Digital Commons Network^™

Deconstructing "Proper Condom Use" As An Introduction To Literary Analysis, Julie Stewart, Thomas D. Clark, Marilyn Clark

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Popular culture figures in television, movies, comics, and video games have captured the imaginations of young people. The themes and characters of shows students watch regularly help shape their views on contemporary issues, especially as they compare their personal experiences with those portrayed on their favorite shows. This paper examines how "Proper Condom Use," an episode of South Park, one of the most popular shows among young viewers, can be used as a springboard for in-class discussion of tools for literary analysis through an exposition of this episode’s visual and aural humor, themes, characters, audience, and genre.

Our experience …

Teaching Technical Writing Through Designing And Running Escape Rooms, Marijel (Maggie) Melo, Antonnet Johnson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

While many instructors recognize how the integration of popular culture and student interests can enhance student engagement and learning, this pedagogical approach remains rare in technical writing courses. In this article, we provide an end-to-end outline of an escape room project assigned to junior and senior level undergraduates, including an overview of our pedagogical rationale, institutional context, instructional materials, and synthesis of work produced by students. By collaborating on a range of technical documentation, students learn through experience that can be leveraged beyond the classroom and in their professional pursuits. Moreover, we aim to provide teachers with an example of …

Editorial: Embracing Changes And Creativity In Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Anna S. Cohenmiller, Kurt Depner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Volume 5, Issue 2 of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy (June 2018), Reading into Creativity: New Approaches in Concept and Practice.

Considering Ethical Questions In (Non)Fiction: Reading And Writing About Graphic Novels, Gene Mcquillan

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Teachers often feature graphic novels in college courses, and recent research notes how these texts can help make the process of reading more engaging as well as more complex. Graphic novels help enhance a variety of “literacies;” they offer bold representations of people dealing with trauma or marginalization; they explore how “texts” can be re-invented; they exemplify how verbal and visual texts are often adapted; they are ideal primers for introducing basic concepts of “post-modernism.” However, two recurring textual complications in graphic novels can pose difficulties for students who are writing about ethical questions. First, graphic novels often present crucial …

Dumbledore’S Uncertain Past: A Harry Potter Approach To Evaluating Sources, Kathryn N. Mcdaniel

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Teaching students to evaluate sources—for accuracy, bias, and agenda—and to use them effectively despite their weaknesses, presents a challenge, and yet is essential in today’s crowded media landscape. Most humanities and social science teachers spend at least some class time helping students develop a critical eye for documentary evidence. Using the fictional informational sources J. K. Rowling presents in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to understand Albus Dumbledore’s troubled youth can provide students the analytic skills they need through an entertaining exercise. The Harry Potter stories intrinsically value the past, though Rowling is not naïve about the difficulty of …

“This Cabal Guy Could Be Right”: Numeric Correlations In Maury Yeston’S In The Beginning, Leonard Vandegrift

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The study of gematria and isopsephy, the numeric conversion of Hebrew and Greek words, yields an abundant harvest of biblical insight. Though applying this method to more secular literature is rare, we have a unique set of circumstances in Maury Yeston’s musical In the Beginning that renders its use appropriate. Derived from Hebrew and Greek, the names of the show’s principal characters can be converted to numeric values, all of which share at least one of three common factors. Moreover, the names are often connected thematically, and their factors reflect key elements in the first five books of the Bible. …

Social Justice From The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling As Human Rights Activist, Hugh A. D. Spencer

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Rod Serling achieved critical acclaim in the First Golden Age of Television writing realist teleplays that express a strong moral sense and social consciousness. With the decline of anthology drama at the close of the 1950s, Serling created The Twilight Zone, which would become a forum for telling relevant stories while circumventing commercial and bureaucratic interference. As a means of exploring Serling’s use of drama as a tool for social justice, this paper compares themes from The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery with charter and constitutional statements of human rights. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is …

2024 November 7 - From My Notepads Newsletter, Office Of The President, East Tennessee State University, Brian Noland

From My Notepads: A Newsletter from President Brian Noland

No abstract provided.

Intersections: Belief, Pedagogy, And Politics [Dialogue, Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2016)], Lynnea Chapman King, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Intersections: Belief, Pedagogy, and Politics [Dialogue, Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2016)]

Editorial: New Horizons, Lynnea Chapman King and Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

The Pedagogy and Politics of Racial Passing: Examining the Role of Visual Literacy in Turn-of-the-Century Activist Media, Tara Propper

Eastern Imaginaries Erika Quinn More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, and True Detective’s Terrestrial Horror, Jonathan Elmore

Hyping the Hyperreal:Postmodern Visual Dynamics in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, Andrew Urie

Applications in the Classroom

Four Decades, Three Songs, Too Much Violence: Using Popular Culture Media Analysis to Prepare Preservice Teachers for Dealing with School Violence, Edward Janak and …

Review: The Design Museum, London, And “Fear And Love: Reactions To A Complex World.”, Michael Samuel

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of the Design Museum in London, United Kingdom and the exhibit “Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World,” available from November 24, 2016 to April 23, 2017.

Using Popular Culture In The Classroom In High Schools And Universities, Laurence Raw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Reviews of:

Edward Janak and Ludovic A. Sourdot, editors. Educating through Popular Culture: You’re Not Cool Just Because You Teach through Comics. Lexington Books, 2017. Hardback, 341 pages. ISBN: 9781498549372.

David Buckingham, editor. Teaching Popular Culture: Beyond Radical Pedagogy. Routledge, 1998. Paperback, 207 pages. ISBN: 1857287932.

Elana Reiser. Teaching Mathematics Using Popular Culture. McFarland, 2005. Paperback, 235 pages. ISBN: 9780786477067.

Lan Dong, editor. Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy, and Practice. McFarland, 2012. Paperback, 272 pages. ISBN: 9780786462462.

Review: Copyright For Scholars: Osmosis Doesn’T Do The Trick Anymore, Janet Brennan Croft

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Reviews of:

Kevin L. Smith. Owning and Using Scholarship: An IP Handbook for Teachers and Researchers. American Library Association, 2014. 240 pages. ISBN: 978-083898747-6.

Kenneth Crews. Copyright Law for Librarians and Educator: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions, 3rd edition. American Library Association, 2012. 192 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1092-4.

Rebecca P. Butler. Copyright for Academic Librarians and Professionals. American Library Association, 2014. 278 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1214-0.

Russell, Carrie. Complete Copyright for K-12 Librarians and Educators. American Library Association, 2012. 172 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1083-2.

Applications In The Classroom: Teaching Disney/Pixar’S Inside Out Within The Tradition Of Allegorical Personification, Jason John Gulya

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Several years ago, I noticed that the widespread distinction between high and low culture was wreaking havoc on my classroom. My students would read and analyze texts like Robinson Crusoe and Pride and Prejudice with little to no prompting because (in their minds) these texts were already part of the recognized canon and it was therefore permissible to pick them apart and analyze them closely. But I would get strange looks when I asked undergraduates to think critically about how the mock-news programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report worked or when I asked them to discuss how the …

Four Decades, Three Songs, Too Much Violence: Using Popular Culture Media Analysis To Prepare Preservice Teachers For Dealing With School Violence, Edward Janak, Lisa Pescara-Kovach

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Since teacher education has morphed from normal schools into colleges of education, the goals of preparing teachers have expanded. While it is essential to prepare teachers to utilize scientifically proven methods as well as to read and use research in the field, there are ever-expanding other goals that must be met as well. For one example, with the increase of school violence taking place in the United States, it is imperative to include preparation for preservice teachers on how to prevent bullying and how to handle traumatic events, such as school shootings, with their future students. However, broaching such a …

Hyping The Hyperreal: Postmodern Visual Dynamics In Amy Heckerling’S Clueless, Andrew Urie

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

An iconic staple of 1990s Hollywood cinema, director-screenwriter Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) is a cult classic. This article examines the film’s postmodern visual dynamics, which parody hyperreal media culture and its connection to feminine teen consumerism amidst the image-saturated society of mid-’90s era Los Angeles.

More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, And True Detective’S Terrestrial Horror, Jonathan Elmore

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” …

Eastern Imaginaries, Erika Quinn

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Orientalist tropes shaped Western ideas about the East in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through travelogues and fiction, and have persisted into the twenty-first. One central set -piece of these stereotypes is the imaginary Eastern European country, “Ruritania.” The advantages and drawbacks of such an imagined place are explored more thoroughly through two recent pieces of pop culture, Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, and China Miéville’s novel The City and the City. While Anderson’s film entertains and sustains Orientalist stereotypes, Miéville’s novel demands the reader go deeper to empathize with characters and grapple with key issues about …

The Pedagogy And Politics Of Racial Passing: Examining Media Literacy In Turn-Of-The-Century Activist Periodicals, Tara Propper

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article explores how we can use African American activist media to theorize the role of pedagogy in the public sphere. Focusing on how racial passing stories expose the limiting (and often tropic) binaries through which racial identity is deciphered, this analysis further highlights the extent to which these binary constructions of identity are learned through media narration.

Using the December 1912, issue of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis Magazine as a touchstone for investigation, this analysis considers how pedagogy is taken up as both a theme and project in the magazine. Foregrounding the degree to which Crisis critiques …

Editorial: New Horizons, Lynnea Chapman King, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Volume 4, Issue 1 of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy (Winter 2017), and issue devoted to the intersections of belief, pedagogy, and politics.

Adapting Our Approaches: (In)Formal Learning, Stereotypes, And Traumas [Dialogue, Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2016)], Lynnea Chapman King, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Adapting Our Approaches: (In)Formal Learning, Stereotypes, and Traumas [Dialogue, Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2016)]

Editorial, Lynnea Chapman King and A.S. CohenMiller

Guest Editorial

Binarisms, Adaptation, and Love: Albuquerque 2016, Laurence Raw

Formal and Informal Learning

The Power of Books: Teachers’ Changing Perspectives about Using Young Adult Books to Teach Social Justice, Janis M. Harmon and Roxanne Henkin

High Culture as Entertainment”: Hybrid Reading Practices in a Live Book Club, Magnus Persson

From the Vertical to the Horizontal: Introducing Mikhail Epstein’s Transculture to Perplexed Educators, Sheldon Kohn

Stereotypes and Reality

The Diyinii of Naachid: Navajo Rhetoric as Ritual, Edward …

Review Of Love Between The Covers By Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015), Lexey A. Bartlett

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

A review of Love Between the Covers by Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015).

The Roots Of Authoritarianism In Amc’S The Walking Dead, Adam M. Crowley

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010- ) is a unique artifact in the twenty-first century’s expansive catalogue of undead-themed entertainments. To date, the show’s producers, commentators, and critics have noted the relevance of psychological trauma to the series. If the experience of realistic psychological trauma is relevant to The Walking Dead, then it should be possible for critics to articulate detailed assessments of the particular kinds of traumatic experiences that are foregrounded in the program. Trauma is, after all, an extremely nuanced and highly theorized facet of the human condition. This paper provides one such assessment and considers the significance …

“If You Want To Be The Man, You’Ve Got To Beat The Man”: Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990s, Marc A. Ouellette

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE's on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

From The Vertical To The Horizontal: Introducing Mikhail Epstein’S Transculture To Perplexed Educators, Sheldon S. Kohn

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

A shift in focus from supporting or opposing vertical, grand narratives to the horizontal, the ordinary and the everyday, can lead educators to transformative developments. Educators find themselves in a false dichotomy of being restricted to supporting or opposing competing vertical utopian visions of education. Mikhail Epstein’s ideas about transculture can help perplexed educators make a shift from the vertical to the horizontal, focusing their praxis and pedagogy on the ordinary and the everyday, including objects and artifacts of popular culture. In a radical move, Epstein argues that commodification represents resistance to totalitarian controls and impulses; he urges educators to …

“High Culture As Entertainment”: Hybrid Reading Practices In A Live Book Club, Magnus Persson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The Bushwick Book Club (BBC) is a live book club in which invited pop musicians perform musical interpretations of a predetermined literary work in a nightclub environment. What can a typical BBC show, with its strong emphasis on popular music and performance, teach readers about the uses of literature? This case study will investigate which reading practices are at work and in what ways they challenge traditional ideas of the forms, functions, and values of reading. Another important aspect concerns how the borders between high and popular culture, and between the printed word and other media are renegotiated. Based on …

Binarisms, Adaptation, And Love: Albuquerque 2016, Laurence Raw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

I was fortunate enough recently to attend the Southwest Popular Culture Association meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico in February 2016. This was the third time I had attended the conference; I find it rather unique in its capacity to embrace academics and graduate learners in a non-threatening ambiance, where participants genuinely try to help each other rather than to try and score cheap scholarly methodological points for their own personal self-gratification.

Popular Culture Pedagogy: Theory And Application In Academia [Dialogue, Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2016)], Lynnea Chapman King, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Popular Culture Pedagogy: Theory and Application in Academia [Dialogue, Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2016)]

Editorial, Lynnea Chapman King and A. S. CohenMiller

Articles

(Re)learning about Learning: Using Cases from Popular Media to Extend and Complicate our Understandings of What It Means to Learn and Teach, Kelli Bippert, Dennis Davis, Margaret Rose Hilburn, Jennifer D. Hooper, Deepti Kharod, Cinthia Rodriguez, and Rebecca Stortz

Building a Popular Writing Course, Emily Howson, Chris Massenburg, and Cecilia Shelton

Lady Gaga Meets Ritzer: Using Music to Teach Sociological Theory, Kenneth Culton and José A. Muñoz

A Framework for Using Popular Music Videos to Teach …

Film Review: Joss Whedon’S Much Ado About Nothing: Whedon, Branagh, And The Anxiety Of Influence, Jessica Maerz

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of Joss Whedon’s film Much Ado About Nothing, reflecting on Whedon, Branagh, and the anxiety of influence.

Connecting The Disconnected: Pedagogy Goes Digital Native, Kurt Depner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

We must redefine online pedagogy as here to stay. Is it any wonder that popular culture pedagogy is moving more from a focus on liberation pedagogy to a commodity based one? While traditional “brick and mortar” course enrollment has flattened or even dropped recently, online courses continue to see increased enrollments. In the case of the university system I’m in, we’ve seen an overall drop in enrollment of 10-15% since 2010 but an increase in online sections of over 30%, and we know the reason, in most cases: as tuition increases and salaries remain flat, more students are forced into …

A Pedagogical Journey: Albuquerque 2015, Laurence Raw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The subject of pedagogy and popular culture has assumed increasing significance in academic circles, especially since the publication of Phil Benson’s and Alice Chik’s anthology Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Teacher Education (2014), a series of interventions discussing how popular culture can be implemented in a variety of teaching situations across the globe. The book offers valuable insights into how popular culture can inspire learners through materials drawn from everyday life but tends to avoid essential questions such as what constitutes popular cultural material (and how it differs from other textual forms) and what learning outcomes might be accomplished through its …