This article presents findings from an inquiry at the nexus of three areas of adult education scholarship: critical pedagogy, university-based professional education, and popular culture. I am investigating how the incorporation of popular culture into professional education can foster students' engagement with theory and thorny issues. Such…

This article supports the thesis that popular art can be a source of learning for adults. Questions are framed in the context of the trend for public pedagogy and the andragogical concepts of learning put forward by Jack Mezirow and Knud Illeris. To illustrate the problem, selected popular culture texts from the field of movies, street art, and TV…

This chapter provides an overview and critique of the mindfulness and meditation literature in popular culture, adult education and health care, and provides discussion based on both experience and the literature for teaching and learning for well-being.

This article is an autoethnographic vignette of a schizoaffective sufferer learning about 'saneness' from slasher films. In this paper, theories from popular culture as pedagogy, Mad Studies, and cultivation theory, are used to confirm that saneness in motion pictures (specifically slasher films) can be conceptualized as a site of critical…

Since the 1960's, the transformative power of protest music has been shrouded in mythology. Sown by musical activists like Pete Seeger, who declared that protest music could "help to save the planet", the seeds of this myth have since taken deep root in the popular imagination. While the mythology surrounding the relationship between…

As one of the public pedagogical sites, Television (TV) has been studied from different perspectives. The purpose of this study is to discuss how TV serves as a habitat for learning in the ecological learning system. The author argues that TV as a habitat provides an exciting, entertaining, dramatic, and social environment which stimulates…

This article focuses on the intersection of three areas of Peter Jarvis's work that have profoundly influenced the field of adult education generally and the authors own research trajectories, in particular: (a) learning from everyday life and in social context, (b) incidental and tacit learning in consumer societies in a globalised world (i.e.…

Using the medical drama Grey's Anatomy as an exemplar, this article discusses findings from a qualitative case study exploring impacts of popular (or pop) culture on Canadian audience members' understanding of social issues, particularly health care policy. Adopting a neo-Gramscian perspective, our fundamental premise is that pop culture operates…

Self-help literature has become an important domain of adult learning in North America. Self-help books offer readers advice on how to take charge of their lives and achieve goals such as prosperity, love, happiness, wellness, and self-actualization. Despite the popularity of self-help books, there has been little research about them from scholars…

In this article, the author outlines an analysis of the American show "Grey's Anatomy" as an example of how popular culture represents identity and the process of professional identity construction in a medical workplace, particularly the surgical service of a large urban hospital. In discussing identity, she connects professional identity to…

Too often, educators, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of adult education and human resource development rely on traditional curricular materials and an academic body of knowledge for teaching, evaluating, and training adults. This assumes a coherent body of prior knowledge, assumptions, worldviews, and experiences in their students…

This article discusses initial findings from a study exploring the pedagogical functions of popular culture. The study was framed by a neo-Gramscian theoretical framework which connects adult education and cultural studies, and asserts that culture underpins important informal adult learning. We used two television shows, "Grey's…

In light of the many social, medical, and political viewpoints on obesity, little is known of the weight loss maintenance experience and the impact on learning processes and outcomes among adults. The purpose of this study was two-fold: a) to explore the experience and meaning-making processes of individuals who have maintained a weight loss and…

This chapter critically examines six political television narratives: The Weather Channel, The Fox News Channel, "24," "The Rachel Maddow Show," "The Daily Show," and "Torchwood." The implications of those television narratives, their impact on adult learners, and suggestions for classroom practice are discussed.

This article queries how one type of human difference--alterity, the experience of multiple distinct consciousnesses, or "alters," by one person--is pathologized in American culture. This experience is inscribed as a mental illness, labeled now as dissociative identity disorder (DID) and formerly known as multiple personality disorder (MPD). In…