Basic Writing Assignments and Pop Culture Studies Laura Gray-Rosendale Northern Arizona University

Additional Sources: Websites and Visuals

Here are a few websites I recommend for writing teachers interested in taking up this approach who may want a bit more foundation in pop culture studies and/or for those who may want to give their students additional resources.

Sarah Zupko’s Cultural Studies Center: http://www.popcultures.com/

American Culture Association and Popular Culture Association: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~pcaaca/

The New American Studies Web: http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/cndls/asw/aswsub.cfm?head1=Popular%20Culture%20and%20Media%20Cultures

Cultural Studies Central: http://www.culturalstudies.net/

The Media Theory Site: http://www.theory.org.uk/

A few additional sources related to cultural studies and composition that I find useful for pedagogical purposes include the following:

Berlin, James. Composition and Cultural Studies." Composition and Resistance. Eds. Hurlbert, C. Mark and Michael Blitz. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991.

--- and Michael Vivion, eds. Cultural Studies in the English Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, Cook, Heinman Portsmouth, 1992.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970.

Shor, Ira. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Edition. NY: Oxford UP, 1977.

Reading Pop Rhetorics

My sense that the approach I have articulated here offers a critical way to reach students—both struggling writers and those who have some confidence as writers— finally led me to write a textbook about these issues. I felt strongly that I should write such a text because I was seeing a formula, an approach working with our students here at NAU and I wanted other people to be able to try it out as well.  And like many of us I was not able to find the kind of textbook I or my students needed in what was already available. I knew that doing this I would also learn from other people’s experiences. I hope that over the years we might streamline the approach, make it more useful to students, more user-friendly for teachers, and the like. McGraw-Hill will be publishing this book in 2004. We see it as a step in a useful direction—but still very much a work in progress, one we will learn from as people use it in different ways with their students, in their own institutional settings.

Basic Writing Assignments and Pop Culture Studies

Teaching Basic Writing

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