Educational practices and entertainment: mapping the use of pop culture as teaching material in Higher Education

Abstract

This article was driven by the following question: What is the potential for using contemporary pop culture products, as part of school education, as complementary teaching material? Its main goal is to answer whether contemporary pop culture products are perceived as valid when it comes to school education, more specifically in Higher Education, and whether they are actually being used by professors. In order to achieve this goal, a survey was conducted at a communitarian university in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, thus mapping the use of pop culture products in classes taught in Higher Education, to identify patterns and potentials for this kind of material. Prominent findings included the fact that faculty members seem to widely validate pop culture as a resource to be explored in class, with cinema being the most used media. Although this kind of practice is more concentrated in the Humanities, it is considerably disseminated in other fields of knowledge as well.