Critical Pedagogy Through Popular Culture

In our media-saturated society, integrating critical pedagogy in the curriculum at all levels has sparked the interest of researchers, scholars, and educators. They have focused their effort on redefining literacy, analyzing the profound influence of the media on the social, economic, and political issues, and promoting critical pedagogy to engage students to challenge the ideological and hegemonic representations, the structures of oppression, gender, class, power, and race. This study attempts to highlight that, in addition to these goals, critical pedagogy of popular culture in the curriculum holds other tremendous benefits to students such as expanding thinking about others, finding alternative narratives in students’ own lives, enhancing cultural synchronization, building culturally responsive awareness, building consumer awareness, and scaffolding social intelligence. This study also discusses the essential aspects of a successful implementation of critical pedagogy of popular culture in terms of content, teacher’s role and education. Keywords: critical pedagogy, popular culture, culturally responsive pedagog