Buy the ticket, take the ride: An Introduction.

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

Greetings.  My name is Brian McDonald, and I want to talk to you about pop culture, and (hopefully) how you can use it to build links between schoolwork and the larger world.  When we talk about "pop culture", there is frequently a sort of sneering quality to the discussion.  Pop culture is "Twilight", freakshow reality television, and grotesquely violent video games.  What could it possibly have of value in an educational setting?  I will explain over the coming weeks.  Let me begin by telling you a bit about me.

First off, I will throw out this caveat that I am not, in any sense, an educational authority.  I am currently a month into a Master of Educational Technology program, and this blog is, in fact, part of my coursework.  I have worked on the periphery of the educational system, first as a designer and prototyper for the parent company of the University of Phoenix, and now as a content production specialist for Pearson, the book publishing company, moving and installing digital content for K-12 online textbooks.  My goal with the Masters program is to move into instructional design.

Second, I am a huge pop culture geek.  I have referred to myself as an "input junkie", and my tastes are as broad as my attention span is sometimes short.  I wouldn't necessarily call myself an EXPERT in popular culture, but that is mainly because the subject is so diverse that global expertise is largely impossible.  I might be able to win at a game show, though.  Qualification enough for a blog, I should think.

So, who are you?  Well, some of you are my classmates, and hopefully you'll find this blog something more than merely an obligation to read.  Some of you, I hope, are teachers.  Teachers who are always looking for new ways to connect with their students, and not afraid to do a little out-of-the-box thinking to do it.  And last, but certainly not least, I hope some of you are parents.  A teacher can pull any number of tricks out of his or her hat to teach a child, and if the parents are engaged as well as the student, it becomes easier for that teaching to succeed.  I hope that as you read my strange ideas some of them resonate, and you may find yourself talking with your kids about some of them. 

Given the drubbing that pop culture frequently takes, you might be asking yourself what possible value it could have in a child's education.  What possible connection could you find between social studies and "Survivor", between math and "Monopoly"?  Well, I'm not going to tell you right now.  What, you want me to ruin all of the surprises?

I will, however, tell you a couple of stories:

I played trumpet back in high school.  I was in marching band, symphonic band, and the jazz band. While I had natural talent, I wasn't especially motivated.  I don't know if that was common among students in my school, or if I was just a terrible student.  I suspect a little of both. The band director, Mr. D, was a good guy, who really wanted his students to not only engage with the music we were playing, but music in general.  One day, during symphonic band, he set up a record player at the front of the class, and played the entire 17-minte epic, Iron Butterfly's "In A Gadda Da Vida".

As it went on, Mr. D picked out various parts of the song, explaining the musical tricks, trying to impart the COOL of the piece.  He didn't really have to convince us much.  It was a bit longer than our MTV-addled brains would normally have handled, but I don't recall anyone complaining much.

Another time, in Jazz band, he played for us Maynard Ferguson's neo-big-band cover of Herbie Hancock's song "Chameleon".  Again, the sheer brashness of the music had us riveted, in a way I wouldn't have expected at the time.  Jazz band aside, my tastes ran more to Electric Light Orchestra and Thomas Dolby, but this was just undeniably electric for me.

While songs from 1968 and 1974 weren't exactly "pop culture" at the time, a decade after "Chameleon" came out, they were part of a broader musical landscape that Mr. D was trying to bring into the classroom.  His efforts to get us to connect with the music, not just play it, changed the course of MY life, certainly.  There's a pernicious tendency in many people to just keep listening to whatever music they liked in high school or college, and decry anything after that as inherently inferior.  By bringing in a psychedelic rock epic into the symphonic music class, and by bringing a rock/funk/big band piece into jazz band (and then having us play it, which if you just listened to it you know is crazy talk), I firmly believe that Mr. D short-circuited that musical apathy in me, and gave me a much better, broader appreciation for music as a whole.

Much later, I would become the step-parent of a daughter, Kyla, who is on the high-functioning end of the Autism spectrum, and it is her that my second story concerns.  One of the challenges that a person with Autism can face is a difficulty, or even inability, to recognize facial expressions and non-verbal cues.  As you probably know, non-verbal communication makes up a huge percentage of any face-to-face communication, so this can be a serious problem.

Our household has always had a high geek quotient.  I refer to us as "Casa de los Weirdos".  Kyla is no exception to this.  From an early age, Kyla was into Japanese animation, or "anime".  For the uninitiated, anime in Japan is a huge industry, and the storylines can cover nearly anything.  There are series with giant robots, schoolgirl romance, basketball; there's even an anime about the game Go.  Kyla's anime of choice in the early days was called "Cardcaptor Sakura", a magical schoolgirl anime, though we watched a variety of them.  Now, anime tends to be very stylized in some ways.  Facial expressions are frequently exaggerated.

We discovered fairly early on that Kyla was able to follow the anime in part because the facial expressions were made easy to read.  With this in mind, we encouraged her to see if she could spot similar expressions on regular American television shows.  I won't kid you and say it happened overnight, but gradually, Kyla became better and better at recognizing facial expressions after having that foundation established by watching the anime.  And here's why the parental engagement is so crucial.  My wife Cinder helped create a non-profit that helped teens and young adults on the spectrum, as well as their parents or caregivers, deal with the issues that arise out of transitioning, either from high school to college, or out into the "real world."  We've dealt with dozens of parents over the years, and I've told this story of Kyla and the anime several times.  More than once I've been met with a blank look, or an outright scoffing that "that anime crap" could have any redeeming qualities.  Whether it's because it's just too outside the norm for some people, or whether the parents equate anime with it's more adult forms (and there are VERY adult animes), they were resolutely resistant to the idea, even after being told of its therapeutic value.

Kids respond better to learning when it relates in some way to their outside interests.  This seems to me to be so mind-bogglingly obvious, and yet a study was published recently in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that determined "incorporating the student with [Autism Spectrum Disorder's] special interests into activities may help improve their socialization with typical peers." (Kogel, Kim, Kogel, Schwartzmann 2013).  Can I get a "duh"?  What's that?  I should be more professional?  Well, okay, if you insist.

I am in no way suggesting that we replace text books with comic books, or teachers with televisions.  The traditional methods of learning aren't going to be displaced by pop culture any time soon, nor would I want them to be.  But if you can form solid positive associations between what children are learning at school and what they're doing for fun, that's going to be the knowledge that sticks.

In the days to come, I'm going to be talking about how you can use television, the internet, video games, and even tabletop games as teaching tools for your kids.  While I may have some fanciful notions as to how these things might be accomplished, when it comes down to it, I'm not a teacher.  I may be talking about something that is no way relevant to your classroom situation.  If that's the case, I hope that you'll comment, and set me straight.  Or if you think that something COULD work, I'd like to hear about that too.  This isn't a manifesto; it's a dialogue.  Hopefully we'll all learn something.

Be seeing you.