“They get enough of that at home”: understanding aversion to popular culture in schools

This paper sets out to try and understand why, in the face of a growing body of research and opinion that favours the utilisation of popular texts to teach literacy (Marsh & Millard, 2000, Dyson, 2001, Bromley, 2001), teachers in a research and development project in Southeast England, still had an aversion to embracing children's interest in popular culture. It will argue that the professional position the teachers take is an understandable one in view of the issues surrounding conceptions of literacy, the nature of the pleasure that popular texts evoke, and the alienation to school literacy and culture that these texts can induce. In a discussion of literacy, the paper will argue that, surprisingly, the teachers in the project who did not wish to use popular culture in their classrooms share similar traditional conceptions of literacy with many of those who advocate the use of popular texts in the classroom.