1st Edition

Education in Popular Culture Telling Tales on Teachers and Learners

By Roy Fisher, Ann Harris, Christine Jarvis Copyright 2008
    222 Pages
    by Routledge

    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    Education in Popular Culture explores what makes schools, colleges, teachers and students an enduring focus for a wide range of contemporary media. What is it about the school experience that makes us wish to relive it again and again? The book provides an overview of education as it is represented in popular culture, together with a framework through which educators can interpret these representations in relation to their own professional values and development. The analyses are contextualised within contemporary, historical and ideological frameworks, and make connections between popular representations and professional and political discourses about education.

    Through its examination of film, television, popular lyrics and fiction, this book tackles educational themes that recur in popular culture, and demonstrates how they intersect with debates concerning teacher performance, the curriculum and young people’s behaviour and morality. Chapters explore how experiences of education are both reflected and constructed in ways that sometimes reinforce official and professional educational perspectives, and sometimes resist and oppose them.

    Education in Popular Culture will stimulate critical reflection on the popular myths and professional discourses that surround teachers and teaching. It will serve to deepen analyses of teaching and learning and their associated institutional and societal contexts in a creative and challenging way.

    1. Introduction  2. The Good Teacher: Class Heroes and School Saints  3. The Sad and the Bad  4. High School Confidential  5. Hot for Teacher  6. Don’t Pick On Me  7. We Don’t Need No Education?  8. School for Grown Ups: Lifelong Learning in Popular Culture  9. (In) Conclusion 

    Biography

    Roy Fisher, Ann Harris, Christine Jarvis

    "...a fine forensic analysis of the multiple and contradictory ways in which popular culture frames and represents education." "All in all, I highly recommend this text for either undergraduate or graduate level courses in either popular culture or cultural foundations of education."

    Teachers College Record (February 2009),