ABSTRACT
In educational work with students in auto/biography of the sort outlined in the previous chapter, one theme emerges consistently: engagements with popular culture are among the most creative and persuasive influences on personal and collective identity. Powerfully and repeatedly demonstrated within auto/biographical stories of literacy are the ways in which “discourses of the popular become discourses of ourselves” (C. Luke 1993, 176). Within traditional literacy education practices, however, little attention has been given the constitutive effects of popular culture 1 beyond cliched, reactionary, and combative commentary designed to maintain the indefensible modernist cultural divides of high (discriminating) and low (popular) cultural practices. The stubborn classism demonstrated in such commentary ignores, as it simultaneously fails to understand fully, the complex political relationship of culture and desire.
