ABSTRACT
We need to widen our understanding of how we are taught, and how we learn, and how we know, and this involves analyzing the pedagogy of popular culture. (Scholle, 1991, p. 3)
The landscape of schooling and the work of teachers have been and continue to be important sites in the cultural production of the texts of childhood. In a very real sense television and other forms of popular culture serve as the first school for young children and as the first Faculty of Education for adults who wish to become teachers. In the countless classrooms of fiction and film in which we are all immersed, we are exposed to both right and left wing images of teaching, image-texts that can be agents of change and subversion, as well as invisible but powerful agents of reproduction and conservatism. These teacher images vie for children’s attention as they grow up, some of them to become teachers.
