Learning With Glee: Popular Culture as Pedagogy

Document Type

Presentation

Presentation Date

4-8-2012

Abstract or Description

The Fox series Glee brings to primetime television a host of potentially polarizing issues faced by contemporary American youth – teenage pregnancy, sexual identity, and both physical and cognitive disabilities, among others. As a cultural text, Glee is particularly relevant to curriculum and pedagogy because these issues are explored in the context of an American high school, but the show is one among many that have emerged in the American Idol era of performance-oriented media. Other popular and well-received television series, such as Dancing With the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, The Voice, and the upcoming Smash, all perpetuate an emphasis on performance that has become such a prominent feature of popular media, and subsequently, youth and adult culture. While the genre of “star search” talent competitions has existed at least since the 1980s with the show “Star Search,” there has been a resurgence in the post-9/11 period. Glee premiered on the Fox Network on May 19, 2009, and is currently watched by over 12 million viewers every week. The Fox series Glee, as an artifact of contemporary popular culture, is also significant in that it exemplifies Stuart Hall’s (1992) notion that the struggle over cultural hegemony is ‘‘waged as much in popular culture as anywhere else’’ (468) and that this space is inherently contradictory. In the case of Glee, which is positioned as “edgy” and “polarizing,” the “resistant” text is, in the words of West (1999) “simultaneously progressive and co-opted’’ (120). As Duncan-Andrade (2004) explains, “Nowhere is the contradictory nature of popular culture more clear than in youth popular culture—a socio-politically charged space because of its increasing influence on the cultural sensibilities of this country’s next generation” (p. 56). In this paper, we invite undergraduate students across multiple disciplines to explore the cultural and pedagogical implications of Glee in order to advance an understanding of how these texts are simultaneous sites of resistance and commodification, attachment and disruption. By engaging students in critical analyses of popular culture texts in a seminar setting, we seek to honor Martusewicz (2001) assertion that, “To teach is always to be in the process of creating something with someone. Usually it is about creating thinking even if we don’t know (can’t know) precisely what that thinking will be (p. 23). As Miller (1999) explains, "it is increasingly important for educators to take seriously the processes by which media texts are produced and disseminated, and to understand the ways in which media images and constructions pervade all our lives" (p. 234). As active and enthusiastic consumers of these cultural texts, we not only seek to inspire critical thinking among students as co-learners, but utilize student readings in taking up Miller’s call to interrogate our own reactions to and interactions with popular culture products, articulate and explore own personal experiences, and investigate our own "subjectivities and identities" (Miller, 2000, p. 267).

Sponsorship/Conference/Institution

American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (AERA)

Location

San Francisco, CA

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