Education in Popular Culture

This book provides an overview of education as it is represented in popular culture, together with a framework through which educators can interpret these representations in relation to their own professional values and development. This framework also links the portrayal of teachers with on-going educational and political discourses.

Demonstrating how popular culture both reflects and constructs social and professional ideas about the teacher, the book looks at a number of themes central to current debates about education:

- sexuality of teachers and of pupils
- bullying
- pupil rebellion and underachievement
- school as a community
- lifelong learning.

Synopsis

"Education in Popular Culture" explores what makes schools, colleges, teachers and students an enduring focus for a wide range of contemporary media. What is it about the school experience that makes us wish to relive it again and again? The book provides an overview of education as it is represented in popular culture, together with a framework through which educators can interpret these representations in relation to their own professional values and development. The analyses are contextualised within contemporary, historical and ideological frameworks, and make connections between popular representations and professional and political discourses about education. Through its examination of film, television, popular lyrics and fiction, this book tackles educational themes that recur in popular culture, and demonstrates how they intersect with debates concerning teacher performance, the curriculum and young people's behaviour and morality. The chapters explore how experiences of education are both reflected and constructed in ways that sometimes reinforce official and professional educational perspectives, and sometimes resist and oppose them.

The book addresses issues relating to: the characterization of teachers, sexual relationships in educational contexts, race, gender and bullying, resistance to educational processes and institutions, and, lifelong learning. "Education in Popular Culture" will stimulate critical reflection on the popular myths and professional discourses that surround teachers and teaching. It will serve to deepen analyses of teaching and learning and their associated institutional and societal contexts in a creative and challenging way.