Lecture: “Pop Culture and Curriculum, Assemble! On Being Otherwise Sin Querer Queriendo”

About the presentation: Drawing from work produced over the last decade, this presentation delves into Pop Culture as curriculum, that is, as a site of complex, contradictory, affectively laden teaching and learning. As we explore schooling scenes in El Chavo del Ocho, anti-heroic narratives in El Chapulín Colorado, and ideas about the posthuman in Watchmen and The Good Place, our understanding about what counts as a good education, who gets to “save the day”, and what an education outside of learning can feel like, begin to shift. We don’t merely consume pop culture, nor are we consumed by it. In our dynamic engagements with what is presented to us, we become something else: an assemblage of images, imaginations, cultural practices, bodies, and wills to power in constant flow. Is there something specifically Latin American in that assemblage? What would it mean to take that dynamic assemblage seriously, when thinking about schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy?

About the presenter: Nave Visiting Scholar, Dani Friedrich, is an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Director of the Doctoral Program in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. A former primary school teacher in Argentina, Prof. Friedrich has published extensively in the fields of Curriculum Studies, Teacher Education, and Comparative and International Education. His first book, Democratic Education as a Curricular Problem, was published by Routledge in 2014, and his co-edited volume, Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Society was published by Bloomsbury Academic in English and by CLACSO in Spanish. His latest co-edited volume, Pop Culture and Curriculum, Assemble! Exploring the limits of curricular humanism through pop culture was recently published by DIO Press. . Prof. Friedrich is utterly unable to stop reading comics and watching silly TV. Twitter: @ProfFriedrich