If you dive into the research surrounding youth and popular culture, it won’t be long before you come across the term ‘participatory culture’. It’s a term coined by researchers like Jocson (2018) to describe the way platforms like Youtube, Twitter and Instagram (or WordPress in my case) have changed culture today by making it so easy to create content. In the world that we now live in, essentially anyone with an internet connection has a voice, even lowly student teachers. For the most part, this phrase gets invoked when discussing our students. It can be used as part of a critique on youth being overwhelmed by information and not knowing what is real and what is fake (Notley & Dezuanni, 2017). Or if you are looking for how social media can benefit education like we are; ‘participatory culture’ can be pointed to as a way to facilitate students becoming engaged creators themselves (Jenkins, 2016).

What gets less talked about, is that this same ‘participatory culture’ is there to benefit teachers just as much. Whilst social media has given some very loud and very misguided people a platform; it has done the same thing for scientists and science communicators. These science communicators have already devoted a significant portion of their time and energy teaching STEM principles by framing them within popular culture. If you are ever struggling for ideas in the classroom, these are the people that can help you. Odds are that they are already visible to the students in your classroom as well. Science communicators like Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson, 2019) , Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox, 2019) and Australia’s own Dr Karl (@DoctorKarl, 2019) have even become celebrities on social media in their own right. Neil Tyson alone boasts a twitter following larger than the populations of both Queensland and New South Wales combined (Population Australia, 2019)!

Staying with Dr Tyson for a little longer; if I were to recommend a place to start for a STEM teacher looking to engage with popular culture, it would have to be Tyson’s podcast and Youtube series: “Star Talk” (Curved Light Productions, 2019). Star Talk is a podcast series which is always hosted by at least one scientist and one comedian. Drawing on the wealth of knowledge that Tyson and his fellow scientists offer, the show attempts to tackle science questions and science in popular culture in an entertaining and easily digestible way. Star Talk can muster quite a pull with its guests as well, meaning that if your students don’t recognise the show, they’ll certainly recognise past guests like Avenger actor Paul Rudd or Pop icon Katy Perry.  Whatever your teaching area, you can be sure that there is a Start Talk episode that you could draw on or recommend to your students as a piece of stimulus. The tag line of the show is actually, ‘where science and pop culture collide’ (Curved Light Productions, 2019). To be perfectly honest with you, that probably would have been the tagline for this blog if it wasn’t already taken.

So if you like the idea of teaching STEM with popular culture, but are unsure where to start or what to say, ask a friendly neighbourhood science communicator for help. They are there for you as much as they are there for your students.

References

@DoctorKarl. (2019, November 1). Retrieved from Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoctorKarl?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

@neiltyson. (2019, October 5). Retrieved from Twitter: https://twitter.com/neiltyson?lang=en

@ProfBrianCox. (2019, October 5). Retrieved from Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox?lang=en

Curved Light Productions. (2019, November 1). Retrieved from Star Talk Radio: https://www.startalkradio.net/

Jenkins, H. (2016). Participatory culture in a networked era : a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. Cambridge: USA : Polity Press.

Jocson, K. M. (2018). Youth media matters : participatory cultures and literacies in education. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Notley, T., & Dezuanni, M. (2017). Most young Australians can’t identify fake news online. The Conversation.

Population Australia. (2019, Novemeber 1). Retrieved from http://www.population.net.au/population-of-queensland/