Popular Culture and Critical Media Pedagogy in Secondary Literacy Classrooms

The article “Popular Culture and Critical Media Pedagogy in Secondary Literacy Classrooms,” had some rather interesting ideas on the framework of teaching media and cultural studies to urban youth students that need much academics and literacy within their students. It’s leading to believe that a “person of 60 years of age, for example, has seen, read, or heard as many as 50 million advertisements,” which the idea that media culture is the most dominant culture in our society nowadays. The idea that it is almost, “true that the media play a central role in the construction of race, class, and gender in problematic ways,” which often leads to stereotypes (3). These media framework can often lead minorities, “feeling of alienation and inferiority while also justifying individual and institutional racism,” which gives these minorities a message of uncertainty (3). However, it is up to us, as teachers to help make these meaningful “connections between out-of-school literacy practices and academic literacy instruction aimed at academic achievement, economic empowerment, and social change,” which allows teachers to draw upon these connections to accomplish multiple aims at media. Yet, it is up to the teacher to help students to “critically interrogate the mass media,” that plays a central role in their identity development and worldviews (4). Yet, it our jobs as teachers to help our students to identify and recognize the “difference between reality and the media’s various representations of reality. Individuals wishing to remain informed need to learn to ‘read’ news media carefully; they must also triangulate traditional readings with counter-reading of media texts writing or using other images when and where they can, whether through a web page, a community newsletter, a brochure, an independent newspaper, a letter to the editor, a message sent out on a listserv, or the production and distribution of digital films,” there our students can understand and get the meaning behind the advertisement (4). Lastly, I believe this article is good for teachers, so they can get ideas on how to reach their students using media. This will allow teachers to connect and understand certain students’ views and thoughts on society that involves media outlets. Not only, will it allow teachers to connect with their students, but it allows teacher to give their point of views on certain advertisement or media outlets that influence our students nowadays.