Popular Culture and Curriculum

People are meaning makers and storytellers. They give meaning to what their senses tell them and create narratives to share and explain their perceptions. This is diversity and culture—from person to person, intragroup and intergroup, across geographical and generational contexts humans make sense and narratives that give value and meaning to experience. All people regardless of age, race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, ability, or other context of being are engaged in this work. Children and adults in the poorest parts of town and those in the wealthiest make [Page 1674]sense of their lived experience. However, the worth attributed to what marginalized populations construct challenges the representations and values shaped by earlier ideas and values put forward by dominant groups. Nonetheless, if available, today's communication technologies enable people of all groups to transform meaning on a mass scale. This cacophony of meaning requires structures of practice and discourse to organize the chaos.

Curriculum and popular culture are two such structures through which people determine and pass on knowledge. Both terms have multiple meanings. Herein, curriculum is the official course of study that educators use in schools to teach students. Popular culture is the ever-changing web of meaning and representations based on mass culture, including television, popular music, the Internet, film, and video games.

To discuss popular culture it is useful to first explore the concept of curriculum. Like popular culture, curriculum is a multitude of narratives and practices that inform culture, but is a more formal construction most often designed by adults to be delivered to young people. J. T. Dillon describes the basic elements of curriculum as being (a) who teaches, (b) who is taught, (c) what is taught, (d) when and where it is taught, (e) why the content is taught, (f) how it is taught—the teacher action and the student action, and (g) what the results are. This straightforward language hides centuries of social struggles about the meaning and practice of each of these components. Tensions in curricular practices, influenced by relationships of power within a society, reflect the rising and falling significance of cultural narratives about the question of what knowledge is of most worth. For example, schooling in the United States has deeply embedded European roots connected to narratives of the rational mind that emphasize mental over somatic and emotional knowledge. Moreover, the European story is promoted, and there is a bias that reflects the values of the wealthier classes. On the other hand, in the contemporary United States, multicultural educators promote curricula that reflect the needs and stories of a pluralistic and democratic society in the 21st century.

At one time, the term culture was used to signify an attribute of only the rich and powerful. The study of popular culture expanded as mass media burgeoned. It challenges the mainstream culture and school curriculum because it includes myriad stories told from many perspectives and multiple contexts; as creativity and interpretation it is fluid and full of surprises. Paul Willis describes popular culture among youth as creative symbolic work shared among young people who follow their passions in film or magazines, on the radio and television, on computers and other digital devices. They communicate ideas, claim their identities, and assert their value as cultural beings through popular culture in everyday life. Their language, clothes, hairstyle, and other forms they choose to create—from hip hop arts to tattoos and piercings—are all the symbolic work of self-determination.

...