Cultural Foundations of Education
Institute on Popular Culture
The Institute on Popular Culture for Education at Syracuse University is an interdisciplinary center engaged in research, educational activities and community outreach. Members include faculty, graduate students, and research associates from the field of education, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as Syracuse area educators.
The purpose of the Institute is to explore popular culture as a complex and understudied area of education. Grounded in qualitative research methods, members of the Institute are concerned with how individuals and groups come to make sense of their experiences, and make meanings in their popular culture practices. As researchers, academics, teachers and students, we advocate for an examination of popular culture that both develops critique and articulates pleasure, negotiating the two as a dynamic in the pedagogic relationship.
We locate popular culture in four overlapping spaces: Cultural products (books, movies, magazines), activities (proms, graduations, weddings), sites (fairs, video arcades, malls), and practices (reading National Geographic, cheerleading, and adorning the body). This approach includes, but is not limited to the examination of education that takes place both in and outside of schools; the raced, classed, aged and gendered relationships between the media and its consumers; representations of sexuality, femininity and masculinity; the expressive role of the body; the production and economics of magazines, music, movies and other media; the character of everyday learning; the uses of technology in schools; the recognition of globalization; and the rise of entertainment, media and culture industries.
Through our individual and collective work with these sites and activities, we struggle to uncover how power relations are enmeshed in American popular culture in the above issues. Our goals, therefore, include working with other educators towards a pedagogy of critical literacy through which teachers, students and researchers can engage in analysis of popular culture's representations of lives. We emphasize:
- articulating pedagogical spaces where student knowledges around popular culture gain authority
- exploring how institutions take up popular culture
- providing youth with additional tools to analyze popular culture tests
- wrestling popular culture from GOOD/BAD binary
- connecting everyday practice with global praxis, politics, and policy
- investigating the construction of social norming practices in popular culture
- engaging in the relationship between participation and resistance
- asserting our responsibility to multicultural practices
The founding principals of the Institute rest upon the belief that popular culture is an increasingly significant educational space often excluded from conversations of power and pedagogy. We undertake the study of popular culture in and around the context of schools with educators and students as part of the dialogue. The Institute works to expand the conversation and to explore popular culture's educative possibilities.