Cycle 3 Reflection

What is the relationship between popular culture and curriculum?

Making connections between popular culture and curriculum is something that I have been passionate about since I first started taking teacher education courses. One of the biggest reasons why I am so interested in this is because I think about how influenced by popular culture I was when I was a student and how excited my peers and I would be whenever there was a legit connection between what we were learning and what we liked to spend our time with outside of school. As an educator, I realized fairly quickly that the relationship between popular culture and curriculum is one that is connected in ways that allow both to build off of each other in a multitude of interesting ways.

Before the article even begins, there is a sentence in Elena Malykhina’s article “Fact or Fiction: Video Games are the Future of Education” that says “Some educators swear by them as valuable high-tech teaching tools but little is known about their impact on learning.” I immediately take issue with this not because I doubt research connected with either of these claims, but because the idea of any action not impacting learning is absurd to me. Sure, video games may not impact the specific, narrow idea of learning that the American education has deemed the most valuable, but video games that require everything from critical thinking of a story and it’s characters, problem and puzzle solving, fine motor skills, memorization, the need to make choices that have consequences, and the ability to adapt to a situation for success are in my view, pretty undeniable examples of learning. This idea of a narrow idea of what learning is, is further emphasized in a quote from the article that says “there is little proof that skillful game play translates into better test scores or broader cognitive development.” The broader cognitive development isn’t given enough of a definition for me to address, but the idea that curriculum based on anything, whether it be classic literature or video games, is not effective for learning because of its relation to test scores is everything that I think is wrong with our education system.

Continuing the build off of popular culture and its relationship to curriculum, I think about the ways that I have used a number of popular games to make connections to the content of my classroom. When I was talking about the 1800s in America, the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 provided ample opportunities to address the way different parts of America were impacted after the Civil War. When I was talking about religions and mythology with students, God of War provided me with incredible visuals and a rich story about Norse mythology that I was able to use to compare different religions. These video games, along with movies, television, popular books, sports, etc all provide incredible opportunities for educators, and if we really want to show students how what they’re doing will translate to the rest of their lives, why not use popular culture that they love to show them the things they’re learning about, in action?

There’s a strong quote in Jean Anyon’s “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” where Anyon states about the relationships between people “capitalists make decisions over how resources are used and and how profit is allocated.” This is something that I believe translates to the classroom very easily, and is an idea that has a huge impact on how students learn. I feel like far too often, especially in schools that serve lower income and diverse communities, the resources and profits are not allocated in a way that best serves the students and their diverse range of modern interests; and I believe that is a huge missed opportunity to help us develop a strong, engaging curriculum that embraces aspects of popular culture and helps create an inspiring environment for all learners.

How can technology be used in education?

With teachers and students the world over currently working with some version of remote or hybrid learning, I think it’s become clear how important technology is to the modern classroom. As someone who had loved everything from movies to TV to eventually YouTube, I have appreciated what video can do since a very young age, and believe that video’s in the classroom is one of the best ways that teachers can reach students today. Not only is interacting with a screen something that modern students have been experiencing pretty much since birth, but it allows for a kind of learning that, when used effectively, can reinforce key ideas in ways an unrecorded, one off lecture never could.

In Sal Khan’s TED Talk Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education, he states “the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" This was something that really struck me because when I think about the way I think, there are countless times where someone will tell me something and even though I think I’m pretty good at paying attention, I’ll forget a key concept almost immediately. I would guess that the vast majority of us are unable to remember something in any meaningful way if we only hear about it once, and I think that using technology in education, in this case video, is a way that we can use modern tools to our advantage and help students learn concepts in ways that allow them to truly engage with them and think about them on a deeper level.

2020 and teaching in the pandemic has provided us in education with a lot of challenges, but also with a pretty incredible opportunity to learn about what the possibilities and limitations of technology in education are. What We’re Learning about Online Learning by Benedict Carey has a quote that says “if the evidence thus far is any guide, virtual education will depend for its success on old-school principles: creative, attentive teaching and patient support from parents,” and I think this is an important idea for educators to remember. If you have all the access to incredible technology in the world, it doesn’t mean much unless teachers are using their training to engage students with that technology and create student investment in their learning and put in a concerted effort to build a community with our students and their families. We are in a place where we have the opportunity as educators to learn about new ways to use technology to engage students that we could end up be using to enhance and improve our classrooms for years to come, and I think the growing pains that go with our current situation will give us incredible opportunities to create engaging learning environments for all students.