The hunter and the hunted: Equipping young readers to traverse the paths of popular culture

By Andrew Smith

ACCESS, Vol. 22, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 5-8.

(The views expressed in articles are those of the author(s) concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

Introduction
To be educated means to be allowed to think and wonder about ideas and their consequences; to be indoctrinated means to hear only about acceptable values, beliefs and traditions of a group. (Swiderek1996, p. 592)

Shakespeare’s plays, when they were written and performed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, emerged from the social commonalities of that era and migrated over the centuries to their present position on the higher shelves of academia (Dolby 2003). That these texts now warrant interrogation as serious texts justifies, if only as a starting point, the merit of studying the popular texts of our own time. Shakespeare’s texts, too, once existed outside the boundaries of the accepted and the received. Of particular interest and the focus of this paper is the relationship that popular culture and youth have in this first decade of the 21st century. The artefacts of popular culture – the printed and electronic texts and embedded images – stand aside and beyond the boundaries of the mainstream accepted and received, as they always have. The connection with modern youth and popular culture is important, particularly as youth, popular culture and education intersect at many points in the field of librarianship. The position of youth in this matrix is outlined by Mallan and Pearce:

Youth live in a ‘predatory culture … of stalkers and victims’, where identity is fashioned around the excesses of the marketplace and consumer culture. (Mallan and Pearce 2003, p. xiv)

Yet, however accurate the picture we now have of the rapacious free market economy in which we live, youth are not powerless. Youth are certainly influenced by external forces, including their positioning as commodities by corporate cultures – ‘young people as both the subject and the object of commodification, as objects to buy and sell in the marketplace’ (Giroux 2000, p. 12) – but this is not the complete picture. Youth live as individuals in both time and space: during the time that their generation journeys through the pre-adulthood years and in the space which today incorporates the material, the imaginative and the cyber. The forces that Mallan and Pearce identify are real and pervasive and exert enormous pressure on contemporary youth but, nevertheless, individuals also possess agency – the capacity to respond and make choices within their own societies and cultures (Dolby 2006, p. 261; see also Wulff 1995, p. 6). As Giroux explains:

Popular culture alone does not influence young people. It simply works in psychological tandem with a range of other important and influential forces, such as family, peers, social and financial environments, school, workplace and internal factors to shape, mould, seduce and appeal … it is simply one mode through which young people style individual and collective identities and learn how to narrate themselves in relation to others. (Giroux 1997, p. 59, cited in Brooks 2006, p. 14)

The relative influence that teacher librarians might have on young people as they negotiate their ways through the complexities of pre-adulthood can be informed by an examination of three components of popular culture: firstly, what we know about the social construction of youth and childhood; secondly, what we know about the economic and political forces impinging on our society; and, finally, what we know about the ways that learning can occur through popular cultural texts. In the following discussion, three contemporary printed texts – Ads r us (Carmichael 2006), The big split (McAuley 2006) and The incredibly short and happy life of Riley (Thompson & Lissiat 2005) – will be examined as a useful way to unpack and contextualise the three components of known popular culture theory listed above.

Youth and childhood
An initial discussion point relates to the social construction of youth and childhood. The period of life we identify as adolescence is known to be a time when youth define and redefine themselves: experimenting, shaping and identifying the boundaries of the cultures they live in (Freedman & Johnson 2001, p. 357). The text Ads r us (Carmichael 2006) explores a number of issues connected with youth identity. This novel is set in the near future and uses the narrative device of multiple voices (two principal characters – Taylor, female, and Barrett, male) to challenge the reader to respond and formulate opinions and imaginative allegiances (Gillis 2002). Two cultures are juxtaposed: Barrett’s world, which is an alternative rural cult called Simplicity, and Taylor’s urban world, which has been profoundly shaped by an alliance of commercial and political forces. The narrative is deliberately ambiguous and forces the reader to negotiate a number of themes: concerns over appearance, ethics, drug use, the evaluation and response to the advertising images, and the way the two adolescents are differently empowered (Barrett) or disempowered (Taylor) by their respective cultures to discern the manipulative images, messages, people and institutions.

Identity is a central theme. Barrett, who emerges from a cult with its associated Amish-like extremes of dress, speech, adult-youth relationships and attitudes to materialism, is confronted as the rank outsider with an alien culture that, at every turn, attempts to change him into its image. Taylor, who has been surreptitiously and maliciously manipulated since childhood by the corrupted adults in her life, is far more insecure, though at the very centre of the political/economic/social system she lives in.

Explicit advocacy
The issue of identity in Ads r us may be approached from two perspectives. The first is an ideological one; the author Claire Carmichael was not neutral when she wrote this novel. Rather as Stephens (1992, p. 8) remarks about writing for children, ‘(there is) a common impulse to intervene in the lives of children … (and) socialising their target audience’. There are ideological positions and meanings that Carmichael creates in the text including the barely veiled ideologies communicated through Barrett’s environmental concerns:

It was an indefensible waste of good land on which crops could have been grown. There were even several fountains spurting plumes of water into the warm air. I hoped the water was recycled; otherwise here was another heedless waste of resources. (Carmichael 2006, p. 96)

The teenager reader might be resistant to such explicit advocacy (Stephens 1992) if it were not for the congruency in the depiction of Barrett realistically as an environmentally concerned person. Thus, the issue of identity is raised intentionally by Carmichael through the narrative devices in the novel. However, as Hollindale (1988, cited in Stephens 1992) shows, there are other levels of ideology which permeate texts, including this one, and which intentionally or not communicate aspects of culture for the reader to respond to, sometimes consciously at other times not so. So the portrayal of both the main teenage characters includes aspects of popular culture: speech, behaviour, dress, attitudes and ethics, which Carmichael has included in the text and which exist passively. These aspects may be at variance to the ideological position Carmichael owns yet may nevertheless be apprehended by readers. Speaking to an entirely different genre, teenage romance novels, Turner (2004, p. 43) demonstrates that what might seem as harmless and innocuous has a ‘powerful ability to shape and construct the social image of femininity’. So the forces which Mallan and Pearce (2003) have alerted us to earlier, the predatory stalkers of the multinational corporate and media worlds, certainly are present even in this text, a text which is explicitly aimed at empowering readers by exposing these forces. Yet here is the point. There are multiple ideologies competing here – even in this text – and imaginative spaces have been created in which the teenage reader can make choices. There is an echo here of Swiderek when she speaks of the freedom to think and wonder about ideas and their consequences (Swiderek 1996).

Commodification
A second discussion point relates to what we know about the economic and political forces impinging on our society and that have pervasive influences on popular culture and youth. In the field of public education, which is a closely related field to this discussion about popular culture, there has been considerable scholarship speaking to the issue of privatisation. Recently, Connell (2006) remarked that ‘private enterprise was to be unleashed as an engine of prosperity and allowed to operate untrammelled in all spheres of life – including education’ (Connell 2006, p. 145) (emphasis added). The relationship that public education has to popular culture is through critical issues of democratic choice. The commodification of education, globalisation and the ascendancy of free market forces are indisputable components of contemporary society. This is the reality of where we as adults and the youth of today live. Moreover, popular culture, which is driven relentlessly by private commercial interests, challenges existing social structures including educational ones. The complexity of life is amplified by the components of popular culture – the messages and imagery communicated by the pervasive and ubiquitous electronic media. Certainly there is also a multiplication of diversity and difference in many areas of society, reflected in the fluidity and impermanence of popular culture. What is iconic today will be fossilised tomorrow. Such diversity and difference in popular culture, if it intersects with an empathetic and enlightened educational system, can strengthen the democratic foundations of our nation challenging and redirecting rampant economic rationalism and its brood. In this sense, the drivers of popular culture – the ‘commercial interests, which are private and concerned with profit’ (Dolby 2003, p. 258) – become the hunted as well as the hunter.

An example of popular culture attired for hunting is the Thompson and Lissiat’s text The short and incredibly happy life of Riley (2005). It is a remarkable picture book that challenges the motivations of those promoting and driving consumer culture. In a similar way that Carmichael juxtaposed the central characters in Ads r us (2005) Thompson and Lissiat contrast two lifestyles to communicate their values and ideology. Riley is a rat with simple (rodent) needs and his life is contrasted with an unnamed (in the text) character whose identity is discovered through Thompson’s drawings. This character, Norman, represents people, where people or they are implied to be the collective name for humankind. People in this narrative are characterised by materialism, hedonism and individualism. The lists that accompany each of the human pages (Norman is present in all of these in different guises) correspond to products, artefacts, services and attitudes common to consumers. Food, goods, appearance, travel and relationships are covered on separate pages. Typically, the list for goods is: ‘They want microwave-video-dvd-sms-internet-big-car-cost-more-than-yours-gold-diamond-electronic-gigabyte-fastest-and-smallest-machines’ (2006, np). An unanswered question that could be asked of the text is whose voice reads out these lists. Is it the consumer, the people, the they, or is it, perhaps, the voice of the market place? This text, aimed at primary school-aged children, operates on a number of ideological levels. Firstly, Thompson does not disguise his own voice and this corresponds closely with Stephens’ notion of an implicit ideology with ‘assumed social structures and habits of thought’ (1992, p. 34). That Thompson’s voice is at variance with what would be commonly recognised as artefacts and behaviours of contemporary life and emblematic of consumer culture is not at issue. Although didactic – ‘And the answer is very simple really – you just have to be happy with a lot less’ (np) – this text, through irony, satire and humour, empowers the reader by creating a memorable story with alternate values. The intersection of this text with issues of globalisation provides the reader with alternative imaginative resources in the form of characters (Riley, Norman) and story with which to challenge these excesses of the market place and strengthen democratic choice for the individual reader and others who may share the text.

Culture and learning
A third discussion point relates to what we know about the ways that learning can occur through popular cultural texts. There seems to be a consistent thread through the literature that educators and students must ‘negotiate a point of mutual tolerance and preparedness to learn from each other’ (QUT 2007). This notion follows directly on from the previous two presuppositions. Popular culture is a powerful social constructor of youth identity and it has the capacity to empower youth. The intersection of the third presupposition with the first two occurs both within and without places of institutional learning. The challenge for educators is to engage students in their learning processes, at least partially, with the texts and artefacts of popular culture. This negotiation allows educators the freedom to choose texts which are written in the languages of popular culture – the idioms, characters, stories and artefacts with which students are already familiar with.

McCarthy et al. (2003) speak of the ‘intersection of transnational capitalism and multicultural education’ the crucial notion that popular culture is the site where understandings and significant communication can be made with contemporary youth. That popular culture is driven by globalising forces is to some degree irrelevant if educators can see that their role is not necessarily to oppose these texts but rather to empower students by skills of critical reflexivity (Alvermann & Xu 2003, pp. 147-148; see also Jetnikoff 2006, p. 38; Hunt & Hunt 2004). Wulff (1995) makes the point that ‘(it is not that youth) know less than adults but rather that they know something else’. Using this something else appears to have great educational merit whereby students learn with and through the components of popular culture with which they are familiar.

The third text, The big split (McAuley 2006), is useful to illustrate some common ground that can be established with students. [Incidentally, this title, one of the Go Girls series, is hugely popular with year 7 and 8 girls in my own library, supporting our instinct that students will engage with texts that they can relate to.] This title takes on the vexed problems associated with marriage break-ups and couples with children separating. At first sight, The big split could be placed in the class of books that Stephens (1992, p. 34) classifies as ‘bibliotherapy’ – ‘books which purport to help children confront and deal with specific problems in their lives’. Yet what is always found in those kinds of books is that the overtly ideological position taken by the narrator leaves children and adolescents … cold. I know of no such text in my library which has been freely chosen by a student. The big split is different in that it has been written using the idioms and language of popular culture. Most importantly, this text gives the young reader the space, the freedom, to explore alternate solutions to what, in this instance, is a very common situation – family dislocation. There is recognition of the conflict and trauma involved and the scenarios are, for the most part, believable. It is possible to set aside adult perceptions of the limitations of the book (unrepresentative economic and professional status and privilege of the parents, unrecognised dangers in the ‘running away’ incident, clichéd happy conclusion) and to recognise that for many young readers, this text offers them resources with which to cope with the trauma of domestic instability. The images, characters, stories and themes in this text (QUT 2007) may (and probably will) remain with some children. Inclusion of this text in the school library is one step towards negotiating common spaces with students.

Concluding thoughts
The intersection of popular culture, youth and education with the forces of global capitalism- the point where these elements meet and compete might seem at first an unequal contest. Or, using the metaphor of the jungle, the free market might appear at first to be best equipped for hunting smaller prey. Mallan and Pearce’s astute observation that ‘youth live in a predatory culture ...’ (Mallam and Pearce 2003, p. xiv) resonates with this jungle metaphor. However, it is a strong contention of this writer that popular culture (already in the hands of youth and funded by corporate capitalism) can be used as a democratising weapon in the hands of educators. The empowerment of youth requires a genuine empathy on the part of educators to embrace components of popular culture using them in the educative process. The three texts examined in this paper illustrate how texts containing elements of popular culture can be used in this empowerment.

References

Alvermann D and Xu S H 2003, ‘Children’s everyday literacies: intersections of popular culture and language arts instruction’, Language Arts, 81(2), pp. 145-154.

Brooks K 2006, ‘Comfortably numb: young people, drugs and the seduction of popular culture’, Youth Studies Australia, 25(2), pp. 9-16.

Carmichael C 2006, Ads r us, Random House, Milsons Point, Sydney.

Connell R 2006, ‘The new right triumphant: the privatization agenda and public education in Australia’, Our Schools, Our Selves, 15(3), pp. 143-199.

Dolby N 2003, ‘Popular culture and democratic practice’, Harvard Educational Review, 73(3), pp. 258-284.

Freedman L and Johnson H 2001, ‘Who’s protecting whom? I hadn’t meant to tell you this, a case in point in confronting self-censorship in the choice of young adult literature’, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, (44) 4, pp. 356-369.

Gillis C 2002, ‘Multiple voices, multiple genres: fiction for young adults’, English Journal, 92(2), pp. 52-59.

Giroux H 1997, Channel surfing: race talk and the destruction of today’s youth, Macmillan, Houndsmill.

Hollindale P 1988, Ideology and the children’s book, Thimble press, Oxford

Hunt T and Hunt B 2004, ‘Popular culture: building connections with our students’, English Journal, 93(3), pp. 80-83.

Jetnikoff A 2006, ‘Combating Cyclops: critical approaches to media literacy and popular culture in senior English’, English in Australia, 41(1), pp. 37-45.

McAuley R, 2006, The big split, E2, Prahan, Victoria.

Queensland University of Technology 2007, ‘“Pop learning”: making learning popular’, CLN 647 Module One Notes. QUT, Brisbane.

Stephens J 1992, ‘Ideology, discourse and narrative fiction’, in J Stephens (ed.), Language and ideology in children’s fiction, Longman, Harlow, Essex.

Swiderek B 1996, ‘Censorship (middle years)’, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, (39)7, pp. 592-594.

Thompson C and Lissiat A 2005, The short and incredibly happy life of Riley, Lothian, South Melbourne.

Wulff H 1995, ‘Introducing youth culture in its own right: the state of the art and new possibilities’ in V Amit-Talai and H Wulff (eds), Youth cultures: a cross-cultural perspective. Routledge, London, pp. 1-18.

Andrew Smith is the teacher librarian at King's Christian College on the Gold Coast, Queensland. He has worked in primary and secondary schools across Australia in the private and public sectors. This article formed part of his studies for the Master of Learning Innovation degree at the Queensland University of Technology.

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Last updated 1 July 2008