Promises and problems of teaching with popular culture: A linguistic ethnographic analysis of discourse genre mixing in a literacy lesson

Lefstein, A. & Snell, J. (2011). Promises and problems of teaching with popular culture: A linguistic ethnographic analysis of discourse genre mixing in a literacy lesson. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(1), 40-63.


Engaging students seems to be a worthy goal in general, and on the surface one might think that anything we do to engage students will be beneficial. This story of how a teacher in Great Britain attempted to engage her young students (about the age of fifth graders in the US) in peer editing using the format of a popular television show (X-Factor, the British equivalent of American Idol) shows us that engagement per se is not always necessarily a good thing. In this case, the strategy did indeed engage students, but is also served as a distraction from, and even an impediment to, the achieving of desired writing outcomes for these students.

Student engagement is seductive to us as teachers. Most of us are social animals, and we love seeing our students’ eyes light up and the behaviors and postures they display when they are totally focused on a learning activity which we have designed for them. In teachers’ lounges you can hear teachers excitedly talking about activities where “the students really got into it” and where children are reluctant to stop the activities. This simply is not usually the case with our students; more often their agendas are at cross purposes with ours. It is reinforcing to us to see our students in what we consider a fully engaged mode. When we find something that produces that reinforcing behavior for us, we really enjoy implementing those strategies, and we draw energy and affirmation from them. Bringing popular culture into our classroom seems like an easy way to get that reinforcement. The trouble is, it can backfire, as obviously happened here. While it can be good to introduce structures that increase student agency and are less teacher-centric, doing so brings an element of uncertainty for both teachers and students that can be a major distraction and can lead to unintended outcomes. Here, the X-Factor activity privileged certain voices in the classroom (those of popular, confident, verbal male students) and silenced others. The popular TV show’s emphasis on harsh, subjective, often surface-level evaluations was in direct opposition to the objective of the teacher’s peer editing focus, which should have included an emphasis on quality writing and on supportive feedback. Instead, the students, mimicking what they knew of X-Factor norms, provided “snarky”, often negative, quantitative evaluations that focused on the number of times students did things in their writing rather than on improvement over time and the quality of revisions. Thus, a well-meaning attempt to engage students actually got in the way of learning. The format kept the teacher from intervening and diminished teacher agency too much. In all things in the classroom, I am convinced that we need balance, and we need to think through the impacts of our decisions carefully, though that can be difficult. Just because an activity is engaging does not automatically make it effective for learning.