Teaching in the Pop Culture Zone: Using Popular Culture in the Composition Classroom

This professional development guide offers insights and strategies about using pop culture in the first year writing classroom. The edited volume includes essays by instructors who share details of their most effective class ideas and writing assignments. It is a resource for new teachers and for those interested in incorporating popular culture into their writing courses.

Trixie G. Smith is Director of The Writing Center and a member of the faculty in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. After earning a BA in English and Elementary Education from Mobile College, she spent several years teaching middle and high school students in southern Alabama. She then received an MA in English, an MLIS in Library and Information Science, and a Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of South Carolina, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. Her teaching and research revolve around writing center theory and practice, writing across the curriculum, writing pedagogy, and teacher training. These areas often intersect with her interests in pop culture, service learning, gender studies, and activism. Recent and upcoming publications include a book chapter in (E)merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center, several articles in Southern Discourse, and COMPbiblio: Leaders and Influences in Composition Theory and Practice, a reference book focusing on the career arcs of leaders in composition studies; she is also one of the series editors for the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development. She is the co-author of THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE. She is an active participant in the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on Composition and Communication, the Research Network Forum, the National Writing Project, and the International Writing Center Association.

Allison D. Smith is professor of English and Coordinator of Graduate Teaching Assistants at Middle Tennessee State University. She received a BA in Teaching Language and Composition and an MA in Applied Linguistics from California State University, Long Beach and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education from The University of Illinois, Urbana�Champaign. Her primary teaching and research areas include writing pedagogy, writing about pop culture, writing assessment, discourse analysis, and pedagogical grammar. Recent publications include a book chapter in More Ways to Handle the Paper Load, an article on journal writing for the English Leadership Quarterly, and COMPbiblio: Leaders and Influences in Composition Theory and Practice, a book focusing on the career arcs of leaders in composition. In addition, she is one of the series editors for the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development. She is the co-author of THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE (Cengage/Wadsworth, 2009). She is an active participant in the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on Composition and Communication, and the Research Network Forum.

Rebecca Bobbitt is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) with a concentration in popular culture and composition. She earned an MA from Murray State University and a BA from the University of Tennessee at Martin. She is the author of the Instructor's Manual for THE POP CULTURE ZONE (authored by Allison D. Smith, Trixie G. Smith, and Stacia Watkins), and she has a chapter on Patricia Bizzell in COMPbiblio: Leaders and Influences in Composition Theory and Practice (edited by Smith, Smith, and Karen Wright). Her pop culture obsessions include Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, not the movie), Supernatural, horror movies of varying quality, and online fandom. She is currently finishing her dissertation on Buffy and fairy tales.