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Popular Culture as Pedagogy: Research in the field of adult education Kaela Jubas, Nancy Taber and Tony Brown (Eds.) (2015) Rotterdam: Sense Publishers ISBN978-94-6300-272-1 paperback, ($ 32.00), vii+160 pages, index
Danesi (2015: p.3) writes that popular culture is atypical. It lacks, rejects and ignores ties to folk or artistic traditions. Herein lies the appeal of popular culture as it sets new trends and morphs into new versions of itself. Popular culture, with its high focus on commoditisation, acts as means for recreation, making it short lived and specific to its own era. This new volume edited by Kaela Jubas, Nancy Taber and Tony Brown, takes examples of popular culture from television programs and movies and applies them to pedagogy in the field of adult education. In their first collaboration, Jubas, Associate Professor in Adult Learning at the University of Calgary, Taber, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University and Brown, Associate Professor in Adult, Community & Higher Education at the University of Canberra, bring together the work of numerous authors who draw upon fictional characters in programs such as Doctor Who, The Lego Movie, assorted isney movies, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to articulate perceptions on how popular culture can be employed with adult learning.
Nine chapters, including the Introduction, form this uniquely comprehensive addition to the literature, with topics including storytelling, community building, representations of teachers, and narratives of illness and gender representations. The volume has a distinct flavour of the United States, although one chapter provides an insight into black South Africa. Each chapter is structured in a similar fashion with background to each movie or television program provided then analysis. There are no graphics such as photographs or diagrams provided in the book.
The book commences with the editors' Introduction which sums up the remaining eight chapters. In chapter two, Wright and Wright consider textual analysis of media and use the long running Doctor Who series as the example to support this discussion. This analysis extends to a consideration of how the actors who play Doctor Who, of which there have been twelve, impact...