Nespor - Tangled Up In School Chapters 5-6

Thérèse Dugan

Tangled Up in School:
Politics, Space, Bodies, and Signs in the Educational Process
By Jan Nespor
Chapters 5-6

Citation:
Nespor, J. (1999) Tangled Up in School. Politics, Space, Bodies and Signs in the Educational Process. New jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Association.

Response/Main Points:
Chapter 5: Intersections of Kids, Signs, and Popular Culture. This chapter explored how children make meaning out of popular culture and how popular culture intersects with students’ everyday lives in and out of school. Building on the Chapter 4 ideas of how space and body affect children’s lives, Nespor explores how students’ immersion in the controlled spaces of their homes, where kids watch TV and play video games, has “some advantages over school culture” as it is “more widely disseminated and easily transportable… it ties more directly to kid’s core concerns, issues such as gender, sexuality, race, violence, and power” (p. 163), and all in a time and place where they control what is going on.

Furthermore, Nespor explores how pop culture is “open to appropriation and used by kids interacting with peers, while school based representations still often presume international systems containing both kids and adults” (p.164). As Nespor explains, kids spend a considerable amount of time (upwards of 4 hours a night) watching TV and playing video games, and this “culture” is something they can relate to and understand a lot more than the “forced” culture they are required to participate in at school.

Nespor points out several instances in which pop culture benefited students:

• They learn and inquire for themselves (for example: Felix and his video games (p.164));
• They become important members of society in relation to industry, politics, and economy (p.166);
• They become integral members of elite networks that disperse entertaining and valuable information, which in some cases only they can understand (p.169-70) and then teach to adults (p.171).
  

Furthermore, Nespor sheds light on how popular culture:

• Helps young people interact and forge friendships and commonalities with others, both in their immediate space and in the greater world (p. 172);
• Helps young people identify themselves and their interests even if they do not surface in the school culture (p.182);
• Reflects how more research into this subject is needed since the United States spends so much time immersed in pop culture (p. 174).
  

Next, Nespor explores the meaning of pop culture, which can be nearly anything that kids think it is. In one sense, pop culture consists of commodities or artifacts that students can consume, absorb, watch, listen to, buy, possess, or share with others. Nespor states that students do not just collect these commodities to help cement their place in the culture. They use the culture that surrounds the purchasing and owning of these artifacts (such as sports cards) to define their own identity. The extent of this identity is vast, transcending kids’ own schools, neighborhoods, and towns to include kids their age all over the country and the world who enjoy similar things.

Furthermore, kids invoke popular culture “to position themselves in local settings by connecting themselves to distant sites of practice” (p.180). Examples include references from the media (Duane’s imaginative story, which seemed like a plot from the popular movie Toy Soldiers (p.181), or the way in which students talked about Saved by the Bell or X-Men characters to explore their ideas about gender and sexuality (pp.186, 192), or even to tease or ridicule one another (p.188). By using these common images when interacting with one another, everyone seems to be on the same page in the kid culture.

However, as Nespor realized, it is a “kid” culture; when he inquires for more information from some of the students, he receives blank stares and the sarcastic reply, “Don’t you know anything?” Apparently, most kids think it’s unimaginable that not everyone in their lives knows about the things in which they are most interested. Perhaps if teachers and educators were more informed or at least in tune with what interests young people, they could connect with them on more meaningful levels and see that their public selves presented at school are only one small part of their personalities, identities, realities, and cultures.

Response/Main Points:
Chapter 6: Loose Ends. In this chapter Nespor explains his ideas for future research after completing his study. He states that what he has seen is only a sneak peak into the lives of his subjects at a certain time, and that those lives are constantly changing. However, as ethnographers we see tiny parts of subjects’ lives, and those parts are all we can try to interpret and respond to. He also explains that he does not want to bog us down with theory, although there are considerable connections to other sources and academic writing and theory throughout the book.

Below is a list of some of the future research Nespor hopes will come of his work. The questions with asterisks next to them are personal interests to my own work and the work I hope to continue to explore in the future:

• Pedagogy has been decontextualized and treated as a virtual system of classroom practice. Does this occur in other schools in different places?
• What are some connections between inter-and intraschool administrative and political structures?
• What are the chains of interpretation within which terms like whole language acquire meaning?
• How are teachers spatially related to the schools and communities in which they work?
• What might happen if parental involvement meant that teachers gearing their practice to parents space-time orientations?
• Do parents ever organize on a cross school basis?
• How do national, state, and regional political movements affect parental activism?
• What would educational research and theory look like if there were refocused on schooling as a long-term trajectory?
• How do schools get reputations?
• How does student mobility alter uses of media and pop culture, access to neighborhood, status in school?
• How do assessments and grades function as communication between school and community?
• How are kid focused funds of knowledge held together?
• How do kids in certain sociospatial locations gain and lose interest in particular cultural aspects?
• Do kids exchange, invoke, inhabit, or appropriate their school based representations they encounter in their academic work?
• **How do teachers understand students popular cultural uses?
• At what point do students stop using their parents as intermediaries for the acquisition of goods?
• **How do preadolescents use cultural products, and how do these uses fit into their network of friendship association?
• **How does popular culture appear in students interactions?
• **What would studies of students individual popular culture interests look like?
• ** How do the functions of cross-gendered association of desire change as kids more through grades? How are these related to media portrayals, constructions of masculinity and femininity, gender relationships among adult at the school?
• How do meanings of fighting change as students progress through school?
• What does it mean to become embedded in a neighborhood?
• How does a child’s movement through a city and neighborhood change over time?
• What happens in school business partnerships?
• What can be made of long term systemic relations between university programs and school practices?
• Note: I used asterisks (**) to mark my personal interests.
  

Key Concepts/Ideas/Terminology:
Popular Culture: (or pop culture) can be deemed as what is popular within the social context - that of which is most strongly represented by what is perceived to be popularly accepted among society. Otherwise, popular culture is also suggested to be the widespread cultural elements in any given society that are perpetuated through that society's vernacular language or lingua franca. It comprises the daily interactions, needs and desires and cultural 'moments' that make up the everyday lives of the mainstream. It can include any number of practices, including those pertaining to cooking, clothing, consumption, mass media and the many facets of entertainment such as sports and literature. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture)

“School occupies about 6 hours a day, 180 days a year for most U.S. kid, but on average they spend 4 hours a day everyday watching television and more hours playing games with, reading, or shopping for artifacts of popular culture” (p.164).

“The intensity of engagements with popular culture were certainly greater than with school based activities” ( p.164).

New World Teen Study: Conducted from January through March 1993 among 6,547 high school students, ages 15 to 18, in 26 countries. "The D.M.B.& B. New World Teen Study" was undertaken by the agency's worldwide research and strategic planning group with a goal of quantifying teen-agers' cultural attitudes -- and, not surprisingly, their consumer behavior as well. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E0D81E38F930A15751C1A962958260)

Pop Culture References Mentioned:
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: is an American live-action television series, created for the American market, based on the sixteenth installment of the Japanese Super Sentai franchise, Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger. The show and its related merchandise both saw unbridled overnight success, catapulting into pop culture in mere months. Under the original name Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the series ran from 1993 to 1996 and spawned a feature film, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_Morphin_Power_Rangers)

Nintendo: is a Japanese multinational corporation founded on September 23, 1889 in Kyoto, Japan by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda cards. Over the years, it became a video game company, growing into one of the most powerful in the industry and Japan's third most valuable listed company with a market value of more than $85 billion. Nintendo has the distinction of historically being both the oldest intact company in the video game console market and one of the largest and well-known console manufacturers, as well as being the dominant entity in the handheld console market.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo)

Saved by the Bell: is an American sitcom that originally aired between 1989 and 1993. The series is a retooled version of the 1988 series Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which later became into the history of Saved by the Bell. The series follows the exploits of several students at Bayside High School, along with their principal. The show stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Dustin Diamond, Lark Voorhies, and Dennis Haskins, who appeared in Good Morning, Miss Bliss, as well as Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley, and Mario Lopez who joined the cast for Saved by the Bell. The show brought fame to the cast members and launched most of their careers. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saved_by_the_bell)

X-Men: is a fictional Marvel Comics superhero team. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, they debuted in The X-Men #1, published in September 1963. The X-Men are fictitious mutants who, as a result of a sudden leap in evolution, are born with latent superhuman abilities, which generally manifest themselves at puberty. In the stories, many ordinary humans harbor an intense fear and/or distrust of mutants (often referred to as Homo sapiens superior), who are regarded by a number of scientists as the next step in human evolution and are thus widely viewed as a threat to human civilizations; mutants who use their powers for criminal ends exacerbate the tensions. The X-Men were formed by the benevolent Professor Charles Xavier, (a.k.a. Professor X), a wealthy mutant who founded an academy to train young mutants to protect themselves and the world from Magneto, the Brotherhood of Mutants and other mutant threats. The X-Men comic book series was one of comicom’s earliest and most influential trendsetters in adopting a multicultural central cast; during the 1970s, the roster was diversified, adding characters from Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, and the Soviet Union. Characters representing many other ethnicities and cultural backgrounds have subsequently been added. The stories themselves have often included themes relating to the status of minorities, including assimilation, tolerance, and beliefs regarding a "superior race". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_men)

Toy Soldiers: is a 1991 film about a group of trouble-making boys who were sent by their high class parents to a boarding school. One day their boarding school is taken over by terrorists and the boys decide to resist them.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103112/)

Links to other Class Readings:
There is quite a contrast between Nespor’s Chapters 5 and 6 and the Sarangapani reading, which was also a school ethnography. While Sarangapani seemed to leave out some major aspects of students’ popular and political culture, Nespor includes a lot of context about the lives of the students. From their own construction of their social world through pop culture to the politics and culture of the school and related community, Nespor offers a better understanding of where these students are from and how they are making sense and meaning of their world.

I found this extra context essential for my understanding of the content. Perhaps this is why I had trouble relating to or connecting with some of the information given in the Sarangapani article without the added contextual layer provided by Annan in class.

Class Discussion Questions:

1. How do you see popular culture influence your academic life?
2. Do you think academia embraces influences from popular culture?
3. What do you think teachers should know about the elements of popular culture that their students care about?
4. Would students relate more to formal learning environments if it included more popular culture references?
5. How do you think the media and popular culture are affecting how young people’s self identities? Is this process hampering their individuality?
6. How do you think today’s life of a young person is the same or different from your own experience growing up? How do popular culture, space, and time constraints play in?
   

Additional Reading:

Andy Hargreaves (1998). Book Review: Tangled up in School: Politics, Space, Bodies and Signs in the Educational Process by Jan Nespor. American Journal of Education, 107, 1, pp. 50-56.