Pop culture in education

Philosophy tends to be associated with dense books, abstract theories, and scholars in their armchairs lost in thought. And while philosophy does demand intellectual rigour at times, an often-overlooked tool in the philosophy teacher’s toolkit is that of pop culture. In this post, I want to share an experience of mine where the use of pop culture in one of my lessons helped to make a difficult concept more accessible and enjoyable for the students, with the hope that other teachers can find inspiration for their own lessons as well.

Last year was my first year as PTA, and I was assigned the Introduction to Philosophical Analysis module. One of the weeks covered Richard Rorty’s anti-representationalism. The basic idea of anti-representationalism is that the purpose of philosophy is not to mirror the world, but to foster an ongoing conversation with new and different perspectives. As useful as some may find this philosophy, it’s quite dense and difficult for students to connect with on a more personal and practical level. So, when it came time to plan the lesson, I needed to find a way to make it more engaging.

I decided to draw on pop culture for a class activity that was both relevant to the topic and much more connected to the students’ own experience. After I’d recapped the basic concept of anti-representationalism from the lecture, I showed the students two different pieces of media.

First, I played the scene from The Matrix where (spoilers) Neo first wakes up in the real world. He realizes in that moment that his whole life had been an illusion, a simulation crafted by the machines. Not only does the film make for engaging viewing (how can one not enjoy The Matrix?), but using different forms of media can break up the usual back-and-forth of the seminar and introduce a new element which requires the use of different skills. Second, I pulled up and read a short excerpt from Descartes’ Meditations, the classic text that all philosophy students are familiar (and usually frustrated) with. The excerpt covered Descartes’ thought experiment about whether an evil demon could be deceiving him about all that be believed to be true, from the reports of his senses to even the logic of mathematics.

Both pieces of media make the same basic point: what if our current reality is an illusion? But both of them go about it in an entirely different way. One is a sci-fi action film with martial arts and evil machines, and the other was a work of philosophy with disappointingly few explosions. I asked the students to vote on which portrayal was more effective at putting across the point, and then a debate ensued picking apart the relative merits of the two pieces of media which took us all the way to the end of the lesson.

The debate was incredibly fun, and allowed students to draw on their pop culture knowledge in a setting where it would usually not be solicited, and tie it to their philosophical understanding. And, crucially, it is exactly the kind of conversation that anti-representationalism has in mind as the purpose of philosophy!

So, what was the point of this exercise? A comparison between The Matrix and Meditations is obviously an un-serious example to use in the context of anti-representationalism. But the use of popular media allowed me to convey a rather difficult philosophy in a way that was relatable and even fun. The students were doing anti-representationalism before some of them had even understood it fully. And, importantly, the whole class was engaged and actively participating in the debate because of the pop culture reference point they had in common. What at first was a dense and inaccessible philosophy became an activity in which the whole class could partake.

And it must have worked, because there was a surprising amount of essays on the topic of anti-representationalism at the end of the term!

I firmly believe that philosophy doesn’t have to be purely serious and academic to be meaningful and have an impact on students. Philosophy is often seen as unapproachable, but through the use of pop culture, humour, and silly comparisons, teachers can foster a learning environment that’s both rigorous and approachable, and students can be invited into a space where they can explore ideas in a low-stakes environment without the fear of getting it wrong. The classroom can be transformed into a space where students don’t just study philosophy, they experience it. And that’s the best kind of learning there is.

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