Drawing On Pop Culture And Entertainment Media In Adult Education Practice In Teaching For Social Change

This paper provides an overview of the critical media literacy literature and related adult education literature to consider how to draw on popular culture and entertainment media in adult education settings when dealing with diversity and equity issues of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. It also provides some examples of from practice. Popular culture and fictional entertainment media have an enormous influence on society. Whether in the genre of television sitcom or drama, or fictional stories in popular film, the entertainment media teach us something about ourselves as we map new meaning onto our own experience based on what we see and relate to; for good or for ill, it also teaches us a lot about others through fictional means. In the past few years, there has been a growing discussion about the role of pop culture and the entertainment media in education (Giroux, 1997; hooks, 1994; Yosso, 2002); In these discussions, critical media education scholars note the tendency of the media to reproduce structural power relations based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; however, they also argue that some media challenge such power relations in their portrayals of characters. Thus, given that students are consumers of entertainment media, which serves as a significant way that people construct knowledge about their own and others’ identities and thus a significant source of “education”, they argue that it is important to teach critical media literacy skills—of how to deconstruct and analyze entertainment media through direct discussion of it in the classroom. Thus far most of these discussions and studies related to critical media literacy have focused on youth. Aside from general reference to the significance of popular culture to the media in our lives (Miller, 1999), discussion of the role of entertainment media in the education of adults has been absent. But given that adult learners and educators are also large consumers of media, it is also important that adult educators tend to issues related to media literacy, particularly in attempting to attend to diversity and equity issues. Therefore the purpose of this paper is two-fold: to provide an overview of the critical media literacy to consider how to draw on popular culture and entertainment media in adult education settings to teach critical medial literacy skills and to discuss issues of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation; and to explore how entertainment media can be used in teaching practice

Women Teaching for Social Change in Adult Education: The Spiritual and Cultural Dimensions of Teaching Across Borders

This study is an exploratory look at understanding how spirituality is renegotiated and informs the emancipatory work of a purposeful sample of women activist adult educators

Spiritual Development and Commitments to Emancipatory Education in Women Adult Educators for Social Change

This paper discusses the results of a qualitative research study of the spiritual development of a multicultural group of women adult educators for social change, and its relationship to their current commitment to emancipatory adult education practice

CLAIMING A SACRED FACE: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF THE ROLE OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE IN CLAIMING A POSITIVE CULTURAL IDENTITY

This paper discusses the results of a qualitative study where the purpose was to examine the role of spirituality in developing a positive cultural identity among a multicultural group of 31 adult educators, and then considers what the finding suggest for the further development of culturally relevant teaching practices within adult and higher education settings. In recent years, there has been much discussion about dealing with culture, race, gender, class, sexual orientation in teaching for social change and greater equity in society (Guy, 1999; Hayes & Colin, 1994; Hayes & Flannery, 2000; Johnson-Bailey, 2001). There has also been some discussion of the role of spirituality in adult development and learning (English & Gillen, 2000; Tisdell, 2000), and some limited discussion on the connection between spirituality and teaching for social justice related to cultural issues ( Hart & Holton, 1993; Tisdell, Tolliver, and Villa, 2001; Tolliver & Tisdell, 2002). Most of these discussions have been conceptual in nature, and there has been only limited discussion of the role of spirituality in developing a positive cultural identity from a data-based research perspective. Thus, the purpose of this paper is (1) to discuss the results of a qualitative study where the purpose was to examine the role of spirituality in developing a positive cultural identity among a multicultural group of 31 adult educators; and (2) to discuss the implications the findings of the study have for the further development of culturally relevant teaching practices within adult and higher education settings

Spiritual Development, Paradox, and Wisdom in Adult Educators’ Reflections Ageing

This paper discusses some of the longitudinal findings of a narrative study of spiritual development and emerging wisdom of women adult educators over a 10 year period

We Make the Way by Walking: Spiritual Pilgrimage and Transformative Learning While Walking the Camino De Santiago

After grounding the discussion in prior research that led impetus to doing a spiritual pilgrimage, this paper primarily provides an auto-ethnographic account of the major insights about spirituality, culture, and transformative learning gleaned from walking the nearly 500 mile pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago

Teaching across borders: A collaborative inter-racial border pedagogy in adult multicultural education classes.

This qualitative action research study examined how power dynamics were manifested between and among instructors and students in two graduate level classes team-taught by a black and a white female co-instructors where diversity and equity issues in education was the primary course content. The study also attempts to identify adult education practices that lead to growth and social change among participants in such classes that are at times both uncomfortable and controversial

Bridging Across Disciplines: Understanding the Connections between Cultural Identity, Spirituality and Sociopolitical Development in Teaching for Transformation

We briefly review and analyze the literature of several different disciplinary perspectives to understand the relationships between cultural identity, spirituality, sociopolitical development and their role in teaching for transformation

“I Know Down to My Ribs”: A Study of the Embodied Adult Learning of Creative Writers

This paper reports a narrative analysis on the embodied learning of creative writers, by providing an extended narrative on the embodied learning of one participant. It is theoretically grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body, Gendlin’s notion of the “felt sense, and Jordi’s analysis of reflection for integrating mind and body

Ghost and the Machine: Bringing Untold Personal Spiritual and Cultural Experiences to Life Through the Medium of Digital Storytelling.

This study examines learners’ perceptions of the experiences of transformation from the storytelling experience of digital stories within a graduate class on spirituality and culture, by means of the lenses of both transformative learning theory and storytelling theory