ABSTRACT
With the remarkable development of faster and more accessible ways of communicating, trends and the "what's hot" for the moment seem to change even more quickly than before, and "updating" and "upgrading" have become part of our daily vocabulary. Staying current, in fact, is one of the most difficult tasks for teachers interested in incorporating popular culture texts in their instructional repertoire. For the sake of better serving students' needs, however, it has become necessary to take on this difficult task. Carmen Luke (1997) has argued "that if schooling refuses to deal with the texts of everyday life— which include media and school texts—then educators will indeed widen, not bridge, the experiential and knowledge gap between both teacher and student" (p. 47). Closing the classroom door on popular culture only causes it to go underground, according to Lewis (1998). It is better, then, that as educators we learn how to engage with students in examining some of the issues underlying media literacy in an age of popular culture.
