Your Best Friend or Your Worst Enemy: Youth Popular Culture, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Urban Class

Below are my annotations from the article Your Best Friend or Your Worst Enemy: Youth Popular Culture, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Urban Classrooms- by Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade (can be read here)

Questions: Why does the curriculum need to be centric to a specific culture? Should the goal not be to find many aspects of our world that fit our required standards?

Reactions: In the first section where the author is defining the connection between popular culture and pedagogy I can see relation to what my IMT (Intern Mentor Teacher) does with group projects. In specific projects the groups must make a commercial/political ad. I can see how this makes them a producer. The issue I see with doing this is that they are graded by a rubric that can be subjective to interpretation.

Connections: The author criticizes teachers and schools for “rejecting” youth culture, regardless of what this includes, and that it creates a destructive relationship. I strongly disagree with this criticism for a large part of “youth culture” is inappropriate and disruptive to the learning environment. For example, while interning in a 7th grade social studies class room my IMT was lecturing on the Civil War and battle strategies implemented by the North. The moment my IMT said the word anaconda (regarding the anaconda plan implemented by the Union to restrict the movement of the South) the class of 7th graders burst out laughing due to their “youth culture” associating that word with a very inappropriate music video.

Restatements: I get the core belief of this article that it is wanting teachers and school to make their curriculum more engaging for the students. I can agree partly, but not fully with what the author is requiring of schools. I have thought of creating RPG style video games as supplemental material (even purchased software to make games) for my students to reinforce their knowledge. I would not go as far as attempt to include aspects of “youth culture” that are not relevant to the content of my course.

Applications: A solution that I see as having the most benefit for both the students and the teachers is to implement more project based assignments. This will give the teachers the flexibility of incorporating what the students want to do while still keeping them within the context of the curriculum.