Angel Chiang is a Literature teacher at Serangoon Garden Secondary School. She is part of the school’s LitUp Programme, which was shortlisted as a finalist project for the Innergy (Schools) Awards 2015. She has been teaching for 4 years, and strongly believes that Literature is God’s tool to voice those thoughts that cannot speak for themselves. This article is based on her presentation “A Popular Culture Approach in Teaching Literature Classics” at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference 2015.

Classroom Perspectives

issue 53 jun 2015

Learning Literature with Popular Culture

Popular culture permeates so much of a youth’s life – except, it seems, when they are in their classrooms. How can teachers take advantage of students’ interest and knowledge in pop culture to help them learn Literature better?

What does a music video of pop-rock band OneRepublic have to do with the modern classic novel Lord of the Flies? Thematically, everything!

In fact, step into Ms Angel Chiang’s Literature class and she’ll show you how movies excerpts from The Dark Knight, lyrics from Lady Gaga songs and even product advertisements can be linked to the Literature text.

Angel Chiang is passionate about Literature and uses popular culture to spark her students’ interest in the classroom.

Understanding Students’ Needs

When Angel first joined Serangoon Garden Secondary School (SGS), Literature was not taught as an O-Level subject. With the help of fellow literature-loving teachers, she sought to change that.

Now, they have 43 students taking the subject.

Angel and her colleagues came up with strategies to prove that they can teach Literature in a way that engages students and sustains their interest.

She noted that if students saw Literature as an academic subject in school and not a discipline, they would feel detached and stressed. “It’s a new subject in the school so students have no seniors to fall back on, no past-year papers, and nobody to give them advice except their teachers,” she says.

The students were also unable to relate to some of the themes in the set text. Lord of the Flies is largely influenced by author William Golding’s experiences in World War II and deals with abstract concepts, such as original sin and morality. Unlike the author, who lived through the period, the students lacked the contextual knowledge to comprehend it.

That was when Angel and her team decided to use the popular culture approach for their lessons.

Providing Cultural Accessibility

Popular culture is shaped by people’s choices, and students come into contact with it via entertainment, sports, brands, beliefs and forms of expressions.

Hence, Angel believes infusing it into Literature lessons can capture students’ attention and provide them the cultural accessibility to understand the text.

“For example, we start off by covering literary devices,” shares Angel. “I’ll show the class a music video or a movie excerpt, and we discuss how colour, light, imagery and diction are used to convey thoughts.”

“Then, I prompt them with questions: How does light make a difference to products of popular culture? How does the choice of lyrics in a song make a difference in its meaning? Afterwards, I relate it back to the text and ask, how can this be used to explain the themes in Lord of the Flies?”

Through this approach, students realize that Literature is not merely a subject in school but can be connected to real-world issues. If they need help understanding the context in which the Literature text is written, they know to situate it in the context of the world around them.

Associating their favourite form of entertainment with their Literature text also helps them to view the subject in a more positive light.

Understand–Apply–Analyse

Using the popular culture approach, teachers hope that students can better communicate their thoughts by understanding, applying and analysing.

Literature teacher Ms Angel Chiang from Serangoon Garden Secondary School explains, “This understand–apply–analyse scaffold gets the students to pick out what is relevant from what they’ve seen, critically analyse it, and then explain and express themselves more coherently.”

Using rock band OneRepublic’s Something I Need music video, she illustrates how it works.

Is the dog really just a dog? Angel posed this question to her class and they had to figure out the symbolism. They agreed that the dog represented the man’s fears and insecurities. Here, she prompted them to explore this theme in depth: Did the man try to resolve his problems with the dog? No, he did not try to fight back – instead, he tried to run away every time the dog appeared.

That suggested that if you try to escape from your fears every single time instead of facing them, you will never get past it. Did the dog give up even after the man died? No – Fear haunted him and even seized him out of the casket. Only after one overcomes his own fears, can one be at rest and find peace, as the man did at the end of the video.

This exercise helped the students understand the theme of fear and recognize its symbolism. So how do they apply this to their Lord of the Flies text to understand its themes better? It is as simple as asking them: “If Fear is represented by a dog in this music video, how is Fear represented in the novel?”

Fear and how the characters deal with it differently is a central theme in the text. The quote “Maybe there’s a beast…maybe it’s only us” rings true for the man in the Something I Need music video – there was no external enemy stopping him from getting the girl, just his own crippling insecurities.

Moreover, the dog attacked the man in the video, after which he found out it had rabies, and then he was attacked again and died. Fear is blown up when one does not have complete understanding about a situation. To parallel it, in the text, the characters struggle with Fear of the Unknown, which is amplified when they imagined a beast on the island with them, and started to claim they could see it.

Angel notes that in these discussions, the students were more engaged and produced insightful comments. They were able to draw patterns between the chapters in the text itself as well, which led to the teachers approaching the novel via a thematic approach rather than the traditional approach of reading chapter by chapter.

Becoming 21st Century Learners

When her pioneer batch of Literature students received their O-Level results, both Angel and the students were proud that they did really well despite being SGS’s first Literature students in over 15 years.

But as significant as their results are, Angel found it just as important that her students are equipped with social and emotional competencies needed in the 21st century.

With the popular culture approach in Literature, she hopes students can become self- directed learners. This is especially important because, while it is ideal, it is difficult for a teacher to help every single student in the class.

“We want the students to know it is possible to learn Literature not just by reading, writing or polishing their techniques of analysing and interpreting during lessons,” says Angel.

“We want to equip them with some skills so that they can be independent learners. If they can question, reflect and persevere by themselves, it means they have taken ownership of their learning.”