Teaching Popular Culture

I. Introduction

On 2 February 1999, our English 131 class participated in an on-line synchronous conversation concerning popular culture. The starting point for the forum was an article discussing the work of Scottish educational reformer George Jardine.(1) Jardine had developed new educational techniques to engage students who were having difficulties with the traditional English in the late eighteenth century. Most respondents in the synchronous conversation focused on the last item in the original question, which asked us to "try to investigate exactly what we might teach with popular culture and what pitfalls we might encounter."(2) The discussion that followed revealed a great deal about our class’s perceptions of popular culture. First of all, no one seemed sure what "popular culture" really means. Second, several respondents expressed doubts about teaching popular culture—being out-of-touch with students on this issue, worrying if they would be able to give seriousness to studying popular culture. This synchronous conversation led me to explore issues surrounding popular culture; the following paper is the result of that exploration.

In this essay, I will first discuss our class’s concerns regarding teaching popular culture, based on comments culled from the synchronous conversation. In the following two sections, I will address some of these concerns by discussing the high culture/low culture dichotomy that shadows our perceptions of popular culture. Here, I will argue that the high/low distinction is a construct that we should work to avoid in our classrooms. In the last section, I suggest a set of assignments that would both fit within the parameters of the English 11 goals for the popular culture unit and resolve some of the concerns expressed by our class members in teaching this tricky subject.

II. The popular culture synchronous conversation(3)

In reviewing the real-time transcript of the popular culture synchronous conversation, three trends emerge. Many students expressed doubt they (as teachers) will be able to make popular culture a useful classroom tool for introducing analytical strategies.

A second trend in the forum was a tendency to negatively define popular culture—that is, to set this "low" subject, ostensibly more approachable for our future students, in opposition to traditional, "high" subjects.

The third trend was to think of the popular culture unit as a "stepping stone" (Seaton #12), a "necessary bridge to allow students to learn to think and function in both [meaning both high and low] realms" (Morawski #65). This view seems to support the Composition Program’s idea that this unit should be taught first in the English 11 course. However, especially for first-time teachers, the same vocabulary that allows us to think of popular culture as a "stepping stone" leads us to acknowledge, as seen in the second group of quotations above, that this stepping stone is tantamount to "dumbing things down." This notion reinforces the association of popular culture with "low" culture—a potentially dangerous association for our students. According to the Staff Manual 1998-99, one of the goals of English 11 is to help students "become confident participants in the discourse communities to which they seek entrance" (75). When the world of words is broken into subsets of discourse communities, there is an underlying presumption that one belongs in only some of them. As teachers, we can counter this notion by giving them access to a variety of cultural registers. Once the students understand that the lines separating these registers are constructs, they will no longer be intimidated to cross them. Teaching the popular culture unit second in English 11 may resolve some of the above tensions. That way, students could use analytical skills learned during the first unit on this equally challenging material. Furthermore, teachers may feel more comfortable by this time, and be better apt to teach popular culture without thinking of it as "dumbing it down."

The doubts concerning teaching popular culture expressed by participants in our synchronous conversation echo the national debate regarding popular culture’s legitimacy as an object of critical attention. In July of last year, Chronicle of Higher Education featured a piece entitled, "The Study of Popular Culture Has Acquired Legitimacy, but Still Lacks Cohesion." Its author, Michael Kammen, acknowledges that the study of popular culture has "enhanced our understanding of the democratization of American culture" and allowed work in this area across several disciplines. On the other hand, the overall purpose of the article is to question this trend. As a discipline, popular culture studies "can be fairly said to have acquired more momentum than direction, and achieved more enthusiasm than cohesion."(4) It seems only natural that this material, obviously such a young discipline, would present challenges for inexperienced teachers and inexperienced college students (here, I refer to first-year teachers teaching first-year undergraduates).

III. Cultural literacy

In the synchronous conversation, the way students discussed popular culture belied an association between popular and "low" culture. I mention above how associating popular with low can be dangerous in the classroom. Here, I would like to point out that the politics connoted by low culture need questioning as well. Allowing popular culture into the scholarly arena is allegedly less totalizing and prescriptive than dealing with more traditional (Eurocentric, dead-white-male) material. Thus, we perceive popular culture studies as progressive, and as accessible to many kinds of students. Kammen argues, and I agree, that the progressive appeal of popular culture has the potential to backfire in the classroom. Kammen observes that the ideology behind popular culture does not always "work in conjunction with efforts to minimize or ameliorate class differences" and can even serve "to build consensus about a (homogenized) national identity."(5) This sounds strangely reminiscent of the debate over cultural literacy sparked by Hirsch and Bloom in the late 1980s. While popular culture may have a hidden conservatism, let us take a moment to examine the archconservative shell of cultural literacy.

A little more than ten years after their publication, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind are rejected in academic circles for being totalizing, dead-white-male versions of "culture." But let us take another look at what these two authors hoped their books would achieve. At the time of their publication, mainstream weeklies published positive reviews of the books. David Gates, writing for Newsweek, welcomed the books as helpful and necessary. Gates aligned himself with Hirsch and Bloom by lamenting the state of secondary-school education in America. He points out that cultural literacy, to borrow Hirsch’s phrase is not only necessary for future professors, but simply for anyone who wishes to function in society:

Today, we realize that the terms "Leibniz, Locke and Luddites" promote a Eurocentric concept of culture. Gates, Hirsch and Bloom certainly did not address multiculturalism, but they made a valid point: certain types of knowledge will help students function in a wider variety of discourse communities. In order to demonstrate how the type of cultural knowledge Hirsch discusses, albeit learned by rote and remembered only in bits and pieces, is still necessary in daily life, Gates summarizes Hirsch’s idea of "schemata." Schemata are "superficial ideas suggested by words." When one has these word-idea connections in place already, one learns more efficiently from what one reads. Knowing that Falstaff is a fat gourmand is an example—one need not be able to name the exact Shakespeare plays that feature him. In this regard, popular culture can be one more way of building the schemata our students need in order to participate in a rewarding way in a variety of discourse communities.

IV. Crossing the lines between High and Low

It is important to note that not all the schemata the culturally literate individual is supposed to acquire come from such allegedly highbrow sources as Shakespeare. Lucia Solorzano, in her U.S. News & World Report review of Cultural Literacy, observes that "Pope John Paul II sits next to Johnny Appleseed. Cleopatra precedes Grover Cleveland. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are there as is another duo, Francis Crick and James Watson."(7) Some of these items are falsely perceived as high culture and some given the misnomer of low culture. As teachers of popular culture, we need to understand the benefits of encouraging our students to question the elusive boundary line that separates high and low. We can teach them that "high" culture is perfectly accessible to them, and that "low" culture can be analyzed in the same careful, critical manner as an arcane treatise.

Interestingly, for many of our students, cultural crossover may not be a new idea. Given that over eighty percent of UNC’s incoming freshmen are from North Carolina, I looked to the Raleigh News & Observer for an idea of how culture is currently perceived by our students and their families. One recent article announced that "classic literature is making a comeback."(8) The caption to an accompanying photo reads "Movies such as ‘Shakespeare in Love’ have spurred interest in the Bard." The Hollywood movie industry is hardly known as a financial risk-taker; the production companies are more likely to seek profit by following trends, rather than creating them. Viewers interested simply in the romance plot could have chosen the contemporary release, "You’ve Got Mail." Instead, they line up for Ralph Fiennes as famous Elizabethan poet and Gwyneth Paltrow as his muse. Not coincidentally, "Elizabeth," another period drama, joins "Shakespeare in Love" on this year’s list of Oscar nominees.(9) While these films have been criticized for lack of (or even disregard for) historicity, the News & Observer suggests that viewers are becoming increasingly interested in the texts on which films such as "Shakespeare in Love" are based.

The article also mentions the end-of-century book lists as a factor contributing to rising sales of the classics. In academic circles, seeing Ulysses at the top of the best-seller list, in response to its number-one ranking on a widely published book list, elicits knowing chuckles. We are unwilling to imagine that nonacademic readers of such a book can squeeze any meaning from it, rather than acknowledging that if people are willing to fight through Joyce on their own, they can certainly be led to do so in a classroom. Significantly, this News & Observer article comments on trends in reading on a national but also on a local level. Those people picking up Shakespeare, for weekly reading groups at the Durham Barnes & Noble, could be parents of our future students. Or, they could be our future students.

Teachers, as well as students, can be helped by understanding the constructed nature of the high/low dichotomy present in American culture. Because Shakespeare has seen a comeback in "popular" readers and viewers in the last year, Lawrence Levine’s treatment of Shakespeare in his 1988 book, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America is especially pertinent. Levine’s premise is that cultural hierarchy developed in America around the middle of the nineteenth century. To demonstrate this in his opening chapter, "Shakespeare in America," Levine quotes widely from parodies of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century American drama. The audience would not have appreciated this humor without familiarity with the original. He further states that Shakespeare’s were the most widely-performed plays in America until around 1840.(10) So while we will be teaching within the halls of academe, which may view Shakespeare as firmly entrenched in the pantheon of untouchables, we would do well to think of the two swindlers in Huckleberry Finn, who entertain Huck and Jim with Shakespearean parody.

V. Practical Example

My goal in the classroom, and I feel that this fits within the parameters established in the manual, is to let my students know they don’t have to be intimidated by things they perceive as high culture. To achieve this, especially in the popular culture unit, I will focus on crossover in the cultural hierarchy.

For instance, I begin by choosing the coffee shop, a very current arena of popular culture. In class, we could discuss the contemporary coffee shop: what do people do in coffee shops? what portion of society do these people represent? where are coffee shops located and why? (For instance, they now have Starbucks in Harris Teeter.) Are the answers to these questions specific to our region / our country? why or why not? As a feeder assignment, I would have the class work in groups as if they are business partners opening their own coffee shop. They would describe in writing their plans, and share these with the class.

For the second feeder assignment, I would have them research to put coffee shops into a historical perspective. For example, the students focus on the role of English coffeehouses in the literary community in the 18^th century. Then, as individuals, they could write a topical piece in the vein of the newsletters which were circulated in coffee houses then.

The coffeehouse could also be expanded to include the oral component of the class. For this portion, I would have students research coffee as an industry, i.e. learn about its production and related race and class politics. We could stage a town meeting at which coffee growers face off with workers or an environmental group. The students would have to write a persuasive argument to fit the research position of one of these three groups (growers, workers, environmentalists) and present their positions debate-style.

In this way, the students are not only using academic methods to approach an item of popular culture. Coffee as popular culture provides the gateway to considering this item across the lines of cultural hierarchy (including the historical perspective, which is often associated with high culture). Thus, the students develop their ability to contextualize and to critically evaluate any subject of study, and with a greater sense of confidence.