Module #5- Week #1 Reading Responses

I LOVE Popular Culture!  It’s one of my most favorite things!  I know the most random facts about things going on.  My friends don’t like playing Pop Culture Trivial Pursuit because I always win (not to toot my own horn)!  Because of my love of Pop Culture I loved reading Margaret Hagood’s piece about “Intersections of Popular Culture, Identities, and New Literacies Research”.

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What I found to be the most interesting is the split between the in-school and out-of-school literacies.  Like most things in education there is no one school of thought regarding this subject.  Some teachers observe the split continue to split it and others see the split and try to blend it.  I’m all for blending it.  A small example is I have a popular characters section in my classroom library.  There are books there on Mickey Mouse, Frozen, Dora, and Spiderman to name a few.  My kids love those books because it is something familiar to them.  Of course those aren’t the only books they read but I have found especially with my reluctant readers giving them that chance to read about something they like encourages them to read more.

“Popular culture is a reality of literacy in the 21st century” (Hagood, 2008) and it will continue to grow and morph into something else.  We as educators should try to embrace it just a little or in my case a lot!

James Gee’s video brings up the debate about testing.  I never really thought about his example before, kids that complete the “Halo” video don’t need to complete a test after “winning” instead they simply have already shown how to complete the various levels.  As teachers we are constantly assessing.  I first give students a pre test to see how to group students based on needs, then every four days I test my students using “dips” during various units, and finally I give them a post test to see what they have learned.  It’s exhausting for them and for me.  I never thought about using the dips as the assessment and maybe add those together for the posttest grade.   Gee says that we are afraid to move away from the constant assessing as students.  I think it’s not that we are afraid but instead we are looking for someone to blame.

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