teaching kids to cut through the BS

So I am in Los Angeles this weekend, and something about this place has gotten me thinking quite a bit about our super-saturated media culture, and how we deal with it in the classroom. Teaching kids to cut through the bullshit (I don't think this is a technical term, but it is a blog, after all) is not really in the best interests of those who hold positions of power in our society. A public that cares more about Anna Nicole Smith than they do about the 1900 people who died in Iraq last month is easier to control than one who thinks critically about political policy and popular culture. It makes me think about how popular culture can be used in the classroom to achive a couple of pedagogical goals; not only can bringing popular cultural resources into our classrooms help to bridge the gap between out-of-school and in-school literacies by connecting to students' background knowledge, but it can also help to engage them in a critical analysis that may then be applied more globally to larger issues of political and economic power. If kids are consuming this type of media at home, then the best thing we can do as educators is to help them to understand and think critically about the images and messages that are flying at them on a daily basis.

This post is just a spewing of random thoughts for now, but I hope to launch in to a larger discussion of social semiotics and critical media literacy soon.

Also just picked up the new issue of New York magazine this week--the cover article is about the "largest generation gap since rock and roll"--the internet and how it is being used by today's youth and where the lines between public and private lives have become blurred for these young people and how the older generation (anyone over 30--yikes!) is having trouble relating to this new paradigm. More on this later.

E