Gaining Knowledge of Popular Culture Texts

Chapter Five

Trading Cards to Comic Strips – Shelley XU

While showing several girls in the class the International Library Reading Site at recess time, I experienced a similar scenario as the teacher in Vignette 5.1. One child was familiar with the site and knew how to enlarge the text to make it large enough to be readable. She said, “Just hit the X key and it will enlarge.” Sure enough it had to be hit several times but each time it enlarged a bit more. We do learn from the children that we work with.

It was interesting to view the documentation charts of a child and teacher regarding the engagement of texts in each of their lives. It is no wonder there is at times a communication gap between elders and children. Unless an effort is made by both to cross over in sharing media text, neither will understand what the other is absorbing in text materials.

When television was compared to film text it was found that they are quite similar. It did mention five or so differences. While a film has a complete story in one episode, the television may not. For me a movie theater is often times too loud. I would prefer a quieter setting. Although in film watching, I do appreciate the bigger than life scenes. Then my oldest son really enjoys watching the CD’s because of all the additional information that is gained. He enjoys the information learned about the making of the movie such as the trailer for making the movie, the process of making the movie, seeing unedited scenes, hearing the sound track, learning the historical background, and listening to the interview with the cast and crew.

Hypermedia text has so many links to other text types that a person has to be careful or he’ll end up where he doesn’t want to be. An individual can begin at the top, bottom, side, or middle of the page to read and to link into other sites. Then one link can lead to another and another and another. Sometimes all the links have to be checked out to locate the information you want. When you find the information, you had better book mark it or else you might not be able to find it again.

Rap music has been mentioned a lot in this and the other text. At our school we have a talent day. Not any of our children have come up with Rap music as their talent. So this leads me to say that there would be much more interest in Western Music or popular music in this particular community of children. I am certain that these lesson could be adapted to other musical genres. Although, a Reading Coach indicated that she had heard some jiving rap recently coming from a K – 3 room.

It’s been years since I have read a comic book but I do enjoy reading the Cartoon Strips every Sunday. The term Mangas was new to me but I have probably see these in book stores but wasn’t particularly interested in buying any of them. It’s been not too long ago that I noticed a graphic novel section in a bookstore and thought it was rather novel and different. Again I wasn’t interested enough in it to buy it.

When in elementary school my youngest son collected baseball and football cards of his favorite teams and exchanged them with friends. He still has boxes of cards. I am sure that if he would check the value of each card, he would find that the value has increased.

My oldest son had Play Station games and at thirty-nine years of age still enjoys playing these types of games. I want to copy a couple of these pages of text regarding gaming for him to view. It would be interesting to see what his comments are about the probe, hypothesize, reprobe, and rethink cycles in gaming.

When I saw the term “Zine and E-Zine”, I wondered what is this? So it appears that they are E-magazines written by and for women and teens as support in the many facets of life – social issues, liberal politics, humor, entertainment, reviews, and personal reflections. Participation in discussion groups can occur in this setting very readily.

All in all the author states that we will notice that popular culture text apply similar literacy knowledge and skills as they do with print-based texts. So outside of school, children who read the popular cultural text do get additional reading practice. It is just that in the past, it appears to me, that the students have not gotten to share this information about what they know in the classroom.