevsky, F. (1981). Crime and punishment (C. Gardner, Trans.). New York: Bantam. (Original work published 1866). Eisner, E. W. (2003). The arts and the creation of mind. Language Arts, 80(5), 340-344. Eken, A. N. (2002). The third eye. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46(3), 220-229. Evans, J. (2004). From Sheryl Crow to Homer Simpson: Literature and composition through pop culture. English Journal, 93(3), 32-38. Fogelberg, D. (1990). Leader of the band. On The innocent age [CD]. United States: Sony. (1981). Golden, J. (2001). Reading in the dark: Using film as a tool in the English classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Harste, J. C., Woodward, V. A., & Burke, C. L. (1984). Language stories and literacy lessons. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hunt, T. J., & Hunt, B. (2004). Popular culture: Building connections with our students. English Journal, 93(3), 80-83. Joyce, J. (1993). A portrait of the artist as a young man. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1964). Keene, E. O. (2006, June 1-2). What's essential: Comprehension instruction for all literacy learners. Presented at Comprehension and the Development of Thought: Teaching Literacy Well in an Era of Growing Demands, Heinemann Professional Development Institute, Barton Creek Resort, Austin, TX. NCTE Board of Directors. (1996). Resolution on viewing and visually representing as forms of literacy. NCTE Position Statement. Retrieved May 31, 2007, http://www.ncte.org/ about/over/positions/category/literacy/107573.htm. Noden, H. R. (1999). Image grammar: Using grammatical structures to teach writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook-Heinemann. Perry, T. (2004). Taking time: It's all good. English Journal, 93(3), 92-95. Shaw, M. (2004). Bulletin from the outside. English Journal, 93(3), 88-91. Talking Heads. (1990). Psycho killer. On Talking heads: 77 [CD]. United States: Warner Brothers. (1977). Wright, J. (2002-2007). Exploring satire with Shrek. Read Write Think. Retrieved May 31, 2007, from http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=810. Zitlow, C. S. (2004). Professional links: The worlds of our students. English Journal, 93(3), 96-100.

References
Adler-Kassner, L. (1998-2007). Multi-modal literacy. NCTE: Multi-Modal Literacy Key Terms. Retrieved May 31, 2007 from http://www.ncte.org/edpolicy/multimodal/ about/122819.htm. Alexander-Smith, A. C. (2004). Feeling the rhythm of the critically conscious mind. English Journal, 93(3), 58-63. Alvermann, D. E., & Xu, S. H. (2003). Children's everyday literacies: Intersection of popular culture and language arts instruction. Language Arts, 81(2), 145-154. Callahan, M., & Low, B. E. (2004). At the crossroads of expertise: The risky business of teaching popular culture. English Journal, 93(3), 52-57. Camus, A. (1988). The stranger (M. Ward, Trans.). New York: Vintage. (Original work published 1942). Carmichael, S. (2002-2007). Stairway to heaven: Examining metaphor in popular music. Read Write Think. Retrieved May 31, 2007, from http://www.readwritethink.org/ lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=975. Copeland, M., & Goering, C. (2003). Blues you can use: Teaching the Faust theme through music, literature, and film. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46(5), 436-441. The Cure. (1990). Killing an Arab. On Boys don't cry [CD]. New York: Elektra. (1980).

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English in Texas | Volume 37.1 | Spring/Summer 2007 | A Journal of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts