[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today, we speak with Mia Hood. Dr. Hood is a curriculum designer, writing coach, and teacher educator based in New York. She’s worked as a professor of literacy and secondary education at the City University of New York (CUNY) and a professor of professional writing at New York University. She’s the author this year [2025] of Pop Culture Literacies: Teaching Interpretation, R esponse, and Composition in a Digital World. Welcome, Mia.
[00:00:45] Mia H: Thank you. Delighted to be here.
[00:00:48] Amy H-L: What are pop culture literacies and why have you chosen to focus on them?
[00:00:53] Mia H: Yeah, so for me, pop culture literacies are ways of engaging with and constructing meaning from pop culture texts, and I define pop culture texts very broadly to include some of the traditional forms of pop culture, like film, TV shows, music. But I think also the content that we see on our social media feeds would be considered pop culture. Texts as well. And I also think of products as being pop culture texts, like toys and clothes. So taking a very broad definition of pop culture texts, pop culture literacy is about our ways of engaging with those texts and making meaning of them.
And for me, there are three major pillars of pop culture literacy. One is that we want young people to become active in their engagements with pop culture literacy. So not to passively consume what they are engaging with, but to think actively about it. To be self-aware about the ways that they are making sense of what they’re seeing and engaging with. And then critical engagement as well. Critical engagement means being able to examine a pop culture text and understand the way that power is operating through that text. And then finally, strategic engagement. So, just in the way we want young people to be strategic when they read literary texts or any kind of text that they are engaging with in school, we want them to be strategic in understanding how the texts that they are engaging with on their phones, for example, how they’re constructed, how they make meaning through their associations with other texts, through their multimodality. I want young people to be strategic in how they are reading and interpreting the pop culture texts that they see.
[00:02:42] Jon M: You’ve said that schools have an ethical duty to help young people to navigate the world as it is. Can you speak about that a little bit?
[00:02:51] Mia H: Yeah, absolutely. I think the whole idea of writing a book about pop culture literacy and researching it and trying to encourage educators to teach it comes from this more fundamental idea I have about the purpose of education, purpose of education for me being to help young people understand the world that they actually inhabit. And to navigate that world in a way that’s ethical and productive, however they define that, and in a way that allows them to flourish. And again, however they want to flourish. And so, for me, the imperative to schools is to ensure that they’re doing that and they’re addressing the world as it is, not as much as it once was.
I think in the humanities, which is where my work is centered, we would traditionally think of teaching and emphasizing the literary canon, for example. So we see in English classrooms we’re teaching texts from 50 years ago, or a hundred years ago, or 400 years ago, and there’s value in doing that for sure. It’s not to say that we teach pop cultural literacy instead of teaching older texts and different kinds of texts, literary texts. But it’s that only focusing on those older texts and not recognizing the digital world, especially, that young people are inhabiting right now, is really taking away an opportunity for them to understand that world on a deeper level and to make it their responsibility to help young people understand that world.
[00:04:22] Amy H-L: And how can teachers encourage students to think about their ethical perspective on the world around them and pop culture in particular?
[00:04:33] Mia H: Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with awareness, including self-awareness. One thing that digital culture in particular does really well, for better or worse, is that it blurs distinctions, blurs boundaries, eradicates boundaries. There’s a sense in which when we are engaging with pop culture as it is today, which is largely on social media, we’re not even aware of ourselves doing it, right? There’s a way in which the design of apps and algorithms puts us into this passive state of consumption.
And so the first step I think, is to help students take a more assertive stance in relation to what they’re doing when they are scrolling on their phones, and recognize that they have, first of all, choices in the way that they engage. They can choose to give their attention to certain things and not give their attention to others. There are ways in which they can actually manipulate their algorithm to make sure that they’re seeing what they want to see. And there are ways that they can calibrate how they respond to content — how and whether they like it, comment on it, share it, repost it, and talk about it in their everyday lives. So it’s just this awareness first that literacy is happening, whether we know it or not.
And then it’s about, okay, so I have a critical framework as I am engaging on social media, to think about what I’m seeing, why I’m seeing it, why was this created? How was it created? Through what combination of human and artificial intelligence did this thing come to be?
And then, how am I going to respond to it? And that includes what am I going to think in response, but also what am I going to do in response?
[00:06:23] Jon M: I have a couple of questions off that. One is, I think you said, when we were talking before, that schools are sometimes disconnected from society or from real life of the kids, but how do the kids respond? How do young people respond when you start talking as an academic with them, as a teacher, about their pop culture? Because I suspect that they may also separate the worlds of school and the rest of their lives. What kind of responses do you get when you start asking them these kinds of questions?
[00:06:59] Mia H: That’s a really important question because I think that there’s a variety of perspectives on whether or not pop culture literacies, which I see as a subset of home literacies, whether they even belong in a school setting. And if they do belong, to what purpose, to what end? What I would say first is that that’s something that has to be negotiated between teacher and students. I think if you, as a teacher, are going to say, I know my students are really into this one thing. There’s a meme or there’s some clip that’s gone viral or something that I’ve heard of. I’ve caught wind of this and I want to bring it into the classroom. I think as a teacher, just like bringing that in and kind of dropping it on them and saying, okay, now we’re going to do a critical analysis of this, I don’t think that’s the way to go for many reasons, one of which is, as a teacher, as an adult, if you were stepping into youth culture, you don’t know as much about that thing as your students do. They have a lot of knowledge and context that you probably don’t have. And so when you are positioning yourself as a teacher, somebody who’s in power, somebody who gets to be a gatekeeper in that classroom space as I am going to kind of impose this on you, you don’t even understand, you can’t possibly understand all the implications of that. And I don’t even know if that kind of approach is going to make sense in terms of leading an analysis of something that you potentially don’t have that context for.
So I think, as a teacher, it can’t be the way that we select “Of Mice and Men” or “Frankenstein” to teach. We can’t be the curator, the one who is selecting the actual examples to teach. The way that I’ve approached this with young people in the past. And I teach in the summers in this terrific program called Thrive. I teach really talented, rising high school seniors, and this is always the opportunity I have to try out some of these ideas and just be in awe of the talent and the intellectual riches of young people.
What I do is early in the session, I will ask students to share with me, what are some of the kinds of pop culture, things that we could use for analysis in this class? And I give them a really wide range of options, right. I ask them about memes or films or songs or, you know, music videos. Anything that they are engaging with that they like at the moment. And I’m specifically telling them for analysis like this, this would be the purpose, and we would be doing this together. So share with me what you want to share with me. That’s the first thing, so that they can have some things for themselves. They don’t have to share something, when I ask them that question, that they don’t want to share and they don’t want to engage with academically. That’s fine.
The second part of it for me is this question of how I’m going to facilitate this work with the thing. There are a couple of things that are important for me. One is I don’t ever want to use an analysis of pop culture as a way of just hooking students into the lesson or just a punchy little opening five minutes before we get to the real work. I want to treat it as the real work, and I want to frame that for students. There’s an imperative that we have as citizens, as human beings, as inhabitants of this digital culture, to understand it. And so we are going to take this seriously right now, and some of these things that we’re learning about, whether it’s postmodernism or post-colonial theory or Marxism or whatever kind of theoretical frameworks we’ve been working on, we are going to apply that to these examples with a lot of seriousness. Because these examples matter, this is what we are swimming in, this is what we are inhabiting.
And then the third thing is that reflective humility as a teacher to know that I don’t have the ultimate reading of this text. Now I am by disposition an English major, and I just love critically analyzing. Give me anything and I’ll critically analyze it. And I would love to stand up in front of the classroom and say, here’s my critical analysis. Give me an A+ on this. But I have to recognize that every person who’s looking at that text is coming with their own web of references and also personal experiences and values and beliefs that they are bringing to that reading. And what’s much more important than arriving at the definitive reading is to have self-awareness about what are we bringing to this text and how are we all analyzing and understanding it differently. That’s where I think there’s a lot of richness and a lot of interest in the conversation.
So for me, again, it’s both parts of my answer, now that I think about it. Both parts of my answer are deferring to the students. As a teacher, you have an important role of cultivating habits of mind, teaching what those guiding questions might be, expanding their perspectives. That is your role. But when it comes to how we incorporate something that feels like it belongs outside of school, into school, I think you’ve got to defer to the people who know best and who have the most skin in the game and have the most at stake.
[00:11:58] Jon M: You discuss critical literacy with particular emphasis on readers or other consumers of pop culture’s roles as text analysis. What do you mean by this, and why is it so critical?
[00:12:12] Mia H: So there are a lot of different approaches to text analysis, whether we’re talking about a traditional literature class, ELA or English class, or we’re talking about pop culture literacy, or even we’re talking about the way we analyze art or music. There’s lots of different approaches. There’s one level, which I think is the one that’s been most emphasized in schools, which is, I am going to look at my reading of this text as an engagement with a brilliant mind, right. And I want to understand how this brilliant mind created this text. I want to identify individual choices they made in how they constructed it, and I want to appreciate and admire those choices and the way that all these different elements of the text work together to convey a certain message, meaning, theme, idea. And I think there’s value to that. There’s nothing that I’m going to say, this is the traditional way and there’s no value to it. I think there’s value to doing that. I think that only enhances the pleasure of engaging with texts. We love to be able to break them apart and see how they work and how they work to produce certain ideas. But that’s one kind of analysis for me.
Critical analysis is not as tethered to the intentions of the person who created the text. So it’s no longer about understanding this person’s genius and their brilliance in putting this text together. Let me think about what other forces might have been at play in the construction of this text and also the circulation of this text and the reading of this text that the person who created it might not have been aware of at all, right. So that might be looking for ways in which different people or perspectives are centered or marginalized in the text. It might be looking at what are these unexamined assumptions that this text is carrying about who people are, the way the world works. It could also be about how this text is positioning different kinds of people and different kinds of viewers of the text and thinking about questions. Who’s an insider in this text? Who’s an outsider in this text? So these are all things that a creator of a text is not necessarily actively thinking about and imbuing their text with these elements. It’s more about how is this text an artifact of a sociocultural context in which it was produced, and what does it reveal about that context? So for me, again, the critical element of critical analysis is about asking those kinds of questions about how power is operating through the text and what the text is revealing about the larger society in which it exists.
[00:15:01] Amy H-L: And I guess that leads to power. And you talk about power operating within and through texts. Could you talk about that?
[00:15:12] Mia H: Yeah, so particularly when we look at pop culture texts, we have to understand their inherently commercial nature. In some ways we can think of any text as having a commercial element to it. But we have to think about the ways in which texts are created and circulated and consumed in ways that are meant to turn a profit in one way or another. When I think about the current digital context for pop culture engagement, we have to understand the way that our attention is being mined, right, that the longer that we we’re giving our eyeballs over to a social media platform, the more money they’re going to get, right. So we have to understand that texts are created today, texts of all kinds, are created to attract that kind of engagement, to hook us and to sustain our attention. And so one of the major ways that I think we need to understand power operating within and through text is how is this text constructed in a way to hold my attention? And what does this text want me to do with it?
One, I’m working on a curriculum design project right now with an organization called Spring Point, and it’s about news literacy specifically, and it’s about how information is constructed and circulated online about current events and other news topics, and one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the ways in which this imperative for audience engagement obviously butts up against journalistic standards, for example, right. And this isn’t new to social media, because those two forces have always been kind of butting up against each other. But now what we see is that audience engagement in the context of social media has taken such precedence that there’s no sense of the information that we’re seeing as being verifiable, right. We can’t pin it to even an individual person. So if you look at a piece of news content that you’re seeing on your feed, it was created by somebody. Sometimes it’s hard to even identify who that somebody was, right. It’s hard to understand what organization they were working as part of and what their ultimate purposes and interests were. And then what happens is it gets recirculated, so you have this individual piece of content, maybe it’s some raw footage with a caption on it, and that’s the original news content. Then it gets reshared. And each time it’s reshared, maybe somebody’s adding a music clip to it or somebody else is adding a caption to it, or somebody’s adding some annotation in the frame on it. Maybe somebody’s doing a picture and picture of their faces responding to it. And so when I think about the way power is operating there, it’s tricky because it’s not like, I don’t want to say like the olden days, but it’s not like a generation or two ago, where the power operating through that text is centralized and it comes from one journalist working for one conglomerate news organization, putting forward their quote unquote “objective” view on what the truth of the situation is. This is more like truth that is kind of cobbled together or an idea of truth that’s cobbled together as a text is being reshared and remixed and recirculated across these different platforms. So you have to understand that. So power isn’t centralized in that way, and yet all of those individual moves that people make to add to and remix that text, that’s ultimately there to keep our eyeballs and our attention on that app. So it’s not that conglomerate news media organization that is making all the money from that, it is the titans of tech that are making all of the money from that. And so I think this is just one layer of how power operates through pop culture texts. But I think it’s the most fundamental one and the most important one we have to think about when we are just simply engaging with or consuming a piece of content on social media. Who is being enriched through that? And how is this text being constructed and reconstructed in a way to keep my attention on it.
[00:19:09] Jon M: Thinking about how students may divide their lives and their thoughts, I can imagine that they may think of school as a place of analysis and a place where they may get asked about or be thinking about their ethical or moral responses to stuff, that it’s a serious place and their teachers may ask them serious questions. And I wonder whether, if they are just thinking that they’re scrolling through their phones or whatever and it’s entertainment, are there ways that you, or that you recommend that teachers can pierce that veil of it being entertainment and encourage students to be thinking about how this fits in with their own ethics or morals?
[00:20:02] Mia H: Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts about that, right. So I hear what you’re saying about students seeing school as a place of analysis. School is a serious place where questions of ethics belong in that space. But I think as educators, we certainly don’t want what we’re doing within the walls of the school to be just contained within the walls of the school, right. We’re trying to cultivate certain qualities and habits in our students that we hope that they will carry with them outside of the school and across their lives. Now, how do you get students to, as you say, how do we pierce that veil with students and help them to understand that what they’re doing in school has some relevance, and then the question about entertainment.
So first of all, I do want to say pop culture is entertainment and it should be entertaining, right. I think one of the ideas that has been powerful for me in the study of pop culture is simultaneity, which means what it sounds like it means, which is you have two simultaneous orientations toward pop culture. You have the orientation of joy and pleasure and fun and entertainment, and you enjoy things, right, and you seek things out that you like. And you derive that kind of bodily or emotional type of pleasure from engaging with it. That is what pop culture is, and I don’t think that the goal should ever be to strip it of that. And then the other part of the simultaneity is you have that orientation towards pop culture, but you also have an orientation towards it of being active, strategic, and critical. And you are understanding that when you are doing this thing that’s entertaining to you, you are doing a form of literacy, and that means that you can be more active about it. You can be more self-aware. You can ask yourself questions about what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it. You can be strategic in thinking about how a particular pop culture text has been constructed and why it’s been constructed in that way. And you can have those two simultaneous orientations. And I would suggest, and maybe it’s just the English major in me that’s saying this, but I don’t think that they necessarily have to interfere with each other. I think that engaging, actively, critically, and strategically with pop culture can potentially even enhance the joy and the pleasure that you derive from engaging with it.
[00:22:32] Jon M: All of this, of course, as you alluded to indirectly, gets tied in with what’s happening now with artificial intelligence.
What are some of your thoughts about the various ways that that’s not just is going to be, but it is impacting things?
[00:22:50] Mia H: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this question of authorship gets even more complicated when we’re looking at AI-produced contents, which is often called appropriately slop, our social media feeds are overrun already with AI slop.
And the first thing I would want to highlight is that, and I’m making a bold, sweeping claim here, and maybe I don’t have all the evidence to back it up, but nobody likes it. You know, I’m not hearing from teens that they are encountering AI slop on their feeds and thinking it’s entertaining and funny and engaging. It’s not something that I’m hearing people actually really like. And I think that for me, when I think about what I want to cultivate in young people, I teach. I want to cultivate. Also, taste, and taste means that you have some discernment about what you’re looking at and whether it’s high quality or low quality.
That doesn’t mean there’s a universal answer to that question, but that means that I am positioning all of my students as people who have that capacity for discernment, who should cultivate that in themselves and think intentionally about, oh, I like this meme is funny. Like, I think this meme is funny and relatable, and this meme describes something about my life that I wasn’t able to describe before, and that’s why I enjoy it.
Versus, oh, this meme has just been replicated to death and it’s just been replicated so much and now it’s been AI-ified and it’s just slop. It’s just there because it’s there and it’s not something that holds any interest for me. So I think one of the assumptions that’s often made about young people is that they have no taste, that they are just consuming anything and everything that comes their way without any thought about quality and about what they actually like and what they don’t like. I think young people absolutely have the capacity for that, and that’s something that we can continue to cultivate in them as more and more of what they’re seeing is overrun by AI slop.
But I also think, in terms of ethics, it’s really important to think about the ethical dimensions of AI and so much content being produced by AI, first because obviously AI is trained on data sets that, as far as I’m concerned, have been stolen from humans, the intellectual and creative work of humans. But I also think about accountability. So one of the, I think, foundations of an ethical society is that we as individuals, we have rights and we have responsibilities, and we’re accountable for what we do and say. And there are a lot of ways in which it’s pretty murky, like who’s accountable for what AI is doing? And when there’s no element of accountability, there’s no human being who, at the end of the day, can say, yeah, I produce this content and I am responsible for the repercussions of this content. I don’t have any answers right now, but I think that is an important dynamic to engage young people in conversations about what does it mean when we’re looking at something that was produced without any sense of accountability to a larger community or society or without adherence to any social contract that we have as humans trying to live together with each other? That’s a really important dimension of AI-produced content to explore.
Sure.
[00:26:25] Jon M: Kathy Hytten wrote an article called Ethics in Teaching for Democracy and Social Justice. She argued that while social justice teachers are concerned with macro issues of justice in society, they may not pay enough attention to the ethical issues in their classroom teaching, especially when a student disagrees with their perspective. What are ways that activist teachers can attempt to ensure that they are themselves acting ethically in the classroom, especially when somebody just doesn’t agree with them?
[00:26:58] Mia H: Yeah. This is something I’ve wrestled with a lot in a lot of different contexts of my own teaching. I sometimes experience a tension between my ethical commitments and critical pedagogy, and specifically this idea that you know, in critical pedagogy, critical pedagogy is inherently political, right. It has this political valence to it where you are wanting to examine how power operates in society. The only reason you want to examine how power operates in society is because you think that there are inequities in society, right. So that already is a political stance and orientation. And so when it comes to my ethical commitments, as an educator, I have a commitment to honor the diverse perspectives of the students in my classroom. Well, so what if one of those diverse perspectives of my students in the classroom is somehow at odds with my critical commitments to say that there are inequities in society and those inequities can be examined and understood through this kind of analysis of text? My answer to that, which is always provisional and always developing, goes back to what I started with, which is how you present this work to students. If you present this work as “I have chosen the thing we’re going to look at, and I am going to, you know… maybe I’ll ask you some discussion questions, but I’m ultimately going to tell you the meaning of this text. I’m ultimately going to give you my sophisticated interpretation of it, and I’m going to tell you that that’s the right one.” Like when you are approaching critical literacy in that way, then that I think is a violation of that ethical commitment to honor the perspectives of the students in your classroom.
So for me, to whatever extent, I am going to model how to analyze a text. Let’s say there is a song that I really like. I’m going to analyze the lyrics, I’m going to analyze the musical choices of that song. There’s a way of modeling that, which I think is not actually modeling, but there’s a way of modeling that where you’re like, here’s my analysis, right. Here’s what the text means. And then there’s a way of modeling it where you say, here’s what I was thinking about when I heard this song, and then here’s what I was thinking about when I heard it again, and here are the questions that I asked myself. And here were the other texts in my frame of reference that I was bringing in to understand this one. Here are the other texts that I think it’s similar to, or here are the other texts that might be alluding to implicitly or explicitly. And here’s what my relationship with those other texts. So what I’m doing is not telling them what it means. What I’m doing is showing them my process of meaning-making and then inviting them to do the same.
It’s really hard as a teacher to let go of that stranglehold we want to have on the meaning and the right answer, right. But I think that’s part of being an ethical teacher. It is recognizing that there are however many humans in the room who all have equally worthy perspectives, values, experiences, frames of reference that they are bringing to the analytical work. And my job as a teacher, I’m not saying I don’t have any job as a teacher, but my job as a teacher is to model that form of inquiry and reflection and analysis and show what that looks like for me, but really convey that that is just one example of what that could look like and invite and celebrate the diversity of thought processes and strategies that everybody in the room is bringing to the text.
[00:30:40] Amy H-L: When you’re working with memes or songs that some might find offensive, do you get any pushback from parents?
[00:30:52] Mia H: In my particular context, I haven’t, because when I teach young people, I teach in a context of a very specialized summer program. One of the major things that I think this can sometimes connect to is grading and assessment. Because my students aren’t really graded or assessed on their ability to do this, there isn’t that same level of maybe anxiety or concern about the actual content of what we’re doing.
I would say that I’ve received other forms of pushback from other teachers or people who I’ve been engaged with in this work about appropriateness and what we’re holding up as, as an example. And I think where that comes from is it comes from this traditional idea of whatever it is we are looking at, talking about in schools should be something we should be admiring, right. It comes from that old idea of the literary canon, that these are great works and so the purpose of our analysis and our interpretation is to recognize how great they are and why they’re so great. So if you come at it from that perspective, you would say, okay, well then yeah, there’d be a problem with holding up a lot of the stuff that I’m saying that we should analyze, because I don’t think that it holds up, right. I don’t think it holds up all the time. Sometimes it does, but it doesn’t always hold up in terms of quality and it certainly doesn’t hold up in terms of the ethical credentials of the people who created it.
So my first response to that concern is about that, just to remember we’re not just incorporating these texts to admire them and to communicate that the people who created them are brilliant geniuses. We are really looking at it from a more critical lens. And then in terms of just the practicalities though, and these are the practicalities I was saying that I don’t really have to deal with very much, and I’m fortunate to not have to deal with them, but the practicalities of appropriateness and how different school communities and how different families might define appropriateness differently. I would say that the answer to that question for me is always about communication. You know, just as I said at the beginning of my summer session that I do with teens, I ask them for the pop culture examples. If I were doing that in a context of a traditional school and parents and families were involved in the schooling, in the traditional ways, that list would also kind of go out to parents, right?
I think that there should be open communication about the different things that we are bringing into the school, and parents and families should be able to weigh in. I also find that because pop culture has so proliferated, beause there’s so much of it, I don’t think that there’s any particular need to look at things if it’s going to feel like it’s going to make certain students uncomfortable or it’s going to be in some fundamental way at odds with their values or their family’s values. I don’t think I would die on the hill of we have to look at this thing because there’s just so much else to look at and there’s so much else to analyze. And so I really think it’s about communicating with the students and communicating in that more traditional school setting with families as well.
[00:33:55] Amy H-L: Thank you so much. Mia Hood, author of Pop Culture Literacies.
Thank you very much for having me.
[00:34:02] Mia H: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show.
[00:34:14] Amy H-L: Check out our website, ethicalschools.org, for more episodes and videos, and to subscribe to our monthly email newsletters. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org or on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn.
Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next time.