Should Psychology Professors Use More Popular Culture to Teach?

In his review of D. E. Wittkower's Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?, Richard Bloom notes the use of popular cultural products by philosophy professors.

Should psychology professors make more use of popular culture? Should we design our approach to teaching to the (ever changing) popular culture? This would go beyond just a few examples in class, as many of us do, by incorporating popular culture into our pedagogy, maybe even making it the basis of our pedagogy.

Read the Review

Minding Facebook
By Richard W. Bloom
      PsycCRITIQUES, 2011 Vol 56(27)

Comments

[Michael Fenichel Ph.D.]

Thanks for enlivening/launching this Dr. Wedding!

I believe it is crucial that we be mindful of the prevailing life and culture styles which impact learning, researching, and interacting. I suspect there will always be a lag or "trickle up" from the latest generational waves or wavelets, such as Rosen describes as the NetGeneration.

I see textbooks more resembling the attention-grabbing/holding style of the web, and obviously more reading and memory-strategies now include a "normal" reliance on external memory and clever recall strategies. And the whole notion of "multi-tasking" and socially-reinforced "device devotion", and professionals scrambling to catch up to the generation which was simply born into a new way of learning and experiencing, socializing and communicating....

Context is everything. New approaches and definitions may need to reflect changes in "attention span", reliance on social and informational networks, etc. No doubt we'll learn from our children and students before we'll have definitive research. It works like that often (imho).

Looks like a pithy and timely read, not having read the original, but reading this summary and bibliography - Terkel, etc. (the cognitive) with the social and education components inherent in online modern life - "All good". And to answer the question, my guess is that teachers *need* to embrace the tools and behaviors of the 21st Century, because that is how many now learn, and without learning there is little evidence of effective teaching. -g-

Yet, different subjects, teachers, and student populations may still vary and my guess is there will be a transition phase... Elementary schools are already there (iPads, etc.), high schools are there, and so why not university? Not that "books are dead" or "tests are useless" - not at all. The paradigm has changed.

Thanks again, Danny Wedding - you clearly "catch the wave"! :-)

[Russell Eisenman]

DO NOT USE POPULAR CULTURE TO TEACH (EXCEPT ON RARE OCCASION)

Russell Eisenman, Ph.D.
University of Texas-Pan American

We should seldom use popular culture in teaching psychology. Popular culture is, for the most part, our enemy. Psychology as a science has a lot to offer, and popular culture is a superficial explainer compared to that.

Do not get me wrong: popular culture is important and should be studied. But, we should seldom use it in our teaching, except for the occasions when students are very involved in something and we can link it to psychology, e. g. when my students were very concerned about the suicide of actor Heath Ledger and they asked me questions about why someone might kill themselves.

Popular Culture Distortions

To a large extent, popular culture distorts and makes our job harder. For example, years ago at another school, a student kept asking me if all cops were voyeurs. Although I kept telling him "no," it turns out he had seen a movie in which the actor Burt Reynolds played a cop who kept watching a woman, who he was attracted to. The student generalized from this that this is how cops really are. This is amazing, but not as rare as you might think. Over the years I have learned that people in general often take movies as accurate in what they present, and, in effect, use the movies as news. Thus, the view expressed in a movie is seen as true, even though it is clearly a make believe story.

Entertainment Better Than the Truth

I once had a student tell me that she was more interested in a particular movie she saw about drug dealing than about the information on drug dealing that I provided in class. She said the movie was more entertaining. I told her that the movie was a drama and, of course, could be entertaining, but that what we were going over in class was based on research, and thus likely to be more accurate. But, I suspect that the pop culture of movies was part of her and she was "addicted" to that kind of entertaining information, and not to academic study. In such a case, popular culture is the enemy of the truth and of teaching.

In Conclusion

So, while popular culture is very important to understand and study, it is also important to avoid when teaching, except in rare instances when we can use it as an adjunct to what we want to teach. I think the field of philosophy is making a big mistake in trying to advance its ideas via pop culture and I hope psychology and other fields do not follow. We have massive amounts of scientific and scholarly information, which is far more useful than what can be learned via exposure to popular culture.

[wedding photography]

I don't find any mistakes in using more popular culture in teaching. For as long as it will do good, then go ahead.