ABSTRACT
This volume is mostly concerned with the uses of popular culture in formal education and, in accordance with changing educational policies and discourses worldwide, these are largely viewed positively. But proposals to use popular culture in the classroom are also apt to meet with resistance. Popular culture texts are often either avoided outright or incorporated into strictly educational frames of reference, because they are not thought of as being intrinsically educational. Although not directly concerned with this resistance, this chapter does address the difficulty of thinking of popular culture as education in two ways. First, it explores, and attempts to undermine, conceptual oppositions between popular culture and education from an historical perspective. Then, it discusses present-day attitudes to the educational value of popular culture in the context of educational theory. The notion that popular culture ‘teaches’ leads on to the question of how we ‘learn’ through engagement with it.
