Silencing the everyday experiences of youth? Deconstructing issues of subjectivity and popular/corporate culture in the English classroom

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of popular/corporate culture texts and discourses on the subjectivities and everyday social experiences of young people, and the extent to which such influences are critically analysed in the English classroom. I present two levels of synthesised information using data analysis born of a mixed-methods postgraduate research project with a group of 15- and 16-year-old high school students in Perth, Australia. First, I argue that popular culture texts position young people to assume subjectivities that are heavily informed by the ideologies and discourses of popular/corporate culture. Moreover, I argue that young people's social currency is often defined by the extent to which individuals demonstrate an alliance to such ideologies and discourses, and that individuals who deviate from popular norms experience subjugation and exclusion within peer and social settings. Second, I deal pedagogically with subject English and areas of it that hold relevance in terms of the integration and analysis of ‘the popular’. I argue that many students feel their teachers are ‘out of touch’ with the everyday realities of young people and their popular culture influences, and that there is a lack of commitment by teachers to critically analyse popular culture texts in the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that such failures risk producing students whose everyday experiences are silenced and who are denied the critical learning spaces necessary to deconstruct the ways they are positioned to adopt certain subjectivities. Moreover, critical and progressive pedagogical praxis need to be further deployed by educators in order to effectively analyse the relationship between youth subjectivities and popular/corporate culture discourses.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank both anonymous referees for their timely and pertinent advice pertaining to the earlier draft version of this paper. Thanks is also due to Dr Wayne Martino, University of Western Ontario, and Dr Nado Aveling, Murdoch University, for their exemplary supervision throughout my research project.

Notes

1. See Yahoo! & OMD (2005) and Olds, Ridley, & Dollman (2006).

2. See Murphy (2006), The Sydney Morning Herald ( 2006 ) and The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006 (Parliament of Australia, Senate, retrieved January 5, 2007, from http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/ecita_ctte/cross_media/report/index.htm).

3. See Hodge (1999), The 7.30 Report ( 2003 ), Lateline ( 2003 ) and Phillips (2003).

4. See FOXTEL Corporate Affairs (Melbourne) press release, August 10, 2006, FOXTEL Delivers Full Year Profit (retrieved January 3, 2006, from http://www.foxtel.tv/209_5306.htm).

5. To a large extent, this personal realisation was born of my extensive reading of a number of English education journals, including NATE's English in Education, AATE's English in Australia, NCTE's English Journal, and the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. I also credit a vibrant minority of like-minded colleagues both in high schools and at Murdoch University with whom I would frequently discuss and debate such issues.

6. To conceptualise my use of ‘public intellectual’ in this context, it is necessary to consider Henry Giroux's Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (1988). Giroux's ‘call to arms’ has heavily influenced my abstraction of how teachers can and should be ‘public intellectuals’. It is important to note, however, the myriad of tensions that surround this concept and the countless barriers that teachers face in attempting to achieve such a position, given their everyday institutional and occupational locations.