ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a different approach to curriculum and literacy. Historically, curriculum and literacy have been thought of, and theorized, only in the context of institutional pedagogical contexts. But we know from two decades of cultural studies and many more decades of empiricist research that an equally if not more powerful curriculum for children and adults is that of television texts. The chapter focuses on the informal curriculum of TV textuality and the self/other productions that emerge out of the relationship between TV and viewers. To reframe curriculum and literacy into a cultural studies approach to knowledge and learning, then, requires that we uncouple 'curriculum' and 'literacy' from strictly school-based knowledges and forms of pedagogy. There is in pop and academic cultural studies a general assumption that we are economically in a 'post-industrial' era, and culturally in a 'postmodernist' era.
