There have been an assortment of books in recent years detailing the use of popular culture in the classroom, some geared towards specific topics like comic books or Star Trek and others offering a more general overview. But what about academic libraries? If pop culture is an ideal fit in the classroom, wouldn’t the same hold true for them? Co-editors Melissa Edmiston Johnson, Thomas C. Weeks, and Jennifer Putnam Davis provide the answer to those questions in Integrating Pop Culture Into the Academic Library, a collection of essays from librarians across the country published in 2022.
“What readers will find in this book is a multitude of chapters covering the foundational basis for implementing popular culture in the library, as well as case studies using popular culture for instruction, collection building, and outreach,” Johnson, Weeks, and Davis write in the introduction. “It is our hope that this book will inspire other librarians to recognize the value of connecting with students, faculty, and the larger community through popular culture.”
In “Stream This! Using Pop Culture to Build Confidence and Connect Community College Students to Academic Research,” Monika Chavez and Esteban Aguilar of Mt. San Antonio College offer ways to use pop culture to teach academic research. “While students may not have successfully conducted academic research in the past, they most likely will have experiences related to pop culture,” they explain. “Additionally, when tied to constructivist teaching techniques, pop culture provides a foundation for learning research and information literary concepts.”
Although popular culture is a vast landscape filled with a multitude of entertainment options, certain mediums and platforms intersect each element nonetheless. Although not all students watch the same televisions shows or movies, for instance, research has shown that a majority use online streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube for their media consumption.
“Searching for a movie to watch is analogous to searching an academic library database to find articles,” Chavez and Aguilar write. “Even though academic library databases generally allow for more powerful searching mechanics than Netflix, the concept is the same. The lesson transitions from utilizing a student’s prior knowledge of streaming platforms to using that knowledge as a foundation for understanding academic library databases.”
Listicles, meanwhile, are online articles compromised of a list of some sort, such as “38 Random Products That Work So Well They’re about to Become Necessities.” Research has shown that younger generations find listicles more credible than traditional news sources. Monika Chavez and Esteban Aguilar therefore teach students to look for warning signs that a particular listicle might actually be biased.
Affiliate marketing is defined as “an advertising model in which a company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and service.” A corresponding warning sign on a listicle might be a disclaimer stating that the publishing website “may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page if you decide to shop from them.” By teaching students to identify such warning signs enhances their ability to determine the credibility of material when conducting academic research.
Lastly, Monika Chavez and Esteban Aguilar ask students to identify the original source for a selected meme. “Traditionally, memes have not included attribution, so we have found students have a difficult time finding the original source of a meme,” Chavez and Aguilar write. “This parallels with a student not citing a source in a research paper and how this impacts the evidence behind their argument. Furthermore, it demonstrates the difficulty for an instructor to understand whose original ideas are behind an argument, leading to discussions on intellectual honesty and claims of plagiarism.”
While Monika Chavez and Esteban Aguilar concentrate on academic research, Hannah C. Gunderman focuses on another component of a university library in “Building a Research Data Management Program through Popular Culture: A Case Study at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.”
“When I first started in my current role, I was tasked with the challenge of building an RDM program from the ground up,” Gunderman explains. “As I progressed in this task, I quickly became disillusioned with low attendance and engagement in my data management workshops, despite strong marketing of the workshops and the use of active learning techniques I had put to practice for several years during my academic training while teaching undergraduate courses. In my experiences in researching popular culture and teaching cultural geography, I have learned about the power of using popular culture to enhance learning outcomes and learning environments, and I decided to overhaul our RDM curriculum.”
That overhaul included a pair of sixty minute workshops entitled Learn Data Management Through Pokémon! and Develop Good File Naming Habits through 1980s Album Covers! In the former, students are shown images of five Pokémon and then tasked with naming them as if they were a digital file. Afterwards, each student reveals the name they chose, demonstrating the different ways that researchers might name an actual digital file.
During the next assignment, students access the online Pokémon database Bulbapedia, pick a random Pokémon, and write detailed step-by-step instructions on how to draw it. Afterwards, other students in the workshop attempt to draw the Pokémon. “The activity helps frame a discussion on writing good documentation in a project so both the researcher as well as others can understand and even re-create the project, supporting its reproducibility,” Hannah Gunderman explains.
In Develop Good File Naming Habits through 1980s Album Covers!, students create names for a collection of album covers from the 1980s as if they were a digital file. Afterwards, each student shares their file names with another person in the workshop, who then has to determine which name goes with which album cover. “They are asked to consider elements of the image, such as colors, figures, shapes, and so on, in coming up with a representative file name,” Gunderman writes. “The workshop ends with a discussion of the importance of creating descriptive file names that not only help the individual researcher find their files but anyone else who might be collaborating with them.”
In addition to using popular culture for workshops, Integrating Pop Culture Into the Academic Library also contains chapters on incorporating popular culture items into library collections. Cushing Memorial Library & Archives at Texas A&M University, for instance, contains a “Maps of Imaginary Places Collection,” with over 500 maps of such fictitious locales as Middle-earth, Narnia, Cobra Island, Battleworld, and Westeros.
Although the collection has often been used for exhibits, Jeremy Brett and Sierra Laddusaw explain in “Mapping the Imagination in an Academic Library” that the maps are used for educational purposes as well. Imaginary maps of real-world location, for instance, are set side-by-side with a factual map of the same locale as part of an “Introduction to Human Geography” course. Students examine the maps and answer questions about the similarities and differences between them, taking into account the time period each was created and the artistic decisions made by the cartographers.
The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, meanwhile, incorporates items from the Marvel superhero film Black Panther and its fictional kingdom of Wakanda into its collection. As Gene Kannenberg Jr. explains in “Wakanda as a Window to the Study of Africa,” the collection is more than an enticement to attract visitors into the library as the Black Panther also acts as a gateway to the factual collections of the facility.
“When characters in the Black Panther film appear to speak in ‘Wakandan,’ they are, in fact, speaking IsiXhosa, ‘a Nguni Bantu language and one of the official languages of South Africa’ that was suggested by the actor John Kani, who portrays King T’Chaka,” Kannenberg offers as an example. “As the Herskovits Library collects in all languages, if a visitor expresses an interest in ‘Wakandan,’ we can point them to literature as well as to grammars and dictionaries. For example, young visitors can browse the Oxford First Bilingual Dictionary: IsiXhosa + English, which includes illustrated definitions as well as a pronunciation guide to help them learn the language’s various click sounds.”
From learning how to conduct academic research to examining imaginary maps, studying African languages to properly identifying data files and Pokémon, Integrating Pop Culture Into the Academic Library offers a plethora of ways to add pop culture into the academic library – turning the resulting pop culture library into a complimentary component of the growing pop culture classroom.
Anthony Letizia