Valuable Resources for Youth and Popular Culture Studies

In order to first engage with youths using popular culture... One must first know what popular culture they enjoy. Keep up to date on the latest trends, fads and pop culture by viewing these resources.


Transformative Works and Cultures
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc

This is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived; articles about media studies; and articles about the fan community.

A particular issue on Participatory Culture was valuable for the critical essay, however this (free) journal is great resource related to youth, popular culture and the new age of social media/online fan communities.

Anime News Network

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com

Find all the news relevant to anime and manga here, always available and always current.

The Beat

http://www.comicsbeat.com/

Another resource for what's popular and new in comics and graphic novels

DeviantART

http://www.deviantart.com

Here you can find out what is trending in the online fandom world of art. Could be the foundation for some creative ideas.

SpriteStitch

http://www.spritestitch.com

A place to find video game inspired projects... You could spend days looking through this site...

Valuable Resources for Librarians

This resource page is dedicated to both school and public librarians working with young people. These resources will help give you more ideas, resources and research into engaging with a young audience in your library.

Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)
http://www.ala.org/yalsa/
Twitter: @yalsa

A division of the American Library Association (ALA), YALSA focuses on youth and related services. They aim to build on the capacity of libraries and librarians to engage, serve and empower teens. Great place to find ideas or resources.

No Flying, No Tights
http://noflyingnotights.com/

Website for librarians who are interesting in creating and maintaining a graphic novel collection. Provides reviews, advice and more resources for librarians

The Daring Librarian
http://www.thedaringlibrarian.com/

Gwyneth Jones' blog was one of the finalists for Best Librarian's Blog in 2011 at the EduBlog Awards. A worthwhile blog on keeping up to date with current trends. Great place to come for ideas and insight.

GreenBeanTeenQueen
http://www.greenbeanteenqueen.com/

'A children's, tween and teen librarian's thoughts on books, readings and adventures in the library'. This is a great blog to visit for ideas on library programs and services aimed at young people as well as book reviews and book lists.

TLT: Teen Librarian's Toolbox
http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/

This is a fantastic resource dedicated to helping librarians 'short on time, short on money BUT NOT short on passion'. Working with VOYA magazine, TLT aims to bring almost everything to the teen librarian: books reviews, book lists, teen services, 'Things we didn't learn in Library School', Reluctant Readers, TrendWatch, TechTalk, Advocacy & Marketing. I really like this site, I could get lost in here reading all their articles.

aliaCYSS Mailing List
http://lists.alia.org.au/mailman/listinfo/aliacyss_lists.alia.org.au

Australian e-list for children's and youth services in libraries. Here you can keep in contact and engage with other children and youth librarians for ideas, support and suggestions.

Week 13: Profile of a Young Peoples Librarian

This blog entry I am going to talk about a real world example of using popular culture to engage with youth. This example is a Young Peoples Librarian… who also happens to be my mum.

My mum is a former high school English teacher, who decide on a career change when I was in high school (yes, there could potentially be a link here but it’s not relevant). Upon her completion of her university graduate diploma (from QUT no less), she applied for the role of Young Peoples Librarian.

That was awhile ago now, and since then, the YPS section has undergone some changes and the services they provide are some of the most popular activities within the library. A short while ago, a position was created for a Young Adult Librarian to focus on the YA collection and users of the library.

Some of their most regular and popular services include:

Baby Bounce: for mums and bubs under the age of 18 months, sit along and sing along to rhymes and songs.

Storytime: For the youngens aged 2-5. They sing, they dance, they read books.

School holiday activities: To help keep those pesky primary school kids entertained over their ridiculously long holiday periods.

MakerSpaces: I still don’t understand what they do, but they have a 3D printer called ‘Dave’ and last week they were making little houses which would light up when it gets dark. @yalsa was retweeting about this concept only this morning. (See my resource page for librarians)

Friday Frodos: Friday afternoon activities for teens aged 12-18. I recall a manga drawing class and a knitting class. Quite varied options obviously.

I asked my mum one afternoon - ‘how do you use popular culture to engage with your children and youth population?’. Her response was a sigh as she struggled to think of an answer. I admit, I probably didn’t choose the best time to ask her such a question without any preamble and we had a friend visiting from the UK. The champagne was a welcome distraction for all involved.

I still haven’t given her any preamble or questions so that she can mull it over and she has given me permission to write this profile on her. After going over her role and services, I made a startlingly obvious conclusion:

All of these activities involve popular culture.

In the Storytime sessions she dances and sings to the Wiggles (Point Your Fingers and Do the Twist is a favourite of mine) as well as reading a variety of books, both old and new and different themes each week.

Baby Bounce has nursery rhymes and songs that we all would have heard when we were younger. That’s got to be a form of popular culture if all of us can remember those rhymes and songs right?

School holiday activities are the same; they use popular current ideas to create activities for the kids.

For the older teens, the Friday Frodos create movie nights with pizza and dress up (a Twilight night was a huge success years ago), manga drawing lessons. These sessions are aimed at using popular culture or “the cool stuff” to get the kids involved.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how much popular culture they use, even if they don’t call it ‘popular culture’. What we are exploring here, they are already doing, and with great results.

So there may be those who harbour the view of libraries being out of touch with the real world; but really, they've been doing this stuff for longer than we've been alive.44

(Estepp, 2012)

Your local YPS Librarian or school librarian is probably the greatest resource when it comes to engaging youth through popular culture because they are already doing it. And I mean, they’re librarians – if they don’t know it, they can find it.

Mum & I, so cool we take #selfies (personal image)

Written with much appreciation to my mum for being a thoroughly fantastic resource and role model.

IMAGES

Estepp, J. (2012, August 16). Storytime Favourites [Image]. Retrieved October 23, 2013, from http://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/so-you-want-to-be-childrens-librarian.html

Week 12: Gateway Books

In this blog entry, I would like to talk about controversial books and authors for children or young people. As you can see in one of my earlier posts, I’m really passionate about encouraging kids to read and one of the questions I found myself asking was whether it was okay to encourage kids to read books which may not be any good quality.

Courtesy Google Images (Ferguson, 2011)

Take for example the Twilight series. The main character, Bella Swan, is not a role model that I would like any young girls or women to be reading and aspiring to. In fact, she’s practically the opposite of what my mum has encouraged me to be – a strong, independent woman with the ability to do whatever I want (within reason obviously) and especially, to have a career, travel and a life of my own before shacking up with some sparkly dude. In fact, I see a lot wrong with just about every character in Twilight, and personally, I think the entire series was written so that Stephenie Meyer could have some Mormon approved soft porn to wank to. No Fifty Shades of Grey for her!

Courtesy Google Images (Unknown, 2012)

I apologise, I’m deviating by being a deviant and rude! One thing that I can’t refuse is that Twilight, however bad I rate it, did encourage a huge range of young girls to read the books. It may have even turned that whole “reading is not cool” crap around at high schools. May have, I make no illusions to knowing anything except when I worked at a school we had to continuously buy more copies of Twilight for the kids to read because they kept reserving it in droves!

I’m now going to make a really bad and inappropriate analogy here. In my mind, Twilight is like marijuana, it’s the gateway drug which will let to the hard stuff, the Literature and books with decent messages (like Harry Potter – friendship and love all the way!). So, by encouraging and allowing young girls to read Twilight, as librarians we then have the opportunity to do two things: encourage critical reading and the option to expand their current reading list.

By engaging in casual discussions about Twilight, we could be surprised at how well the kids have realised how little of a role model Bella is (which is actually what happened to me, I do have hope for the future!) and also to encourage them to questions stories and books and to make them critically reflect on what they have just read.

Courtesy Google Images (MemeBucket, n.d)

From there, we could say – ‘why don’t you try reading this novel which is about this strong, young woman who overcomes great adversity to triumph’ (for some reason all I can think of is Jane Eyre right now). But the option is there, once they get past that first bump of ‘reading isn’t cool, it’s so boring’, we can use this to our advantage and engage with them and hopefully, get them reading more.

I would like to note that young boys will most likely definitely not be interested in reading Twilight, but maybe motorbike magazines, science fiction, horror novels or non-fiction books. As librarians for young people, we need to be talking about what they like and reading it to engage with them. We have great responsibility on our shoulders.

IMAGES

Ferguson, S. (2011, November 16). Twilight book series [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.badhaven.com/books/book-features/books-vs-films-a-twilight-retrospective/

MemeBucket. (n.d). What if Twilight was written [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.memebucket.com/what-if-twilight-was-written/

Unknown. (2012). LOTR vs Harry Potter vs Twilight [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013 , from http://funny-pictures-blog.com/2011/11/21/lotr-vs-harry-potter-vs-twilight/

Week 11: Interview with a Young Person

As I do not have any young people to interview personally apart from a 2 year old girl obsessed with the Wiggles. As I am a bit over conversations about Emma the Yellow Wiggle, I instead asked a friend of mine to give the questionnaire to her twin daughters who are in year 6.

I found that they both like to read action and adventure books. Out of the four books they mentioned, only two were familiar to me: Hunger Games Catching Fire and Skulduggery Pleasant. The other two were The Golden Door by Emily Rodda (The Three Door series) and The Diamond Brothers: The Falcons Malteaser by Anthony Horowitz. Already there is a reference to a famous crime novel/film The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

When I asked LV whether popular culture influence her or made her smarter she replied: it doesn't really impact me in anyway to be honest i think something's impact the way we learn but i don't think all the things today help, sure they make life easier but that means that we're not really challenging ourselves to do stuff, somethings today confuse our brains to do stuff like how adds make us believe in a simple product.

In describing her favourite book, Skulduggery Pleasant, she mentioned that the ‘noun groups and vocabulary is very strong’. In this case it would appear that the popular culture in the form of the book is actually making her smarter by reinforcing noun groups and vocabulary which is great.

I won’t tell her this as personally, I think sometimes it’s best to leave popular culture as an “enjoyable” part of life, not an “educational” part. When I studied popular culture it actually first made me hate it/myself as every time I would watch something I would be analysing the social and cultural background and see how it was portraying the contemporary time. It took me awhile to be able to simply enjoy movies again.

Some things in life don’t need critical thinking/analysis all the time and sometimes learning can be done unconsciously. I do think encouraging children to critically engage with books and movies is important, but don’t take away from them the right to just simply vege out and enjoy something that might not be incredibly wholesome or education (especially when they’ve been at school all day!). I enjoyed books as they took me away from my world (and still do), asking me to critically engage that world with the real world probably would have made things depressing as it would have ruined the escape it offered me.

I would love to have sat down with SV & LV to do this interview in person, but unfortunately when it’s a single parent family, time isn’t a very accessible resource when their mother works full time and doesn’t live close. However, I still think they have provided me with some food for thought on popular culture and young people.

Questions:

What are you currently reading? Do you like it, why?

What’s your favourite book and why?

What are your favourite TV shows and movies at this time?

Why do you like them?

Are there any shows or movies that other young people are really liking which you hate? If yes, why don’t you like it?

If you could be any character you want, who would you choose?

Do you participate in any online communities where you discuss your thoughts on movies and shows?

Anything recommendations on shows or movies I should be watching?

Do any of these shows, movies or books influence you?

Do you think popular culture is making you smarter? Examples?

Week 10: Pinterest

So I was finally forced to join Pinterest for uni (I swear they must want me to fail!) and create a board showing what I thought was big with young people these days. Firstly I had to get past all the gardening pins which were absolutely amazing and I was so tempted to quit uni and become a professional green thumb... Before I remembered the only time I have had success in the garden is when my green thumb boyfriend does all the planting and sets up the water system. So that was a kick in the face...

Anyway, back to Pinterest and uni. As I am still waiting to hear what my lovely interviewees think of popular culture, I wasn't exactly sure what they are watching and I don't have many young people to ask. So I ended up guessing, and I will admit, my guesses were probably pretty stereotypical - One Direction, Hunger Games and J-Law, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

I apologise for this, I should probably be more active in knowing what is cool with young people so I can encourage them to read and get involved... But my personal restrictions (I ban myself from reading books during semester as otherwise uni gets very neglected) do get in the way. When I worked at a school library is was easy to keep up with things. Hopefully when this course is over I can catch up on all that I've missed (not the Twlight movies though, I was about for the hype of the first release, that'll do me just fine).

What do you think? Have I missed something crucial that young people are totally addicted to?!

Week 9: Reading for Life Starts Young

I am a huge believer in the importance of reading from a young age. Such a huge believer that I was buying books for my eldest nephew before he was born… He and his younger brother are always, without fail, always read at least one book each night before bed. They are nuts for it. My nephew recently turned four and he knows what he wants – two books and a song before bed. He has even worked out that by choosing books with lots of pages and words means more reading time before. Clever, but annoying. Some of those Thomas books are so repetitive! I can’t complain though, because this love for reading is only ever going to help my nephew in school and the real world.

Earlier this year I attended the Read for Life - Early Childhood Symposium hosted by the State Library of Queensland in Mackay (more info available http://www.plconnect.slq.qld.gov.au/news/2013-news/read-for-life-early-childhood-symposium). The guest speakers, Jay Laga’aia and Dr Susan Krieg, spoke on the importance for reading to children from a young age. One fact which really struck me was that a child should have read at least 10,000 books by the time they start school. For my nephews, no drama. For other kids, probably not so good.

However, it’s come to my attention that not all children are lucky like my nephew to be raised with a love of books. This is a shame, and even more shameful is that the general public don’t seem to realise on what these kids are missing out on. By not encouraging children to read from an early age, we’re contributing to the declining rates of literacy within Australia.

ABC News reported in 2010 that Australia was one of the only countries in which reading literacy levels have declined (McDonald, 2010). In this article, Geoff Masters, chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research, stated that it is mostly related to how highly education is valued within Australia (McDonald, 2010). One of Master’s main points was that there was a huge gap between low socio-economic groups and Indigenous groups with higher socio-economic groups. In the recent election a huge emphasis was placed on education reform.

Now that the election has finished and the new prime minister will be sworn in this afternoon, it will be interesting to see how he values education. One of statements on the ABC News website has spike my interest though. The Coalition in their view on education aim to ‘give school principals more control of their schools and parents more say in how schools are run, devolving responsibility from bureaucrats’ (ABC, 2013).

To me, this doesn’t seem to be the best way in close the gaps that Masters mentioned. By giving responsibility entirely to the school principals then it would all depend on that particular school and community. What happens when kids get lumped with a lazy principal who’s holding out to their retirement? Or if their community doesn’t value education? Or their local MP is a t*sser? There needs to be a balance between government and schools in order to provide the best for the children. As they always say - Children are the future!

So maybe take the time to sit down and read a book with a young child. It’s a rewarding and fun experience (for the kid too!)

Reference List

McDonald, T. (2010). Australian students’ literacy levels declining. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-12-08/australian-students-literacy-levels-declining/2366804

Lane, S. (2013). Education policy: where the parties stand. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/policy/education/