Harnessing Popular Culture to Teach Course Content

One of the fundamental challenges we face as educators is engaging students in course material. While there are already several pedagogically sound approaches to building student engagement via the way we structure the course (e.g., active learning, high impact practices), another strategy involves the lens of the course itself. In fact, many faculty are moving towards courses which utilize a popular culture theme. For example, many colleges offer courses on everything from popular culture icons (e.g., Taylor Swift, Beyonce) to literature (e.g., Lord of the Rings,  Harry Potter) to children’s shows (e.g., Sesame Street) to media more broadly (e.g., Star Wars, Star Trek). 

This is not a new practice, such popular culture themed courses have been around for years (Blessing & Blessing, 2015). In fact, there is empirical evidence of themed courses being used in disciplines such as Chemistry (Schultz et al., 2009), Art (Tessier & Tessier, 2015), Language Arts (Lipson et al., 1993), Biology (Tessier & Tessier, 2015), and Sociology (Valiente-Neighbours, 2020) as well as anecdotal evidence from the social sciences (e.g., The Good Place; Morality, Motivation, & the Multiverse: The Making of a Superhero; Swirsky et al., in press). 

What is new is the empirical attention that’s beginning to recognize thematic teaching as a valid and useful strategy to engage students in class material. There are also an increasing number of resources becoming available to help faculty develop and teach themed courses. For example, a team of researchers (including myself!) created a series of modules aimed at using Sesame Street to teach about Human Development (Timmons et al., 2023) as well as a guidebook for teaching themed courses more broadly (Geffen et al., 2023).

So what does this mean for our teaching? Find a topic that you are interested in and passionate about and think about how it can connect to your discipline. Consider a course on “Deconstructing Hogwarts: Religion, Race, and Gender in Harry Potter” (Religion), or “"The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling With Taylor Swift Through the Eras”, or “The Philosophy of Tolkien”, or “The Psychology of Musical Theater”. In fact - recent evidence suggests that there are myriad benefits for faculty as well as students (e.g., they are fun, allow us to humanize ourselves, they are reinvigorating). Harnessing the power of popular culture can be a really powerful teaching tool!
 

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