Harnessing Popular Culture to Teach Course Content
吃瓜tv assistant professor and BLUEprint coordinator
Psychology, School of Arts & Sciences
One of the fundamental challenges we face as educators is engaging students in course material. While there are already several pedagogically sound approaches to building student engagement via the way we structure the course (e.g., active learning, high impact practices), another strategy involves the lens of the course itself. In fact, many faculty are moving towards courses which utilize a popular culture theme. For example, many colleges offer courses on everything from popular culture icons (e.g., Taylor Swift, Beyonce) to literature (e.g., Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) to children鈥檚 shows (e.g., Sesame Street) to media more broadly (e.g., Star Wars, Star Trek).
This is not a new practice, such popular culture themed courses have been around for years (Blessing & Blessing, 2015). In fact, there is empirical evidence of themed courses being used in disciplines such as Chemistry (Schultz et al., 2009), Art (Tessier & Tessier, 2015), Language Arts (Lipson et al., 1993), Biology (Tessier & Tessier, 2015), and Sociology (Valiente-Neighbours, 2020) as well as anecdotal evidence from the social sciences (e.g., ; ; Swirsky et al., in press).
What is new is the empirical attention that鈥檚 beginning to recognize thematic teaching as a valid and useful strategy to engage students in class material. There are also an increasing number of resources becoming available to help faculty develop and teach themed courses. For example, a team of researchers (including myself!) created aimed at using Sesame Street to teach about Human Development (Timmons et al., 2023) as well as a guidebook for teaching themed courses more broadly (Geffen et al., 2023).
So what does this mean for our teaching? Find a topic that you are interested in and passionate about and think about how it can connect to your discipline. Consider a course on 鈥淒econstructing Hogwarts: Religion, Race, and Gender in Harry Potter鈥 (Religion), or 鈥"The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling With Taylor Swift Through the Eras鈥, or 鈥淭he Philosophy of Tolkien鈥, or 鈥淭he Psychology of Musical Theater鈥. In fact - recent evidence suggests that there are myriad benefits for faculty as well as students (e.g., they are fun, allow us to humanize ourselves, they are reinvigorating). Harnessing the power of popular culture can be a really powerful teaching tool!
References
Blessing, S. B., & Blessing, J. S. (2015). Using a movie as a capstone activity for the introductory course. Teaching of Psychology, 42(1), 51-55.
Geffen, S., Swirsky, J.M., Coyle, E., Doody, K.R., Schuetz, P., Timmons, L., & Weisgram, E. (2023). 鈥淐an you tell me how to get鈥 started: Using Sesame Street as an example for developing a themed course? In L. Forbes & D. Thomas (Eds.), Professors @ play playbook: Playful teaching techniques in higher education. Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press.
Lipson, M. Y., Valencia, S. W., Wixson, K. K., & Peters, C. W. (1993). Integration and thematic teaching: Integration to improve teaching and learning. Language Arts, 70(4), 252-263.
Shultz, M. J., Kelly, M., Paritsky, L., & Wagner, J. (2009). A theme-based course: hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Journal of Chemical Education, 86(9), 1051.
Swirsky, J.M., Doody, K., Schuetz, P., Geffen, S., Timmons, L., & Weisgram, E. Coyle, E. (in press). Benefits and challenges of developing and teaching popular culture themed classes. College Teaching.
Tessier, L., & Tessier, J. (2015). Theme-based courses foster student learning and promote comfort with learning new material. Journal for Learning through the Arts, 11(1).
Timmons, L., Geffen, S., Coyle, E., Doody, K.R., Schuetz, P., Swirsky, J.M., & Weisgram, E. (in press). To Theme or Not to Theme? Sesame Street as a Pop Culture Theme for Developmental Psychology Classes. In J. McIntyre & K. Brakke (Eds). Engaging, Supporting, and Challenging Students in Developmental Psychology Courses. Society for the Teaching of Psychology.
Valiente-Neighbours, J. M. (2020). Honoring student cultural capital: Social media and popular culture as tools for teaching theory. College Teaching, 68(2), 79-86.