This teaching guide reflects the belief that popular music is an effective tool for teachers to use in presenting social studies lessons to students. Titles of songs representative of popular music from 1955 to 1982 are listed by subject matter and suggest a possible lesson to be used in teaching that particular issue. Subject areas listed…

In order to determine some of the effects of children's television, a study investigated the communicative response repertoire of primary female characters in Saturday morning children's cartoons as perceived by children. Those perceptions were then compared with those of the researchers, formulated through previous studies, showing a relationship…

This paper begins by discussing the difference between genre and gender, defining the former as the study of a systemic totality, and the latter as the split in the totality, reversal, upturning, and break-up of any systemic logic. Also discussed are (1) the difference between nature and culture, and the quarrel between essentialist and…

The 1987 NFL players' strike provided an opportunity to evaluate the importance of media gratification and viewing involvement in the development of audience reactions to a major sports labor conflict that produced gratification denial. Two groups of viewers of professional football--183 adult males in the Memphis, Tennessee area, interviewed by…

To illustrate the relevance of critical communication history and theory to media ethics, this paper examines a crucial episode in the history of public relations: the American electrical industry's cooperative advertising and public relations efforts in the 1920s to sell the "electrical idea" to consumers. The paper first enumerates…

To identify the descriptors most frequently associated with four popular television talk show hosts and to isolate the fundamental dimensions of the images of those talk show hosts, a study surveyed 209 students from Memphis State University and the University of Arkansas (Little Rock) about their impressions of Johnny Carson, David Letterman,…

To examine the rhetorical vision of nuclear war presented in the television show "The Day After," it is necessary to consider (1) the motives of those involved in producing the film, (2) the debate over the film that preceded its presentation, (3) the effect of the film's message, and (4) how the film's rhetorical structure contributed…

Music videos, with their characteristic visual energy and frenetic music-and-dance numbers, have caught on rapidly since their introduction in 1981, bringing prosperity to a slumping record industry. Creating images to accompany existing music is, however, hardly a new idea. The concept can be traced back to 1877 and Thomas Edison's invention of…

A study examined attitude change for viewers of "Amerika," an ABC television miniseries about the takeover of the United States by Soviet forces. Subjects, 267 undergraduates in communication courses at Memphis State University, completed a pretest a week prior to the airing of "Amerika" and a posttest a week after. The…

Mass communication researchers have largely ignored the role of audio media and popular music in the lives of children, yet the available evidence shows that children do listen. Extant studies yield a consistent developmental portrait of childrens' listening frequency, but there is a notable lack of programatic research over the past decade, one…

Focusing on the experience of one of seven working groups at a theater-for-development workshop in Zimbabwe, this report details the process followed by many groups, and reveals some of the major learnings, dilemmas, contradictions, strengths, and limiting factors found in a practical village-based theater-for-development process. A brief…

Although the suppression in 1917 of "The Masses," an influential Socialist magazine, has been depicted as an American tragedy, such a narrow interpretation ignores the bizarre, confused, often comic developments and episodes that attended the magazine's end. A reexamination of the demise of "The Masses" has been made to show…

The purpose of this guide is to offer possible answers to questions concerning popular culture that teachers might have and to offer suggestions on utilizing popular culture materials that are available. Lesson plans are presented using materials from advertising, newspapers, comics, film, television, popular music, radio, popular literature,…

There are many ways films, paintings, and photographs can be used in teaching freshman college composition courses. These materials illustrate such rhetorical principles as unity, use of detail, comparison, point of view, and metaphor. Similarly, popular culture such as advertisements, song lyrics, comics, newspapers, and magazines can illustrate…

This issue of the "Arizona English Bulletin" contains 38 articles related to popular culture and the teaching of English. The articles discuss such topics as language in the popular arts, establishing a popular culture library, defining sexism in popular culture, detective literature and its uses in the traditional classroom, popular…