Popular Culture as the Enemy
As English teachers, we often say that one of our greatest goals is to simply get students to read. Often times the most difficult thing about teaching a novel is to get the student to even read the book. I think that is where we see the greatest asset of television and movie productions. These are texts that educators often do not deem educational. They are often seen as the adversary, as their glitter, glamour, and color take students away from curling up with a good book. However, these media examples cannot simply be dismissed. Not only are they an important part of students’ lives, but they also are a great way to teach literary ideas through a venue that students will want to explore.
It is important to teach students about the specific film techniques or the elements of the TV industry, because it is essential that we give students the tools to think critically about these elements of popular culture. Many of our students’ ideologies and ways of seeing the world stem directly from what they see in movies or TV shows. Often times these areas of popular culture create representations that students see to be as reality, and they do little to question what they see unless we teach them how to do so. Students need to know how the goals behind creating a movie differ from writing a book. They need to learn about what role the advertising or the opportunity for resale plays in creating a show. They need to know what goes in to creating a text so that they understand how and why these representations are formed and what basis they have in reality.
Using a Critical Eye to See the World
If we teach students how a book that we are reading discusses gender, we may effectively teach the student about the representation of gender, but will they are able to extend that discussion to the real world context? Will they able to see the issue as it is being represented daily in their own life? These television shows and video games that students are watching are working off of many of the same themes that we explore through literature. It is important that as we teach students to look through different literary and critical lenses, like gender, multiple perspectives, deconstruction, or post colonialism, that we teach students how these ideas are represented in the media that they experience as well.
I would use media adaptations and viewings in my class in many different ways. I think one of the most prominent ways they can be used is to teach these literary lenses on an extended and applicable level. I think that as we teach students to read the word critically, we need to extend that to the media that they are truly using in their daily lives. We need to focus on gender representations in advertisements, movies, school settings, books, and in so many other areas of life. If my students were reading a text that dealt with gender issues, I may introduce them to the idea by showing them clips of a TV show that they may be more familiar with and have them study the representation in gender in that at first. I may choose something that is very explicit and easier to recognize, like in music videos. This way students could begin to see how authors and society in general can manipulate the idea that we see as gender. Once students had a thorough grasp on this socially constructed nature of gender, I would then delve into how it is being played with in the texts that they are reading.
Developing Theme
As I discussed in my final project for this class, I also think that media adaptations can be used to talk about specific themes that are being discussed in a text. Often times, themes such as good vs. evil, the fickleness of love, or one’s coming of age can be seen in many different TV shows, songs, or movies that students are already aware of. By having students look for these themes in other texts, they are not only realizing how universal these themes are but they are also gaining a better understanding of them. Different texts will bring up different issues of a theme and it will help students see the complexity and the importance behind the discussions in the book.
For my final project, where I had the students look at the themes in a Midsummer Night’s Dream and find three different media examples that focused on the same theme, I had the students discuss the similarities and the differences between the two representations. I think that this is where a good discussion could take place about how the format of the representation changes the content. This is where students could look at silent films and see how the mood or the theme is represented differently without the use of words. How does the focus on facial expressions change how love is represented? Or anger? What limitations does this put on the representation? Students could look at the limited space of songs and how that affects the theme development. They could look at the intended audience or the purpose of the creation of the media example. All of these things play a role in the representation and as students work to understand this, I think that they will gain a better understanding about how representations are being represented. Through this experience, students will be able to see how they are being manipulated and exposed to certain ideologies and hopefully they will learn to fight back from this.
In my project, I had students find media examples that represented themes, but it might be interesting to have them create their own representations of theme as well. They could look at what factors go into the development and what choices they have to make when they choose what to represent. Students could collect a group of pictures, they could record a video, play a song, or they could write a story. They could also go into depth with one media example and annotate each moment that a theme or representation is being developed. They could focus on each moment and expression of gender, or love, or class and annotate on how that is expressed and what the text is saying. This could assist students in becoming active readers, as they begin to pay attention to each page or moment in a text, highlighting those moments that become significant or representational.
Reaching a Level of Enriched Understanding
Finally, I think that it is important to point out how many media examples there are out there that are taken to be explicit adaptations of the texts that we read. I do not see anything wrong with students watching a movie version of the book that they are reading, as they reading. I think that for more difficult texts this would help them visualize the setting or the scene. It would also help to build on a discussion of how the two are different and the reasons that that might be the case. This would be especially interesting when students are looking at completely different versions of a text, like the movie The Lion King as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Students can easily begin to notice the thread of similarities but also the differences that exist. They can begin to denote where the changes are and what might be the causes for the changes. How does the changing of society and format change these representations?
This focus on why these differences exist is key, as I believe that it is where the critical thinking takes place. As I have students use different media examples, I would ask them to outline these differences and begin to notice the infinite amount of possible representations are out there. As students use these examples to see different ways to represent ideas, they begin to realize how constructed our view of the world actually is. They begin to see how vulnerable and subjective meaning truly is. And I think that is the true goal of teaching literature.
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