Release the Dragon: The role of popular culture in children's stories

Abstract

Young learners come to the school environment with myriad literacy experiences, some of which are inevitably based in popular culture. While literacy knowledge drawn from experiences with popular culture has traditionally been viewed as less important than academic literacy, educators wishing to create classrooms that value all children need to shift views of what contributes to student learning. Inclusion of popular culture in the school environment provides a space for extending the possibility of building upon and increasing children's understandings of these cultural resources. Through an in-depth exploration of a first-grade student's use of popular cultural items in a classroombased storytelling project, this research illuminates how experiences with popular culture can become an imaginative and cognitive endeavor that impacts literacy learning.