Public Pedagogy

Feminist Constructions of Popular Culture and Everyday Life as Public Pedagogy

Early conceptualizations of public pedagogy originated in the 1990s with feminist theorists' efforts to understand popular culture and the practice of everyday living as sites of pedagogy. Carmen Luke conceptualized public pedagogy in these ways in her 1996 edited volume, Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life. In this text, authors addressed how gendered identities are constructed and circulated through a variety of sites and activities that constitute “everyday life,” as well as how these identities are negotiated by individuals within these various sites. Contributors to the book focused on popular culturebased sites, such as computer games, comic books, magazines, billboards, television, children's toys, parenting magazines, and food marketing, examining how identity formation is connected to the ways in which gender, family, childhood, parenting, and mothering are represented and reproduced. Luke advanced the project by envisioning public pedagogy in a broader way that moves beyond popular culture, explicating everyday life itself as a pedagogical project. Thus, even though including popular culture as a site of pedagogy, she also includes other arenas of public pedagogy, including women's friendships and parenting. This strand of everyday-practices-as-public-pedagogy has been taken up in more recent work, including Bryant Keith Alexander's research on the performative act of buying condoms and Andrew Hickey's work on the street as a discursive site of learning.

Working within a feminist politics of ethics, curriculum theorists Jeanne Brady and Audrey Dentith theorized public pedagogy in the mid- to late 1990s as a curricular notion oriented toward subverting dominant ideologies. Regarding media as a predominant site in which identities are constructed and aware of the processes of hegemonic cultural reproduction inherent within media representations, Dentith and Brady assert that media localities also carry the potential to serve as pathways for liberatory discourses and the (re)creation among women and other marginalized populations of collective identities oriented toward activism for justice. Requiring critical examination of daily experience and the complex interactions of government, media, and popular culture, public pedagogy creates sites of struggle in which images, discourses, canonical themes, and commonly accepted understandings of reality are disputed. Dentith and Brady thus express explicit interest in public pedagogy as a grassroots and communal phenomenon situated beyond institutional structures that fosters movement from positions of social inequality to ones of informed activism by pursuing concrete advances in neighborhoods, health and social services, education, and basic human rights.

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