Linking Contemporary Research on Youth, Literacy, and Popular Culture With Literacy Teacher Education

The aim of this article is to expand the dialogue about how contemporary scholarship on the intersections between youth, literacy, and popular culture might inform literacy teacher education. Specifically, this article is designed to (a) orient literacy teacher educators who may be somewhat unfamiliar with this particular line of scholarship to a few of its major concepts and K-12 classroom implications and (b) propose several ways this line of scholarship might open up possibilities for literacy teacher educators to help pre-service literacy teachers develop culturally responsive teaching practices. To address these goals, this article first provides an introduction to several common ways popular culture has been theorized. From this introduction, the article explains the following three concepts within contemporary scholarship that investigates youth engagement with popular culture: (a) popular culture as a site of identity formation for youth; (b) popular culture as a context for literacy development; and (c) popular culture as a vehicle for sociopolitical critique and action. In addition, this article illustrates pedagogical implications these concepts have for K-12 literacy education, including how literacy instructors adopt ethnographic stances toward youth engagement with popular culture to reposition youth and ascertain their popular culture funds of knowledge, bridge standard literacy curricula to students’ popular culture funds of knowledge, and develop literacy curricula to facilitate students’ sociopolitical critique and action. Finally, this article explores how this line of scholarship may open up spaces within literacy teacher education for K-12 pre-service literacy teachers to grapple with the politics of literacy pedagogy.