Chair: Michael Gard
Contemporary educational discourses require classroom teachers to produce pedagogies that are engaging and authentic. One of the mechanisms through with such pedagogy is perceived to be achieved is through the use of popular culture. The possibilities of the use of popular culture are near endless and teachers, in their quest to provide 'engaging and authentic' learning experiences for students, increasingly draw upon popular culture as they assemble lesson plans and assessment tasks. Drawing upon post-Foucauldian insights on governmentality, and the concept of pedagogical assemblages, the possibilities of utilizing popular culture as a pedagogical device in health education classrooms will be explored. Throughout the paper I suggest that the possibilities for using popular culture within the classroom are powerfully shaped by governmental risk imperatives that circulate in curriculum and curriculum translation assemblages. I conclude the paper by discussing how popular culture, can be recruited as a potent pedagogical device that becomes part of, and reconfigured within, a broader health education assemblage that is saturated through by neoliberalism and risk discourse.