Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy: Reading, Constructing, Connecting

This collection attempts to incorporate cultural studies into the understanding of schooling, not simply addressing how students read themselves as "members" of a distinct culture, but how they, along with teachers and administrators, read popular texts in general. The purpose of this book is to suggest some alternative directions critical pedagogy can take in its critique of popular culture by inviting multiple reading of popular texts into its analysis of schooling and seeing many forms of popular culture as critical pedagogical texts.

Toby Daspit, the Assistant Professor Formerly Known as "Sparky," teaches secondary education and curriculum courses in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership at Western Michigan University. He is the co-author, with Pamela Dean and Petra Munro, of TalkingGumbo: A Teacher's Guide to Using Oral History in theClassroom. Although transforming Buffy the VampireSlayer, rap/rock music, and collage art into educational theories is a full-time job, he still finds the energy to write essays on popular cultural studies and alternative forms of curriculum theorizing, and to fish in the swamps of Louisiana Educated at the University of Pittsburgh and in the wasteland of TV land, John A. Weaver is the author of (Re-) Thinking Academic Politics in (Re-)unifiedGermany and the United States (RoutledgeFalmer) and co-edited with Marla Morris and Peter Appelbaum (Post)Modern Science (Education) and Difficulty Memories: Talkin a Post-Holocaust Era. He also has written on Rap, TheSimpsons, information technology, the Post-Human condition, and Higher Educational reform. When he is not writing and reading, he is furthering his education at the movies or in front of the television.