Ernest Morrell knows urban schools. He attended them as a student, taught in them as a teacher, and has spent a great deal of time in them as a researcher.
"My sense is that most Americans don't have an understanding of the differences between schools that are high in resources and those that that have fewer resources," said Morrell, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education. "Having spent most of my life in those schools with fewer resources, I have been able to see the stark inequalities that lead to a lot of the challenges we face in education.
"Education is so important in today's society, and yet we have students attending schools where many teachers are not credentialed and have a third of the budget of other schools. All of these circumstances force us to rethink what we're doing in schools."
What Morrell has been doing in schools for the past several years is finding ways to engage high school students in subject-matter learning to bolster academic achievement and critical and analytical skills by fusing the literary canon, those texts traditionally taught in English literature classes, with popular culture.
Morrell began to explore how popular culture could be used as a learning tool when he was a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. He has since directed a series of research projects in Los Angeles investigating the use of popular culture to foster the literacy development of urban adolescents.
He recently published Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning (Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 2004) in which he details his research and outlines how teachers can use popular culture as a powerful teaching tool.
The notion of incorporating aspects of the culture that are prominent in the lives of youth such as movies or sports or even hip-hop music into traditional curricula may seem a bit radical. Morrell is quick to point out, however, that it's an old and established idea.
He notes that literacy researchers have drawn upon the work of early twentieth century Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to make the case that effective literacy educators need to build upon the background experiences and cultural practices of their students when attempting to teach them unfamiliar academic skills and concepts.
That is exactly what Morrell said he is doing by introducing popular culture into the classroom.
Young people, especially urban youth, are immersed in popular culture. They are avid consumers of music, film, television, and other media. Through his involvement in literacy ethnographies, Morrell came to understand that many young people who experienced difficulty in school had, in fact, substantial literacy skills developed through their participation in youth and popular culture.
Over the past decade, Morrell has designed and taught a number of academic units and courses in urban high schools that incorporate popular culture in an effort to enhance the critical and analytical skills they possess. The goal, he said, has been to build confidence and make the students aware that they have skills and abilities that they can transfer to the analysis of literary texts traditionally studied in high school.
"You have to find ways to show students that they have those skills," he said. "We talk a lot in education about scaffolding because it is important. You can't just make the connections for your students, you have to explain how those connections are made, and you have to put the students in situations where they can be successful."
Two of Morrell's most direct efforts to make the connections between popular culture and the literary canon involved linking movies and novels and poetry and hip hop. In the lesson involving hip hop, students were required to make group presentations interpreting poems and hip-hop songs.
One group, for example, analyzed "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot and "If I Ruled the World" by the rap group Nas. Another group interpreted the poem "O Me! O Life!" by Walt Whitman and the song "Don't Believe the Hype" by Public Enemy.
He also designed several units that combined films with a book of similar theme. In one case, he had students analyze The Godfather films against Homer's The Odyssey.
The result has been that the students, all of them from urban high schools, were able to generate interesting interpretations and gain a deeper awareness of both popular cultural and literary texts.
In addition, inclusion of popular culture engaged students and helped them see how their knowledge and skill at critically analyzing popular media was transferable to the likes of Shakespeare and Homer, he said.
"Students have so much experience with these forms of popular culture and in using their literacy skills to decode them in analytical ways that it makes sense to start there," Morrell said. "I tell teachers that these students already have a schema to do a lot things we claim they can't do. Some teachers will say, 'These kids have no concept of story.' These students may well be watching five hours of television a day and have an incredible sense of story that runs the gamut from structure, character development, moment of crisis, and so on.
"What they don't understand is how they can transfer those skills."
In his book, Morrell provides educators practical ways of incorporating popular culture. He cautions teachers to avoid negative judgments about popular culture. Simply because a work is popular does not make it bad, noting that Shakespeare and Dickens were popular in their day.
He also advises teachers to treat popular cultural texts with the same careful consideration as those in the literary canon--"as powerful, yet flawed portrayals of the human condition."
He also encourages teachers to take on roles as ethnographers of the language and literacy practices of their students. Teachers, he said, need to understand their students in order to build on their abilities. He provides teachers resources ranging from formal ethnography to simple ways of being more cognizant of the lives of young people.
"If you're going to take the notion seriously that learning occurs when you're able to draw upon what people have and know, then you have to have a strategy to ascertain what it is they know," he said.
In the end, Morrell is clear that he is not advocating ignoring literacy in the traditional sense. The literary canon is vitally important and students, urban or not, need to read these works and grasp their meaning. What he is advocating is looking at urban students in a different way, as young people who have critical skills that can be nurtured and enhanced by the use of popular culture.
"There is such a direct correlation between income and academic achievement that it is hard to say that we have a meritocracy," he said. "The wealthiest schools are the highest achieving schools and the poorest schools are the lowest achieving schools. As a society, we have to ask ourselves is this what we want from our public education system."
