Use of Children’s Popular Culture in Literacy Curricula: An Analysis of the Papers by Parry (2002) and Dickie and Shuker (2014) through the Lenses of “No Research Can Be Value-Laden”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of children’s out-of-school experiences as their popular culture and discusses how such experiences contribute to their creativity and critical thinking. In addition to this, the paper also discusses the critical role of researchers’ values in terms of how values affect the design and process of research. From this standpoint, it analyses two research articles, namely as: “Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroom”, by Parry (2014), and “Ben 10, superheroes and princesses: primary teachers’ views of popular culture and school literacy”, by Dickie and Shuker (2014). Throughout the analysis, the paper discusses how the values of the authors’ of these papers affected their selection of the research topics, as well as the process of research, by bringing out the importance of critical literacy in pre-school curricula.