The “Product:” one 2000-word article (Publisher or Word) and one PowerPoint Presentation /w video, audio, and any props you want. I anticipate presentations to begin in late May. The articles also will be due at the same time.
There is also a graphics piece to this project. Each group will make an 8.5×11 poster for each decade of popular culture (with youth culture blended in). We’ll do the image work posters in Photoshop, and so we’ll turn the posters in as JPEGs. We’ll print the results and redecorate our windows with the art.
You’ll produce a total of 12 posters, one for each decade. You can’t put everything about the decade’s popular culture on one poster, but you can capture the spirit and show the highlights of a decade pretty well, using words, phrases, and pictures in a collage-style work of graphic art.
Please take care to use your artistic sense to have balance, contrast, clarity and excitement to your posters. Make it so people get a good sense of your message from 6 feet away.
I want us to learn about the history of Popular Culture. Most of the time history teaches about dates when stuff happened, like wars and revolutions and when man first walked on the moon. That’s important stuff, don’t get me wrong. I live in Sonoma, and I like the fact that it was the first capital of California because of the Bear Flag Revolt in June of 1846. Of course, it lost out to Monterey, which became the capital in July of the same year. Oh, well.
But there’s another kind of history, and that’s about culture. Culture is “all the knowledge and values shared by a society.” A society is “an extended social group having a distinctive cultural and economic organization.” Mostly we think of society as being all the people of a country–American society–but it can be a smaller group like “San Francisco society”or “hip-hop culture” or “gang culture” or even “police culture.” Every group and subgroup can have its own culture.
Sometimes what goes on in a country is more interesting on the “street level,” such as “what kids are doing these days.” What music influences them, what movies do they like, what art do they enjoy, what books do they read? How do they like to spend their time? What do they like to eat?
Each team will research, examine, and learn about culture through the decades and generations. I want us to divide this culture into the adult or grown-up culture, that is “what people did” during their lifetimes. We’ll call that “popular culture.” Then I’d like us to look at their time as kids or teenagers, what we call “youth culture.” Youth culture is described as “young adults (a generational unit) considered as a cultural class or subculture.”
I’d like us to research the last 120 years of popular culture. We can study by generation, but we can also study by decade, i.e. the “Roaring 20′s,” the “me decade (the 80′s),” the 1890′s (La Belle Epoque), and so on. You can do either or both to organize your presentation as you choose. I’ll give higher points for organizing your info by both decade and generation.
When you talk about the popular and youth culture of a generation or a decade, use these categories: Art, Music, Food, Fashion, Sports, Leisure, Entertainment (Theater, Radio, Movies, TV) Inventions (technology), and Literature.
A great place to start is this Wikipedia entry called Generation/List of generations/Western World. Here’s the link.
The start document with the First Steps is here.
Essential questions:
- What is popular culture?
- Does it have a history?
- Why does popular culture change?
- What is more important, “real” history, political history, economic history, or popular culture history? Why is one more important than another?
- How are they connected? What influences popular culture and how it develops?
- Let’s understand youth culture through the generations and decades in the same way.
We can write our article (2000 words) in any program you want, although I recommend Microsoft Publisher so you can learn how to use it, but Word is fine, too. You can create columns that look like a magazine in Word. You can create charts and graphs if necessary (this time just do them in Word or PowerPoint), and you’ll get more credit for any special features you use. The BIG PRESENTATION will be created in PowerPoint, so you can share with the class what your group has learned. And as I said, you’ll make a poster for each decade for a total of 12 posters.
We’ll do this project in design teams. Each team will be chosen by the leaders. Each team should first write a contract that commits each member to live up to their responsibility, and then sign that contract.
Our goal: To understand how popular culture is another way of finding out how people lived in different generations or eras. It’s a way to understand the human story. It also helps us develop our cultural literacy. Cultural literacy can be defined as the “knowledge of and ability to discuss the history of and major concepts underlying a culture, particularly one’s own and those of one’s peers.”
Another way of putting this is that when someone says something, you know what they’re talking about. For example: “Someone pulled a Kanye at the Oscars last night!” If you saw the MTV Awards, you’d be culturally literate enough to understand “doing a Kanye.” Another example: “Yo, dog.” What’s that about?
Have fun, make great reports and presentations, and learn about our culture.
