Pop Culture and Pedagogy: Taking up School Documentaries in Teacher Education
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository POP CULTURE AND PEDAGOGY: TAKING UP SCHOOL DOCUMENTARIES IN TEACHER EDUCATION Reid L. Adams A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Education. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: James Trier, Ph.D. Cheryl Mason Bolick, Ph.D. Heather Coffey, Ph.D. Deborah Eaker-Rich, Ph.D. George Noblit, Ph.D. © 2011 Reid L. Adams ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Reid L. Adams: Pop Culture and Pedagogy: Taking Up School Documentaries in Teacher Education (Under the direction of James Trier) In the forward to Reading Television , Fiske and Hartley (2003) write that television programs ”constitute a gigantic empirical archive of human sense-making, there for the taking, twenty-four/seven” (p.xviii). In addition, this “gigantic empirical archive” also includes fiction films, video games, documentary films, commercials, news media, radio, Internet, and many other forms of mass-produced visual media found in popular culture. In this dissertation I explore a particular piece of this contemporary archive. I suggest pedagogical projects based on a cultural studies analysis of “school docs,” a particular genre of documentary films that I have defined and catalogued. This genre includes such documentary films as: Hoop Dreams (1994) , Mad Hot Ballroom (2004), OT: Our Town (2002) , Stupid in America (2006), Waiting for Superman (2010), and The War on Kids (2009). The pedagogical projects that I conceptualize are intended to explore issues and topics relevant to teacher education coursework; specifically issues and topics associated with the teaching of Social Foundations of Education.
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