The concepts of border and boundaries center the way in which we can think about the articles shared in this issue, 8.3, for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. As a popular working image deployed for interrogations of the multiplicity of identity, borders, though physical, cannot be reduced to a geographical or territorial boundary. Echoing this point, Gloria Anzaldúa writes in the preface to the first edition of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza that borderlands “are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (Preface). Indeed, the very liminality of borders invites us to critically contend with the contradictions and negotiations that emerge from navigating or straddling cultural (ex. language and religion) and social borders (ex. race, gender, sexuality, and class). Yet while the image of borders habitually communicates notions of boundedness, dichotomy, exclusion, and stasis given the violent histories of oppression that belie it, borders, whether real or imagined, are open to contestation, disruption, and transgression. “Borders, after all,” as public intellectual and self-proclaimed nomadic performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña reminds us in his artist/personal website, “are there for us to cross.” In this vein, the four articles presented in this issue, Traversing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries in Popular Culture and Pedagogy, deal with traversing and transgressing borders and the myriad possibilities and limitations that such crossings and transgressions invite. 

In the first article in this issue, “Halfies, Half-Written Letters, and One-Eyed Gods: Connecting the Dots of Communicative Cultures,” Gregory Stephens traverses the seemingly intractable boundaries between communication studies, ethnographic studies, pedagogy, and popular culture to “distill the theory of communicative cultures as a tool for cultural analysis.” Defining “communicative cultures’’ as a “a set of shared commitments expressed through cultural means,” Stephens analyzes and explores the pedagogical potentialities of Jamaican writer Olive Senior’s short story, “Country of the One Eye God,” to “illustrate the necessarily unfinished and processual nature of cultural analysis.” In so doing, Stephens attempts to resist static conceptualizations of culture and essentialized notions of identity by enacting a practice of cultural analysis that “accounts for radical fluidity.” Animated by Abu-Lughod’s definition of “halfies’’ as a key group that, by virtue of their cultural and/or national in-betweenness, often “expose and challenge static concepts of culture,” Stephens adapts the term as a form of cultural analysis. Through this connect-the-dots analytical approach, Stephens suggests that teaching texts such as Senior’s “Country of the One Eye God’’ invites students to appreciate and “develop a sense of culture as relational, distributive, and attuned to the connections and interconnections of lived cultural processes.”

Using Captain Marvel and Avengers: Infinity War as central case studies, the second article of this issue, “Crossing Over: The Migrant ‘Other’ in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” bridges media studies with migration studies to analyze how these films “reflect anxiety about the alien (migrant) ‘other’ through difference and crisis.” Contextualizing these films within our rife sociopolitical climate, one marred by renewed anti-immigrant politics and the increasing militarization of our  geographical borders, Casey Walker, Anthony Ramirez, and Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez argue that films/texts like Captain Marvel and Avengers: Infinity War, while innocuous on the surface, are “symbolic of a creeping right-wing discourse that dehumanizes outsiders, refugees, and migrants in popular culture.” By adopting Symbolic Convergence Theory as their key analytical framework, Walker, Ramirez, and Soto-Vásquez not only perform close readings of the MCU films under consideration but also, and perhaps more importantly, explore how “analyzing texts situated adjacent to fan communities can reveal how meaning flows in our hybrid media environment.” Though Walker, Ramirez, and Soto-Vásquez do acknowledge the film director’s “good intentions” behind the making of these films—they include, for instance, snippets of an interview where the director shares that he sought to emphasize Thanos’ villainous god-complex—the authors foreground the creeping “emergence of Thanos-inspired eco-fascism thinking among well-intentioned people.” In so doing, Walker, Ramirez, and Soto-Vásquez ultimately reveal how the emergence of this Thanos-inspired eco-fascist rhetoric precariously informs the “real world” dehumanization of migrant subjects who are too often deemed “dangerous border crossers.”

The third article in this issue, “Media Literacy, Education, and a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned in a Gender and Pop Culture Classroom,” explores the pedagogical risks and adaptations that both a student and educator took on in an upper-division course— “Sex: Gender and Popular Culture”—that was being offered amid what was then the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic (spring 2020). In response to bell hooks invitation in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom to “collaborate in discussion that crosses boundaries and creates space for intervention,” Lowell Mason (the course instructor) and Imobhio (one of Lowell Mason’s former students), offer readers a collaborative and dialogic essay that privileges pedagogical border crossings. Indeed, as Lowell Mason and Imobhio write in their essay, “in coming together, as student and teacher, [they] are deliberately collaborating, crossing boundaries and dismantling the power structure between teacher and student to create space for pedagogical awareness and change.” Moreover, in conceiving their dialogue as an academic and cultural text, Lowell Mason and Imobhio argue that they transgress the “boundaries of what is considered an ‘academic text.’’ Shifting to a discussion on how an ever-evolving crisis-informed pedagogy prompted a re-imagining of the course, Lowell Mason argues that “being deliberate and specific about the role of media literacy’s role in the course is the pedagogical intervention that the pandemic produced.” Peppering the essay with student media literacy project examples, Lowell Mason ultimately suggests that “A media literacy course, one that teaches students how to view, question, and better understand the world and representations within it, is an important place for us to dismantle the culture of silence and create better representation.”

Bringing together video games studies and composition and writing pedagogy, Joy Sterrantino’s article, “It’s Dangerous to Learn Alone- Play This: Video Games in Higher Education, particularly in the Composition Classroom,” focuses on the importance of incorporating texts in the writing classroom that push the boundaries of what is understood as “proper dialects” (or, academic language) and what is considered a “suitable” academic text and/or teaching format. Though video games have, as Sterrantino’s makes clear, their own dialects and lexicons, ones that society oft-times dismisses as elementary and time-wasting, Sterrantino argues that video game dialects may be “the best way to teach students the material and skills we want them to learn.” Indeed, Sterrantino writes that “applying gaming language and structures to a class, a language many students already know, professors can use game structures to make students feel like insiders; students will then be more committed to what they are learning.” Putting to practice calls for the gamification of the higher education classroom, Sterrantino shares a preview of a collaboratively developed composition course where “gaming” elements will be integrated into the course’s content/Canvas page. By centering what game studies has to offer writing pedagogy (and higher education, more broadly), Sterrantino shows how coming to understand gaming (and its dialects)  as a valid pedagogical tool disrupts the idea that students need only “learn the conventions of this [traditional] classroom or leave.”

Across the articles in issue 8.3, Traversing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries in Popular Culture and Pedagogy, audiences see the potential for thinking about popular culture and pedagogy through the complicated notion of borders, whether in constraints or the opportunities such as suggested in cultural analysis, in film, and through innovative practice integrating social media, dialogic work, and video game dialects in teaching and learning. As 2021 comes to a close, we can look back and see the challenges we collectively have learned from and moved through, for good, bad, and all the layers in between. This issue was made possible by a strong team of individuals, including the authors and peer reviewers for these articles, Copy Editors – Miriam Sciala, Robert Gordyn, and Arlyce Menzies; Reference Editors – Joseph Yapp and April Manabat; Creative Director – Douglas CohenMiller. We hope that there is something in these articles that encourages you to think about popular culture and pedagogy in new ways, offering potential for traversing border and transgressing boundaries in your thinking and practice.

A note from the Editor in Chief

I would like to thank Karina Vado for her insightful and incredible work across positions at Dialogue from Book Review Editor to Musings Editor. For this issue, it was my honor to have her come aboard as Managing Editor, making this a stronger, more robust issue because of her work.

Anna CohenMiller

References

Anzaldúa, G.A. (2007). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (3rd ed.). Aunt Lute Books.

Gómez-Peña G. (n.d.) Publications. https://www.guillermogomezpena.com

hooks, b. (2014). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Suggested Citation

APA

Vado, K., & CohenMiller, A. (2021). Traversing borders, transgressing boundaries in popular culture and pedagogy. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 8(3). http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v8-issue-3/traversing-borders-transgressing-boundaries-in-popular-culture-and-pedagogy/

MLA

Vado, Karina, and Anna CohenMiller. “Traversing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries in Popular Culture and Pedagogy,” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, vol. 8, no. 3, 2021.  http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v8-issue-3/traversing-borders-transgressing-boundaries-in-popular-culture-and-pedagogy/

The “wicked problems” of our day continue as first discussed by Rittel and Weber  (1973). As a means to address such problems, Donna Mertens (2020) suggests transformative research to bring together solutions for the wicked problems needing interdisciplinary thought and practice to solve (e.g., hunger, poverty, educational access). What has changed since first discussed is a commonly accepted awareness for addressing these problems. For those of us in higher education, we have opportunities to consider the ways in which we work with students and communities to affect a greater understanding of worldwide issues as well as personal level concerns affecting growth and development. In our classrooms, we have a chance to introduce new ways of thinking and deeper learning and self-awareness to become more effective global citizens.

The three articles for this issue speak to these fundamental aspects of being global citizens in a world increasingly marred by seemingly intractable socioeconomic inequalities. Yet as the articles that follow show us, the classroom remains a space of “possibility,” one where, as Wayne Au, Bill Bigelow and Stan Kar suggest (2007), “students and teachers gain glimpses of the kind of society we could live in and where students learn the academic and critical skills needed to make it a reality” (p. x). As teacher-scholars who take seriously the socially transformative and pedagogical potential of popular culture, the authors in this volume prompt us to consider how the study of (and thinking with) popular culture invites students to seriously grapple with questions of identity and identification, of ethics and representation, of difference and sameness. At the same time, these case studies highlight the profound significance that teaching popular culture has, be it in the literature or philosophy classroom, for students’ interrogation of their personal lives, for their reflections on the power differentials evoked by their social identities, and on their ability to translate such discussions to the public realm. 

Thus, if popular culture, as Nadine Dolby (2003) argues, is a “cultural practice that has its own power to create social change — to alter social conditions and the very foundation of people’s lives,” (258) how can the practice of critical pedagogy through popular culture help tackle the “wicked problems” of our contemporary moment? Further, given that popular culture is not neutral but rather a site of contestation, how can educators empower students to openly challenge, make meaning of, negotiate, and reshape popular culture in ways that prove to be (socially) transformative? Finally, how can both educator and student, as co-conspirators in learning and unlearning, help promote cultural citizenship, self and social empowerment, social justice, and more just futures vis-à-vis their critical consumption of popular culture? 

Across these articles, we see a deep engagement with such questions, each tackling the intersections of critical pedagogy, popular culture, and social action in potent and imaginative ways. In this issue’s first article, “Conceptualizing Empathy and Prosocial Action: Teaching Film within the Literature Classroom,” Mayuri Deka explores the pedagogical potential of integrating socio-affective strategies in the literature classroom. Using films like How to Train Your Dragon, Deka argues that “including film within the literature classroom would allow for a critical interrogation of the socio-cultural and economic negotiations between various ethno-racial and cultural communities while attempting to alter and subvert the traditional power structure with the marginalized Other.” In turn, cultivating empathy in the literature classroom, as Deka suggests, “could play a crucial role in creating a student body that better negotiates the Self/Other divide and enhances their moral emotion, motivation and action.”

Along similar lines, our second article, “Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry,” takes up questions of inclusion, representation, and canon formation in the teaching of contemporary poetry. Through the inclusion of poets of color who disidentify with or disrupt the rigid forms and conventions of “traditional” (read: white and cisheteropatriarchal) American poetry, Ronnie Stephens argues that poets such as Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, and Natalie Diaz, among others, employ dissentive poetic forms to conjure “more expansive conceptions of gender, race, and the human experience.” Thus, emphasizing “dissent poetry’s” fluid quality and its relationship to the rigidity of “traditional” poetry allows students to effectively learn poetic conventions all while tapping into the emancipatory potential that such poetic disruptions invite. By incorporating “dissent poetry” into their curriculum, Stephens argues that educators are uniquely poised to promote students of color engagement with the “literary canon on their own terms.”

This issue’s third and final article, “What We Owe Our Students: The Good Place, Pedagogy, and the Architecture of Engaged Learning,” invites readers to consider how NBC’s hit television series, The Good Place, effectively models how a “well-constructed ‘classroom’ can prepare students to meet ordinary challenges, extraordinary obstacles, and even existential crises.” Putting in conversation The Good Place’s “architecture of learning” with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ Global Challenges “real world” blended model, Shala Mills and Darrell Hamlin argue that both similarly “engage students through content connected to issues that confront them personally and professionally, providing them with opportunities for repetition and mastery.” The “students” in the show’s diegetic world and those who take part in the “real world” case study are thus empowered to tackle the “wicked problems” of our present moment through an architecture of learning that offers “engagement pathways for the common good.” Ultimately, Mills and Hamlin urge educators to deploy a pedagogy of engagement that helps “awaken students and build skills for purposeful work to solve wicked problems.”

In addition to the full-length articles, this Dialogue issue features two “Musings” on pedagogy and popular culture, and a book review. Tyler Sheldon’s Musing piece takes up questions of academic voice, independent thinking, and the craft of academic writing in the college composition classroom. In the second Musings feature, Craig Wynne considers how the disproportionate representation of “coupled” peoples across varied media forms reinforces the primacy of the nuclear family and the reductive gender and sexuality tropes it consolidates. Lastly, this issue spotlights Tyler Sheldon’s review of David Gooblar’s The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. Educators interested in constructivist pedagogy will find Sheldon’s review of Gooblar’s teaching approaches particularly useful.

These articles, Musings, and book review have been brought together into a full issue through the hard work of a dedicated team. We would like to thank those amazing people who helped to make this possible: Copy Editors – Miriam Sciala, Robert Gordyn, and Arlyce Menzies; Reference Editors – Joseph Yapp and April Manabat; Creative Director – Douglas CohenMiller; and our authors and peer reviewers. 

Overall, Infusing Pedogogy with Empathy, Social Action and Value through Popular Culture offers readers illuminating case studies that foreground the generative intersections of critical pedagogy, popular culture, and social action. Indeed, all three articles explore the potentialities of using the critical study of popular culture to help fashion solutions to the “wicked problems” of the 21st century. At a moment where students are feeling increasingly dejected and apprehensive about their futures and the future of our planet, approaching popular culture in personally and socially meaningful ways proves ever-necessary. It is thus our hope that this issue inspires innovative and socially conscious approaches to the teaching of popular culture and that these ultimately lead to more liberatory ways of being, thinking, and seeing. 

References

Au, W., Bigelow B., & Kar S. (2007). Introduction. Rethinking Public Schools (Rev. ed.), 1, I-XI.

Dolby, N. (2003). Popular culture and democratic practice. Harvard Educational Review, 73(3), 258-284.

Mertens, D. M. (2020). Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology: Integrating Diversity with Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods. 5th ed. Sage.

Rittel, H., & M. Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169. 

Suggested Citation

APA

Vado, K., & CohenMiller, A. S. (2021). Teaching wicked problems: Critical pedagogy, personal transformation, and social action through popular culture. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 8(2). (http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v8-issue-2/teaching-wicked-problems-critical-pedagogy-personal-transformation-and-social-action-through-popular-culture/)

MLA

Vado, Karina, and Anna S. CohenMiller. “Teaching Wicked Problems: Critical Pedagogy, Personal Transformation, and Social Action through Popular Culture,” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, vol. 8, no. 2, 2021. http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v8-issue-2/teaching-wicked-problems-critical-pedagogy-personal-transformation-and-social-action-through-popular-culture/