“She Don’t Know I Got It, You Ain’t Gonna Tell Her, Are You?” Popular Culture as a Space of Resistance in the Preschool Classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 39
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Studies of Children: Critical Perspectives on Childhoods, Popular Culture, and Consumerism

Abstract

There are two agendas taking place in schools: the intentions of adults and the sometimes-separate intentions of children that coincide and sometimes compete in school classrooms. This is particularly the case in some preschool classrooms where parents and teachers banned popular culture and media ideas in the classroom.


Media or popular culture, ideas, and images that stem from television and movies have a tenuous relationship, at best, with schools. They are typically seen as distracting, low-brow and are often critiqued as promoting violent behavior in schools. As demonstrated by Hodge and Tripp (1986) children are acutely aware that media and popular culture are not welcomed in the classroom and if they are they are typically limited to certain times. Yet children remain interested and as a result will partake in agentive, surreptitious actions in order to engage with images and ideas that may not be welcomed in the classroom. Resistance takes the form of both individual and collective, cohesive resistance which stands in opposition to the rules of the institution. Examining what has been called the “second curriculum” (Best, 1983 as quoted in Adler, Kless and Adler, 1992) or the “unofficial school” (Kessler, Ashenden,, Connell and Dowsett, 1985), this paper highlights children’s voices as it discusses how children in three American preschools interpret and resist adult rules limiting marketing and branded images and in some cases children’s talk about popular culture. Drawing on sociological (Goffman, 1961) and cultural studies (de Certeau, 1984) frameworks this paper describes (a) the strategies adults use to further official curriculums and (b) the subversive tactics that children employ to resist these strategies by carrying out their own agenda. It discusses children’s individual attempts toward resistance as well as the manner in which group dynamics contribute to opposition of teachers’ rules through engagement with popular culture.

In an ethnographic tradition, I spent seven months as a participant observer in three preschool classrooms. I also conducted formal and informal interviews with children participating in the study. I interviewed the teachers and directors and held focus groups with parents in each preschool community.

Data were collected in field notebooks, and interviews and focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed. Children in all three settings were well aware of rules limiting or banning popular culture, as represented by interviews with children in which they recognized interacting with popular culture as “against the rules.” Contextualized by factors such as the intersectionality of social class and ideology, preschools had very different perspectives on the appropriateness of popular culture. This point is raised because the “taboo” or prohibited subject matter was typically that which was approached in a clandestine factor. This speaks to nuanced cultural interpretations of and engagement with popular culture as well as to how savvy the children were in each culture to detect specific perspectives of teachers. Children engaged in singular acts of resistance; additionally, there were a few instances in which children collectively engaged in what Schultz (2005) describes as “coordinated group actions” (p. 13).

Author

• Allison Sterling Henward, University of Hawaii at Manoa