Using popular culture in professional education to foster critical curiosity and learning

Abstract

This article presents findings from an inquiry at the nexus of three areas of adult education scholarship: critical pedagogy, university-based professional education, and popular culture. I am investigating how the incorporation of popular culture into professional education can foster students’ engagement with theory and thorny issues. Such engagement, I argue, promotes a critical form of learning and curiosity that furthers students’ development as ethical, responsible, reflective practitioners and adults. Data reported here is drawn from conversations with students in three courses that I delivered. In presenting my findings, I discuss three forms of learning that participants described: learning concepts, learning perspectives, and learning relevance. I close with a reflection on implications for my teaching practice and postsecondary professional education more broadly.

Keywords:

• Popular culture
• critical pedagogy
• critical curiosity
• postsecondary education
• professional education

Introduction

For some time, I have been interested in the educative impacts of popular culture, especially fiction, because of its concurrent departure from and resonance with people’s lived experiences. In constructing stories and characters that can become important in people’s lives, fiction can play a unique and compelling role. As I go on to establish, the question of how popular culture functions pedagogically, whether within or outside the classroom, is one that concerns a growing number of adult learning and education (ALE) scholars who recognise popular culture’s potential to foster learning that might reinforce problematic ideas and might prompt critical learning. Given my own base in a school of education whose largest programs are categorised as professional education, I focus on how popular culture might help students bridge theory and practice, concept and application, social issues and vocational processes. I concur that purposeful use of cultural texts can figure in efforts ‘to developing professionals who are more than technicians’ (Jarvis and Gouthro 2015, p. 76).

The study that I discuss here includes instructors and students from university-based courses in education, nursing, social work, and other fields associated with professional practice; however, I limit my discussion here to findings related to three courses that I delivered. My first research question asks how instructors insert popular culture into curriculum and what learning impacts they identify, especially to support teaching of theory or sensitive issues. My second question asks how students link engagement with popular culture to their learning and, more specifically, development of the qualities of criticality and curiosity. Following an outline of the theoretical terms and scholarly literature that inform my project, I explain my study. I then present data related to my three courses, before closing with a reflective section where I consider how those findings help me rethink and refine my teaching practice.

Empirical and theoretical grounding: literature review

I have drawn on literature from three primary areas: critical pedagogy, postsecondary professional education, and popular culture. Connecting to this work enables me to ground my inquiry empirically and theoretically, and to develop the notion of a pedagogy of critical curiosity.

Critical pedagogy and pedagogy of critical curiosity

Critical pedagogues approach education as a process of teaching and learning about historical and persistent structural problems, which have material, cultural, and psychic repercussions. ‘Organizing to teach people to realise and oppose this state of affairs is what critical pedagogy is all about’, according to Brookfield (2003, p. 141). Fostering criticality and curiosity is essential to realising that aim.

Extending feminist sociologist Enloe’s (2004) notion of feminist curiosity, I believe that all people and circumstances are ‘worth thinking about, paying close attention to, because in this way we will be able to throw into sharp relief the blatant and subtle political workings [of social structures and discourses]’ (p. 4). Freire’s (1998) writing on criticality and curiosity is another major theoretical influence. In his view, ‘the more critically one exercises one’s capacity for learning, the greater is one’s capacity for constructing and developing what I call “epistemological curiosity,” without which it is not possible to obtain a complete grasp of the object of our knowledge’ (p. 32). In developing what I refer to as a pedagogy of critical curiosity, I am interested in how popular culture can become a resource in teaching about core concepts and controversial, sensitive topics in professional education.

University-based professional education

Like other contexts, university-based professional education is subject to the logic of neoliberalism, whose influences are evident in the priorities set for higher education. What is underscored is ‘higher education’s contribution to a global, market-based knowledge economy’ (Holmwood 2014, p. 63). Beyond discourse, neoliberalism produces new practices and subjectivities, as collectivity is replaced by a notion of ‘individuals [including instructors and students] as entrepreneurial and capital-enhancing actors’ (Rottenberg 2018, p. 57). Overlooking systemic inequities, neoliberals endorse concepts such as neutrality, meritocracy, and competence, and ascribe responsibility for life circumstances to individuals’ choices. In the postsecondary setting, the ideal outcome is graduates’ success in the job market.

In the face of globalised – albeit locally varied – neoliberalism, even instructors committed to critical pedagogy face growing pressure to stick to technical, work-related curriculum. Many students enter the classroom expecting an economistic, ‘how-to’ vocational focus (Tisdell 2008, Jarvis 2012, McAllister et al. 2015, Ross 2015, Kreber 2016, Griswold 2017, Bohonos et al. 2019, Ferris 2022) and see social theory as abstract, obscure, irrelevant or biased (Gouthro 2019, Love et al. 2016). Instructors working with social justice-oriented critical theory find that such an approach ‘can be difficult, dull, and uninspiring to students’ (Wright and Wright 2015, p. 26). Certainly, not all theory is equally sound or helpful in advancing critical, inclusive learning and engaging with theory requires much intellectual energy (Gouthro 2019). Nonetheless, the study of theory remains important in postsecondary professional education because, as Gouthro (2019, p. 61) notes, it ‘can provide an important grounding for educators and students in their academic writing, scholarly research, and in their applied practice.’

Often, scholars interested in postsecondary pedagogy are affiliated with the emerging area of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL); however, I continue to locate my work in ALE. SoTL’s critics note a ‘preoccupation with impact [that] is anti-intellectual and located in a narrow neoliberalism’ (Boshier 2009, p. 8). Its emergence alongside neoliberalism raises questions about how it functions ‘as technologies that cultivate self-governing and entrepreneurial neo-liberal subjects who come to understand “learning” primarily on the basis of its performative value’ (Servage 1969, p. 27). Even SoTL scholars have acknowledged a ‘sometimes dogmatic norm for SoTL’ (Bloch-Schulman et al. 2016, p. 110). Clearly, SoTL ideas and scholarship are part of the picture of university-based professional education and I make use of SoTL scholarship to complement my own grounding – as a researcher and an instructor – in considering how popular culture can be incorporated into curriculum and pedagogy.

Popular culture, curriculum, and pedagogy

Central to my study is the idea that popular culture functions pedagogically. Popular culture can be associated with belonging ‘to the people’ ((Williams [1976] 2015, p. 179), ‘“low” or “base”’ qualities, or simply being ‘“widely favoured” or “well liked”’ (p. 180). Popular culture articles or objects are often referred to as texts, which include ‘any artefact or experience that we can read [or interpret] to produce meaning’ (Maudlin and Sandlin 2015, p. 369). In exploring popular culture texts as pedagogical resources, I focus here on works of fiction, concurring that fiction’s pedagogical power rests on its invitation to ‘participate in a morally complex universe’ (Jarvis and Burr 2011, p. 174). More specifically, I highlight film and television, whose multidimensionality ‘can enable new, innovative, and analytical ways of seeing and relating to the world around us and offer different pedagogical possibilities than other [conventional] educational resources’ (James et al. 2011, p. 354).

Popular culture texts can reflect mainstream notions, especially when corporately produced for mass audiences, and open opportunities for people to envision alternatives to what they have been taught and have come to know (Williams 1958/2011), although those opportunities are limited by both structural arrangements and personal histories. Following Williams’s statement that ‘culture is ordinary’ (p. 53), one of the hallmarks of popular culture is its everyday-ness: what normally passes as unremarkable can have potentially long-lasting impacts on what people learn about themselves and others. People might encounter characters and circumstances that challenge privileged positions or members of marginalised groups might find characters who become role models for success and admiration (Tisdell and Thompson 2007, Tisdell 2008, Brown 2011, Jarvis and Burr 2011, Jarvis 2012, Burdick and Sandlin 2013, Wright and Wright 2015). Encountering a combination of differences and similarities in characters and stories illuminates that, although personal experience matters pedagogically, it is always limited. Still, even for critically oriented audience members, enjoyment of texts can divert attention away from problematic messages and representations (Tisdell and Thompson 2007, Jarvis and Burr 2011). In short, learning through cultural engagement is unpredictable, as people assert and insert themselves in their interpretations of texts.

Those ideas about popular culture and ALE are apparent in my research to date. In early research, I conducted a textual analysis of the novel A Fine Balance, elucidating a critical response to pro-globalisation discourse (Jubas 2005). Similar forms of textual, narrative or discourse analysis have been conducted about movies. Odgren’s (2015) analysis of The Lego Movie highlights its depictions of how people can work together in communities of practice and learn to become active, powerful citizens. Tracing shifts in how education is portrayed in film, Brown (2015) found that, although societal and classroom complexity is increasingly recognised, today’s teacher appears in a cynical vision of (public) education that undermines parental authority and as incapable of meeting students’ needs.

Turning to television, scholars have explored how the sci-fi series Doctor Who challenges consumerist ideology and media concentration (Wright and Wright 2015), how Once Upon a Time recasts fairy tales in a way that both reiterates gender stereotypes with regard to family life and disrupts those stereotypes via assertive, admirable female leaders (Taber 2015), or how Nurse Jackie represents socially mediated communities of practice as novice nurses work with experts to develop knowledge and identity (Timanson and Schindel 2015). Versions of the franchise The Office produced in different countries illustrate national differences in both comedy and ideas about office work (Armstrong 2008). Utilising a combination of film, television, and novel, Jarvis (2015) focuses on the lead characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight to illuminate two visions of womanhood. In contrast to tropes of fulfilment through self-sacrifice and motherhood, embodied by Twilight’s Bella, Buffy learns to reject patterns of self-harm and resist injustice.

Occasionally, research has gone beyond textual analysis. In a previous study, I followed my analysis of the television shows Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs by talking to medical and nursing student fans about what they saw in the shows, both set in a teaching hospital (Jubas 2013, Jubas and Knutson 2012, 2013). Although participants saw points of departure from reality, they found aspects of the portrayals of professional, gender, racial or class identity, ethics, and teaching and learning processes that resonated with their experiences. In a follow-up study, I spoke to other Grey’s Anatomy fans in Canada about how they juxtaposed storylines in the U.S.-produced show about patients who could not afford private medical insurance with Canada’s publicly funded medical insurance framework (Jubas et al. 2014, 2017, 2020). Wright (2013) studied the impact of the Cathy Gale character from the 1962 season of the British show The Avengers on female fans’ understandings of second wave feminism and their own strengths and professional options. In their interview study with fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jarvis and Burr (2011, p. 178) found that, even as it was enjoyable, the show’s complexities ‘created dissonance and discomfort … [and] led people to reflect on their views of themselves and the world’, a precondition for transformative learning. Further to these examples of how the pedagogical impacts of popular culture in leisure life have been studied, some have attended to how popular culture can be incorporated into formal education.

Popular culture in the classroom

Further to the informal, often unrecognised learning that cultural engagement can spur, there is the potential for popular culture to be inserted into the postsecondary classroom. Indeed, that is a strategy that some scholars promote for critically oriented learning, especially in increasingly diverse classrooms where cultural texts can aid in building ties among students and between students and course content (Guy 2007, Tisdell and Thompson 2007, Tisdell 2008, Maudlin and Sandlin 2015, Love et al. 2016, Taber et al. 2017). Moreover, these scholars have also argued that incorporating popular culture in course activities can help foster critical media literacy, as students discern how representations that are enjoyable can also be problematic.

Instructors across disciplines employ popular culture ‘for teaching a variety of concepts’ (Peacock et al. 2018, p. 602), admittedly not always with a critical orientation, ‘with some regularity and through a variety of means’ (p. 609). Accounts of such efforts typically offer ‘a narrative view’ (Darbyshire and Baker 2012, p. 30) of practices and observations of students’ performance in courses that authors themselves taught. In his ALE class, Brown (2011) screened films and, halfway through a film, he asked students to identify scenes where characters face difficult choices and speculate about how the film would develop. Students also discussed their views of the films’ endings. Brown concluded that the process helped students ‘construct their own meanings of contemporary events [and] understand the different predicaments confronted [and choices made] by others’ (p. 244). In courses highlighting diversity, social relations or critical media literacy, Guy (2007) and Tisdell (2008) used the film Crash. In teacher education, popular culture texts have also included hip hop music (Hanley 2007), television series (Carpenter and Sourdot 2010), and novels (Jones and Hughes-Decatur 2012).

In other fields, Jule (2010) used The Mary Tyler Moore Show, an American show from the 1970s, to engage students in a communications course on women, leadership, and second wave feminism. Pandey (2012) used popular culture in a cross-cultural course in management studies. In an employment relations course, Lafferty (2016) used popular culture to link employment to power relations and discrimination.

In health studies, Darbyshire and Baker (2012) international review of 76 articles and several books indicates that film has long supported medical teaching about topics including addiction, poverty, family relations, counselling, ethics, and empathy. The area of medical humanities brings fiction, including film and novels, into the classroom specifically to support teaching about ‘social and ethical issues’ (Abidi et al. 2017, p. 38) that arise for doctors or to foster empathy among students in allied health fields (Erikson et al. 2020). Abidi and colleagues link fiction’s pedagogical effectiveness to ‘emotional memory’, which ‘lasts longer and can be recalled more readily’ (p. 38) than intellectually oriented memory. In nursing studies, McAllister et al. (2015) used television shows in exploring professional history, aspirations, and identifications and Masters (2005) found that films made her psychiatric nursing course more interesting and memorable for students.

To explore what other instructors are doing, Tisdell and Thompson (2007) surveyed 215 and interviewed 15 adult educators focussed on social stereotypes and critical media literacy. As one participant in their study clarified, ‘it is the discussion of issues raised in movies that can lead to greater understanding’ (p. 667, italics in original). Marquis et al. (2020) examined the use of videos in faculties across seven Ontario, Canada postsecondary institutions. Although participants agreed that popular culture texts can contribute to curriculum, they noted ambiguities around the critical potential of popular culture and the tendency to employ it to keep students interested and engaged. Finally, having surveyed 212 faculty members about working with popular culture at one public university in the United States, Peacock et al. (2018, p. 611) produced a guideline with the acronym ‘DEBATE.’ Popular culture texts should be selected as the student base is defined; expectations should be set for academic focus rather than entertainment; instructors should be authentic in choosing personally meaningful texts and access texts that students will appreciate; cultural texts should be tailored to course aims; and activities surrounding the cultural texts should foster enhancement of critical thinking and analysis.

Interestingly, students have been rarely consulted about their learning experiences with popular culture. Having observed in-class student engagement in his employment relations course and surveying students post-course, Lafferty (2016) found agreement among students that, in introducing stories and characters based in different historical periods, occupations, and cultural contexts, the films ‘provided a basis from which to draw new, more reflective arguments and conclusions that breach the confines of textbook explanations’ (p. 22). Stuckey and Kring’s (2007) article presents reflections from both the instructor and an ex-student about their experiences in a course on critical media literacy for teachers and adult educators. In general, though, students remain absent from accounts of the educational value of popular culture in formal education – an absence that my study addresses.

There are some cautions to share. First, Peacock et al. (2018) and Marquis et al. (2020) note the widespread concern that educators are being remade into entertainers. Engagement with mass produced popular culture, including texts I use, continues to immerse students in the web of capitalist production and consumption that critical pedagogues profess to disrupt. Second, representations of marginalised groups produced from a privileged vantage can become a form of ‘stealing the pain of others’ by revolving around privileged main characters who fulfil the desire for progressives to see themselves ‘as sensitive humanitarians who feel the pain of others deeply’ (Razack 2007, p. 386). These concerns point to the importance of retaining scholarly readings and activities that encourage critical analysis, reflection, and discussion.

Study overview

My qualitative multi-case study uses courses as cases or ‘multiple bounded systems’ (Creswell and Poth 2018, p. 96) to build knowledge about a phenomenon of interest. The cases provide evidence about the pedagogical function of popular culture rather than specific courses, instructors, students or texts. The study involves discussions with students and instructors, follow-up interviews, and collection of syllabi. Participants also complete a short demographics questionnaire. They can skip questions, whether in a discussion or on the questionnaire. I limit my discussion here to data gathered with 23 student participants who completed courses that I delivered. Given the links between my own pedagogical practice and the role of reflection on my practice in inspiring this study, starting with these courses and participants seemed appropriate.

Ideally, the first session with participants, all from the same class, was a focus group, which I had anticipated would generate ideas that exceed what one person might offer and function as a pedagogical space where participants shared and constructed ideas (Kitzinger and Barbour 1999). Taken off the proposal page and conducted with real-life constraints, qualitative research rarely unfolds as planned, and I soon had to adjust my methods to accommodate last-minute changes in participants’ schedules. I decided to proceed with smaller-than-anticipated sessions, with as few as one person, agreeing that declining to go ahead with ‘very small focus groups’ silences prospective participants who are keen to share their experiences and thoughts (Toner 2009). Ultimately, my aim always has been to hear what participants have done and experienced, and what they have to say about their practices and learning.

To alleviate potential coercion in my courses, I delayed participant recruitment until after the courses had ended. I explained the study in class and students could join a list that I put aside until after grades were submitted. Like most students in the courses that I teach, these participants ranged from their early 30s to mid-50s. They tended to be mid-career, working in jobs associated with adult education (e.g. postsecondary instruction, student support or library services; workplace training; allied health; community services). Most described themselves as middle class. Racially, most self-identified as White, with some adding ethnic identities (e.g. ‘Irish-Canadian’, ‘Polish-Canadian’, ‘Jewish’). Two identified as Black, three as mixed race, and one as Asian. All adhered to a male/female gender binary, with five self-identifying as male. A couple of participants did not disclose their sexual identity or orientation, and everybody else identified as heterosexual.

Because these courses have been designed to fit into what are classified as distance programs, students were in varied locales during data collection; therefore, most sessions were conducted via Zoom or telephone. Sessions were recorded and transcribed, and analysed using nVivo qualitative analysis software, with codes developed from the research questions and emergent as I found interesting insights in the transcripts. Consistent with research ethics procedures, the study received institutional clearance and participants are referred to with pseudonyms. In Table 1, I provide information about how these students participated in the study, before offering a description of the courses.

Table 1. Participation details, by course.

Course	Number of participants & sessions	Session delivery
Doctoral adult education survey course	Focus group 1: 2	Focus group 1: Zoom
	Focus group 2: 8	Focus group 2: Zoom
	Follow-up interviews: 9	Follow-up interviews: Phone
Master’s work and learning course	Focus group 1: 5	Focus group 1: Zoom
	Focus group 2: 3	Focus group 2: Zoom
	Follow-up interviews: 8	Follow-up interviews: Phone
Master’s community course	Focus group 1: 2	Focus group 1: Face-to-face
	Focus group 2: 2	Focus group 2: Zoom
	Interview: 1	Interview: Phone
	Follow-up interviews: 4	Follow-up interviews: Phone

My courses

The courses that I delivered were based in programs marketed to practitioners motivated to return to school to secure current or better jobs. They were delivered on-campus in a compressed summer term over two weeks, followed by time for independent assignment completion. I opted to use class time to view key cultural texts, because I believe there is something gained through shared engagement in a learning community. In addition to citations to the popular culture texts employed in these courses, I note some of the scholarly articles that I used in citations below.

The first course, designed for incoming doctoral students surveyed topics prominent in ALE scholarship, such as work-related learning, identity, and social justice. Concepts and theories covered included Mezirow’s (1994) transformative learning (see also Morrice 2013, Taylor and Cranton, 2013), public pedagogy (Jubas et al. 2015), critical race theory (Closson 2010, McKay 2010) and Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality, which captures the idea that multiple forms of marginalisation amplify discrimination exponentially (see also Misawa 2010). Two feature-length films complemented scholarly articles. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) revolves around a wealthy, Western-educated sheik determined to build a salmon hatchery in his Yemeni homeland and two White British characters hired to coordinate project logistics, one a female consultant and the other a male fisheries scientist. The romantic comedy can be seen as a debate between Eastern and Western values, as the sheik wins over the fishery expert by persuading him that faith has a place alongside science. A likeable figure, the sheik also echoes problematic images of noble savage civilised by Western education; the British characters are portrayed as knowledge-holders and the peripheral characters of Yemeni opponents of the project as ignorant, violent, and misguided. The second film, Moonlight (2016), tells a coming-of-age story about an African American boy struggling to understand himself, his circumstances, and his queer identity, in a context of racialised poverty and tough-guy, heterosexual masculinity. Working on a group presentation assignment, students connected one film to a set of scholarly readings.

The second course, designed for master’s students entering second year of their program, focussed on work and learning. It introduced topics and concepts such as globalisation, risk (Beck 2006), the austerity accompanying transition to a ‘market-based knowledge economy’ (Holmwood 2014, p. 63), and the workplace as a socially contested arena rather than a neutral meritocracy. Bourdieusian terms including habitus (i.e. disposition, demeanour, view), doxa (i.e. taken-for-granted understandings in a social or professional field), social capital (i.e. networks and ties), cultural capital (i.e. taste, recognised achievements), and illusio (i.e. fit of personal habitus with doxa and idealised habitus) were introduced early in and returned to throughout the course (see Colley 2012) in discussions about migration, ageing, gender and sexuality, and technology as a social phenomenon. We watched and analysed two episodes of the medical comedy Scrubs (2001-2007) to highlight portrayals of gender, race, and class relations as well as learning in the (medical) workplace. Viewing the episodes offered a chance for students to practice a textual analysis, an option available to them for the final assignment.

The third course was a first-year master’s course on community, in which I incorporated the film Chocolat (2000), about a single mother and her daughter who arrive in a French village led by a conservative mayor. When the newcomer opens a chocolate shop during the Catholic Lent period and befriends other outsiders, conflict ensues. Working with the film in both instructor-led activities and their own presentations, students were encouraged to consider ideas covered in scholarly articles, including Noddings (1996) ‘dark side of community’, insider/outsider identities, and learning models such as communities of practice (Wenger 2009).

Findings

In this section, I outline three themes emerging from discussions with participants: learning concepts, learning perspectives, and learning relevance.

Learning concepts

One of the most challenging concepts dealt with in the doctoral course, during the section on identity, was intersectionality. One student, Gemma, thought that ‘without the visual [of Moonlight], I would not have been able to grasp [intersectionality], to be honest, because it took me such a long time to really put it together clearly in my head.’ For Trinity, watching Moonlight ‘just opened my mind to a different way of understanding the whole concept of intersectionality.’ Cindy also commented on the pedagogical power of Moonlight when juxtaposed with scholarly readings and discussions: ‘I definitely go back to the essence of intersectionality. Read it, thought I kind of got it. I did not understand that as a concept. … When I think about intersectionality, I immediately go back to the movie.’ Those comments hint at the value of fictional stories and representations as illustrations of concepts, confirming the pedagogical potential of popular culture.

That point was echoed in the master’s courses. In inserting sociological concepts into the work and learning curriculum, I was attempting to help students consider ideas that I outlined earlier in this article about the commodification of adult and higher education as well the pretence of neutrality in both work and education. In one class session, we discussed the pilot episode of Scrubs as an illustration of Bourdieusian concepts. Isabella retraced in-class processes:

We did the reading. We went over [it] and you explained those concepts in more detail. And then we watched the … video clip [and] … then we talked about … specific examples in that video clip and how it related to those concepts. And I remember that being very helpful.

In the course on community, we read about the complexities of community. Despite its contributions to personal and social well-being, community can have a dark side (Noddings 1996), as newcomers or people with non-normative identities face discrimination and ostracism. Two participants recalled the usefulness of Chocolat in helping them apprehend this concept:

Alicia: For me I think maybe the recognition of potentially the negative side of community. … ‘Cause that was sort of how the mayor of that town was doing things. So a lot of articles will discuss community in a really positive sense. … And of course that can be the case, but not always the case. …

Natasha: I was thinking of the mayor as well but I couldn’t really figure out … why. And then as soon as you said the negative sides of community, I was like, Yeah! That’s bang on, that’s exactly, it really demonstrated that for me. Because I think going into the class, that wasn’t something that I really thought of when I thought of the word community. … I think for me … the scholarly articles are really hard for me to process. And some of them are extremely technical and they’re just not very reader-friendly.

Consistent with the literature reviewed above, students Suzanne and Fred commented on the purposeful activities that became part of the engagement with both cultural and scholarly texts. As they explained, having a sense of what to look for in a cultural text and opportunities for discussion were vital in turning Scrubs into an educational resource:

Suzanne: I just remember … you said, When you’re watching the episode, look for moments that relate to … or that represent social power, social identification. …

Fred: And I think, along with that, after the episode, you kind of … set up beforehand but allowed for a good dialogue and conversation to happen after the episode.

Similar points were made by participants from the other two courses. Doctoral student Gemma described how one film helped her understand the transformative learning model: ‘I actually clearly recall the transformational learning discussion with Salmon Fishing on [sic] the Yemen and how we looked at each character separately and how they went through that process. I think that was very helpful.’ From the course on community, Linda found that seeing vivid examples in the film, followed by in-class discussions, made the concept of the dark side of community memorable ‘for a longer time.’ In the same course, Cameron and Robert recalled an activity for which students were placed in groups and asked to talk about how a term or phrase given to them was illustrated in Chocolat:

Robert: That’s what comes to mind for me, is using the film and its examples to look at different communities that were in the film. … And even now, I remember more about the one that my group and I discussed, than the other ones that we did not discuss. …

Cameron: Yeah, … I can recall certain elements of the film more strongly because there was that lens through which we explored those pieces of the film.

The popular culture texts remained helpful long after their introduction, becoming touchstones for participants as they moved through a course. Work and learning student Rhonda ‘found that the viewing of cultural texts allowed us to have an experience that we could ground back to that place. Oh yes, I remember sitting there watching that.’ Her classmate JC commented, ‘When you were talking about doxa or illusio it was easy to say, Hey, remember in that episode when this happened? As opposed to saying, Remember what Brookfield said.’ On a similar note, doctoral student Abigail explained,

You have so much reading to do that the concepts and some of the terminologies … can seem really nebulous. … I'm not quite sure how to anchor this to anything. With the films, I found that they became an anchor.

In short, using popular culture texts helped students approach concepts and topics with openness, energy, and curiosity and to reach a sense of clarity about scholarly texts’ meaning and relevance. Sharing and working with those texts, through in-class discussion activities and student-led presentations, helped them build understandings of what might otherwise have been daunting material.

Learning perspectives

Consistent with assertions and findings in the literature, even if fictional, the popular culture texts exposed participants to experiences and individuals that were unknown to them, allowing them to reconsider their own experiences and understandings. From the work and learning course, Suzanne mentioned that ‘using different materials and approaches and lenses will allow different students within the classroom to understand the material that’s being presented in different ways.’ Follow-up discussions enabled students to share understandings of what they had seen in a cultural text and how they related it to scholarly material. For Linda, from the community course, viewing Chocolat promoted engagement with ideas and opening of interpretive possibilities. As she explained,

When you’re reading, … it’s just papers and letters. But with the movie, then you can actually see the people’s expressions and settings and you can kind of really visualize a meaning. … Even [in] the discussion group … I noticed some people have [a] totally different way of seeing the movie.

Engaging with the film and in discussion was a multidimensional process that spurred a multidimensional, multiperspectival learning process.

Perspectives that are reconsidered and realigned might relate to rather superficial aspects of everyday life. Fred found that discussion after the Scrubs episodes gave rise to ‘a real diversity of thought’ about connections to other course materials. Other times, perspectives might relate to the types of issues that concern critical pedagogues. Turning to the matter of social relations and issues, Fred commented that ‘I find that I’ve questioned more my own perceptions, my own biases, my own understanding of a particular issue, but have tried to approach that from a little bit more of a critical reflective stage.’ Doctoral student Abigail ‘became aware of certain biases that I have. And I think that in the process of watching the film [Moonlight] you become aware of your biases and then they are also challenged.’ Her classmate Maggie found,

It did greatly expand just some of my own understanding, maybe did start to raise some new questions in my mind with respect to some of those topics … especially when we were looking at the topics of identity and social resistance and justice. And to examine those through the context of Moonlight, I think forced me to raise questions that I wouldn't necessarily have thought of and to expand my learning and my understanding of some of those topics in ways that I wouldn't have if I hadn't watched that movie.

The personal experiences of Linda, a racialized student, had sensitised her to discrimination. She related Chocolat’s messages about community to contemporary concerns about Indigenous rights and reconciliation. She noted,

When I see some of the tension between the Aboriginal and … Western community here, like I can kind of … overlap some of the scenes [in the film] and then what I see in reality. And I think that’s kind of [the] beauty of the movie. That they tried to kind of depict … what we can see in the reality through [the] movie.

Also from the community course, Robert and Cameron offered explanations for the pedagogical power of popular culture. They tied the emotional power of a cultural text to the emotionality of learning about disparities that develop as differences are experienced materially, psychically, and physically. Recalling Chocolat, Cameron repeated the word ‘anchor’, saying, ‘It’s … just like this emotional anchor … which you can then use as … a mirror of sorts to say, Does this reflect my experiences or not?’ Robert was more explicit in naming the key quality fostered through engagement with fiction but missing from engagement with scholarly articles: empathy. ‘I think that if we’re going back to drama and heightened emotion, it provides an example to see ourselves in’, he said. Similarly, doctoral student Trinity offered this comment:

When I’m reading an article, especially one that is heavily rooted in theoretical framework, I’m trying to process the information as if I’m calculating something in my brain. But when I’m watching a movie, I actually feel like I’m inside the movie. … I feel kind of, like, unguarded. … When I’m actually watching it, I think it gives me the ability to kind of put myself in other people’s shoes, if that’s even possible.

Participants continued to note the importance of discussion activities in turning popular culture texts into pedagogical resources. According to Abigail, a participant from the doctoral course, ‘We bring our own biases and our own lenses and our own worldview. … But something that I learned was the importance of the post-film discussion and sort of the debrief if you will.’ In talking about perspectives, participants might have meant simply ideas or understandings; alternatively, they might have emphasised a more critical concern about social relations and inequities. Equally compelling is the possibility that what they learned about and with popular culture in one course might carry over into their everyday lives, including professional practice.

Learning relevance

Popular fictions are not factual accounts, but they represent real-life relations and conditions, a fact that makes them relevant to developing practitioners. From the doctoral course, Maggie captured that point:

So, we would read the journal article. But … by then watching the film and connecting it to that, I found it gave me the realization of how this information was applicable in real life. I don't mean that the film was real life. … I think it just helped to expand my understanding of the topic and my insight into that topic and remove that beyond just a classroom theory to what would actually be applicable in a real-life context.

Tanya, another doctoral student, employed as a post-secondary instructor in a health profession, recalled course readings on identity and corresponding in-class presentations and discussions. She stated,

For me what was really interesting about Salmon Fishing in the Yemen … was thinking about how identity is performed … and what is a scientist. … I’ve started to see those same kinds of elements of performance … in the classroom [when I teach], so it really kind of opened my eyes to the different ways we illustrate our professional identity.

For Tanya, the gendering and racing of professional identity became a question she took from her studies to her own pedagogical and professional practice.

From the work and learning course, Melissa found herself ‘really keying into how people and things are represented in pop culture now and what that says about our society at large’, including how women are represented in media and treated in the workplace. Her peer, Fred, recounted watching an episode of Scrubs:

That was an example of relationships, of doxa, of just characters interacting with each other. … It’s like, okay, this is something that has real-world context, right? This is something that we encounter in our daily lives without even being aware of it. And we need to be aware of that.

An option extended to the students in that course was to analyse a popular culture text for their final assignment. Choosing that option, Melissa, whose job at a not-for-profit organisation involved community-based education and advocacy, found that ‘the analysis that I did … looking at workplace learning and your assumptions about how you’re supposed to advocate a certain role, that was very applicable to the work that I do.’

In sharing these thoughts, participants illuminated how the incorporation of popular culture texts into their courses helped them find possible applications of scholarly concepts and theories in their own professional practices. This finding supports scholarly claims that spending time engaging with theory matters in professional education (Gouthro 2019). They also echoed assertions about the multidimensionality and emotional strength of popular fiction and the strength of learning that is multidimensional and affective, as well as intellectual (Abidi et al. 2017, James et al. 2011). Their comments also helped me appreciate and learn things about my own teaching practice.

Reflections and lessons

At a time when pleasing – or even entertaining – students becomes a priority in higher education, incorporating popular culture in curriculum gives rise to a tension or paradox. On the one hand, there is a perception that popular culture is inherently silly, the antithesis of serious scholarship, something that scholars (Tisdell and Thompson 2007, Jarvis and Burr 2011, Peacock et al. 2018) and some participants referred to. On the other hand, my own intuition has told me otherwise for some time and participants’ comments confirm the pedagogical value of employing popular culture in the classroom.

For these participants, watching a film or a television show became a form of respite and increased their openness to and even enthusiasm for the theory that they might otherwise have found confusing, irrelevant, intimidating or boring (Wright and Wright 2015, Love et al. 2016, Gouthro 2019). JC described the use of popular culture texts as ‘a refreshing break’ from the ‘read this paper, let’s talk about it’ pedagogy that had become standard and ‘stale.’ Cindy echoed that sentiment, referring to watching film as a ‘brain break’ from ‘the monotony’ of reading and discussing scholarly articles. These comments underestimate the serious attention that students gave to the cultural texts, a point recognised in Abigail’s clarification that ‘it wasn't a brain break because we were still looking at the film through academic lenses.’ As scholars discussed above have argued, employing popular culture texts in the classroom diminished neither their enjoyability nor the seriousness of academic purpose; indeed, participants broadened their view of what constitutes valid scholarly material and practice and found theoretical, challenging material more interesting and useful.

Picking up on the multidimensionality of both adult learning and cultural engagement, participants described their holistic, active engagement with cultural texts. That engagement helped them feel confident in their abilities not just to tackle scholarly material but also to confront social complexities and rhetorical assumptions in their work and lives. It helped them develop intellectual and, I hope, critical curiosity.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the need to be explicit about the limitations of popular culture texts, which can challenge and reiterate problematic ideas. A film such as Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which students have tended to enjoy, positions the White, British fishery expert as knowledgeable, albeit imperfect, in contrast to the Yemeni opponents of the fishery project. In the world of the film, their concern about the threats to their livelihoods and homeland is reduced to a form of ignorance and misguided fear. The series Scrubs challenges gender-based stereotypes about who is suited to practice medicine and the sexualization of nursing, even as it features a sexy nurse character. I have paid attention to these points in debriefing discussions.

As I noted above, some students evoked the notion of empathy, especially when relating cultural texts to social inequities. Although it is taken up as a crucial quality for practitioners and, indeed, all adults, and associated with both individual transformative learning and social transformation (Mezirow 1994, Jarvis 2012), empathy has complications and limitations. Empathy might not move people beyond good feeling to bold action (Jarvis 2012) and the generation of a sense of shared humanity can bring a false feeling of closeness and similarity (Razack 2007). Moreover, people can empathise with likeable others, whether fictional or real-life, even when they behave unethically (Jarvis and Burr 2011), a fact that signals the need to address both emotional and intellectual responses and foster both empathy and critical reflection.

Despite their enthusiasm for using popular culture in the classroom, participants shared cautions for me and other instructors. Watching a film or a television show together can help build a learning community but takes what Maureen described as ‘precious’ in-class time. In discussing the importance of choosing ‘the right’ cultural text, doctoral student Drew recognised that choosing a ‘gritty’ film like Moonlight is ‘pushing boundaries’, and both he and Cindy admitted that some ‘classmates came away from watching Moonlight and didn’t like it for … various reasons.’ Masters student Cameron echoed the concern that employing popular culture, without clearly purposeful, scholarly activities can diminish pedagogical rigour and exacerbate the view that ‘education has become entertain-ified.’ These cautionary notes echo much of what Peacock et al. (2018) outline in their guidelines for employing cultural texts in curriculum.

These pieces of advice and cautions have helped me reconsider and refine my pedagogical ideas and practice. I spend more time priming students for a gritty text and probing the problematic representations that even useful popular culture texts display. Building on Brown’s (2011) exercise of projecting a film’s ending, I might ask students how they could employ scholarly ideas covered to help them rewrite a segment of a text. Engaging seriously with popular culture texts can be a form of witnessing something unfamiliar and important and can make course-based learning more interesting and relevant. Still, such education does not narrow sociomaterial gaps or eliminate disparities or necessarily lead students to enact a critical practice in complicated, challenging workplaces and jobs. I hope that my brief time with students promotes a critical curiosity that they take into their ongoing learning and professional practice; however, I realise that such an outcome is beyond the scope of my teaching and research. As powerful and inspirational as I find Enloe’s (2004) and Freire’s (1998) concepts of feminist curiosity and epistemological curiosity, even the most effective pedagogy of critical curiosity is only a first step and even the best-executed, best-received pedagogy might not be carried from classroom to workplace.

Although I understand the limits of employing popular culture, especially commercial mass-produced texts, in what is positioned as critically oriented education, I also understand that my complicity with neoliberal education is inescapable. I teach where and when I do, in programs and in an institution whose explicit purpose aligns with neoliberal priorities. This is a complication raised in some scholarly articles that I use and something I note in class. Still, the over-arching message for me is that, done well – thoughtfully, clearly, carefully – the fusion of popular culture and critical, curiosity-fostering education that views theory as part of practice can be part of a professional education that builds students’ attention to and application of typically challenging but still-important concepts and topics.

Acknowledgements

This article extends a presentation that I provided at Provocations and Possibilities, the 4th International Professional Practice, Education and Learning Conference, held in 2019 and the final in-person conference I attended before the onset of COVID-19. I thank colleague Dr. Donna Rooney from University of Technology Sydney who was involved in coordinating that conference and whom I invited onto the study team several months after the conference, as well as delegates whose questions and comments following my presentation as well as comments from reviewers of my initial draft of this article have helped me extend and, I believe, strengthen my analysis. I also thank research assistants Sherri Ross and Eric Ofori-Atta for their assistance with transcription and early data analysis work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research discussed in this article has received funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, specifically through its Enhance and Insight Grant programs.