21st Century Pop Culture

Popular Culture and Education

Popular culture has taken on a new meaning in the last fifty years. Popular culture has seen this change with the advancement of new technology. Things like radio and television have made it possible for ‘fads’ or music to catch on faster and reach larger amounts of people. Throughout history there have been games, clothes, and other things that have defined popular culture along with social ideas, restrictions, attitudes and other phenomena. Popular culture is an important to all aspects of our lives and especially as teachers as we interact with popular culture and our students. An important part of popular culture in the 21st century is technology and how we choose to interact with it.
I think as teachers it is important for us to try to stay technologically ‘savvy’ in order to keep up with our students and also to enhance the classroom experience. In order to have my students understand popular culture in an educational sense. Popular culture has changed over the years in the United States, changes have been because and through social, political and economical situations. As a teacher, I think there are many ways to introduce popular culture into the classroom. One of the ways that I find very interesting is to have the students do a history presentation of cultural changes of a certain subject, for example, in our class we read about the history of toys. Students could report on how the change in toys has affected the generations.



Another way that students could integrate popular culture into their education is by taking normal everyday assignments and adding popular culture to them. For example, if they are reading The Scarlet Letter they could think about how Pearl, Hester and the other characters would react and be perceived in the 21st century. How would our culture react to such a situation compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s generation and culture. With the world drastically changing and with technology we, as a whole are becoming much more aware of other cultures but it is also important to understand our own culture and how that affects us.