The Pop Culture Zone: Writing Critically about Popular Culture

Why bring pop culture into the composition classroom? Because it?s something you know and can get passionate about. THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE focuses on your relationship with pop culture--such as film, television, popular books, and advertisements--and how that relationship can help you become a more critical reader and writer. The authors of this book use pop culture as the bridge between your life and the critical reading, thinking, and writing that are part of freshman composition to help you learn the rules of formal writing as well as more familiar forms of persuasion. You?ll learn to summarize your views effectively, listen to viewpoints that are different from your own, compare and contrast, and present ideas in a way that creates a continuing conversation of ideas.

Allison D. Smith is professor of English and Coordinator of Graduate Teaching Assistants at Middle Tennessee State University. She received a BA in Teaching Language and Composition and an MA in Applied Linguistics from California State University, Long Beach and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education from The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her primary teaching and research areas include writing pedagogy, writing about pop culture, writing assessment, discourse analysis, and pedagogical grammar. Recent publications include a book chapter in More Ways to Handle the Paper Load, an article on journal writing for the English Leadership Quarterly, and COMPbiblio: Leaders and Influences in Composition Theory and Practice, a book focusing on the career arcs of leaders in composition. In addition, she is one of the series editors for the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development. She is the co-author of THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE (Cengage/Wadsworth, 2009). She is an active participant in the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on Composition and Communication, and the Research Network Forum.

Trixie G. Smith is Director of The Writing Center and a member of the faculty in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. After earning a BA in English and Elementary Education from Mobile College, she spent several years teaching middle and high school students in southern Alabama. She then received an MA in English, an MLIS in Library and Information Science, and a Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of South Carolina, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. Her teaching and research revolve around writing center theory and practice, writing across the curriculum, writing pedagogy, and teacher training. These areas often intersect with her interests in pop culture, service learning, gender studies, and activism. Recent and upcoming publications include a book chapter in (E)merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center, several articles in Southern Discourse, and COMPbiblio: Leaders and Influences in Composition Theory and Practice, a reference book focusing on the career arcs of leaders in composition studies; she is also one of the series editors for the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development. She is the co-author of THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE. She is an active participant in the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on Composition and Communication, the Research Network Forum, the National Writing Project, and the International Writing Center Association.

Stacia Watkins is Assistant Coordinator of Graduate Teaching Assistants for the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University. She graduated from Western Kentucky University with a BA specializing in poetry writing in 2001 and from MTSU with an MA in English focused on television studies in 2004. Watkins is currently ABD and is finishing her dissertation in Rhetoric/Composition and Popular Culture at MTSU. After teaching high school and middle school, tutoring in the University Writing Center, serving as a mentor and an administrator for both the Writing and Teaching Assistants, and instructing several freshman English courses, she was awarded the John N. McDaniel Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006. Watkins has been published in COMPBIBLIO: LEADERS AND INFLUENCES IN COMPOSITION THEORY AND PRACTICE, and in SOUTERN DISCOURSE, and she is currently collaborating on the freshman text THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE (Cengage/Wadsworth, 2009). She serves as the New Professional/Graduate Student Member at Large on the Executive Council of the Popular Culture Association of the South and as Assistant Editor of Studies in Popular Culture. She is also an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on Composition and Communication, the Research Network Forum, the Popular Culture Association, and the Southeastern Writing Center Association.