Reflections on Education in, and through, Popular Culture
In this post, Dr Nicola Robertson, convenor of the Popular Culture and Education Network, reflects on the educational significance of popular culture.
Like much of my academic career to date, my foray into the research field of popular culture and education came about as a total fluke. In 2021, as a PhD student, I gave a fateful online presentation with my colleague and fellow Strathclyde PGR, Yueling Chen, from which we were invited to curate an edited book on Autobiography, Fan Fiction, and Education. This resulted in an invite to the Popular Culture Association conference in San Antonio, Texas where I had the best four days of my life watching scholarly presentations on The Beatles and The Twilight Zone (among others), and, to my delight, I was accepted to give a talk about representations of education in Rick and Morty. I came to realise that this was both a strongly established research field and a lot of fun, and I wanted to be part of it.
My surprise at the extent of this field of study could not have been more misplaced. Education and popular culture have long been theoretical bedfellows. Silberman-Keller et al’s (2008) idea that you cannot think about education without invoking the spirit of popular culture (and vice versa) resonates when one considers them perhaps as sibling terms, their conceptual consanguinity arising from their statuses as sites of considerable influence.
We can see the influence of popular culture on education, and perhaps the influence it holds in general, by casting our minds back a year or so ago to Keir Starmer’s call for the Netflix drama Adolescence to be shown in schools with a view to countering misogynistic narratives (Youngs, 2025).
However, seeing popular culture as a formal pedagogical device like this is only one (narrow) way of understanding it through an educational lens. Much more exciting to me as a theorist is to consider the ways in which collective notions of education are reflected to the consumer of popular culture objects (i.e. education in pop culture); or how the object itself may sit at the centre of an educational relation that fashions the creator as an educator who intends to show something to the consumer/student (i.e. education through popular culture). In the latter sense, Adolescence was inherently educational, even before it was screened in a classroom, because the creators intended to affect its viewers by foregrounding a fictional, yet feasible, scenario with a moral undercurrent. It was, in short, a fable for contemporary times.
Adolescence, though, offers a rather obvious example of education through popular culture because the intention and the message could hardly be contested. Since all creators of popular culture objects share a similar intention to show something, the most interesting discussions are had when what is to be shown is obscured under layers of nuance, and the audience may not be aware that there is a message at all. To emulate the great Roland Barthes (2009), ask yourself what paparazzi pictures of the Royal Family intend to show you, or the horoscope section of your local newspaper[1]. These are still examples of education through popular culture, but ones that require a level of sophisticated interpretation, greater than that required to decode the worthy, if not at all subtle, message of Adolescence.
Education in popular culture can also be subject to varying levels of interpretation. While this mode of inquiry deals with how education is represented in the object(s) in question, it is not always the case that education will be shown in an instantly recognisable way. Schools, colleges, universities do regularly appear in popular culture (think Harry Potter, Waterloo Road, and Grange Hill), as do teacher/student relationships outside of conventional settings (Karate Kid, Rocky, or Star Wars). Referring back to the introduction of this piece, my examination of educational representation in Rick and Morty could not rely on such simple images of ‘schooling’, but was nonetheless able to ask bigger questions about education more broadly inspired by a question that Schleiermacher asked two centuries ago (cited in Friesen, 2017): “What does the older generation want with the younger?”. When looking through this lens and applying the ever-useful framework of the pedagogical triangle to identify instances of education (Friesen & Kenklies, 2022), it is possible to see that education in Rick and Morty, and other objects of popular culture, is everywhere.
Thus, this is a field of research that encourages us to be mindful of the ways in which certain ideas about education come to be reinforced, almost subliminally, through the popular culture objects with which we engage, and these objects are also used educationally to propagate certain ideas about the world – again, almost subliminally. Educationalists, I would suggest, have an ethical duty to recognise, and interrogate, the way in which they conceptualise education and its associated notions; testing these against educational representations in, and education happening through, popular culture is a fascinating and accessible place to begin.
[1] Barthes suggests that paparazzi pictures of the Royal Family perform the ironic task of setting them apart from their subjects by suggesting they are just the same as everyone else. If that were the case, their photographs would not be made public. And horoscopes are a reflection of the lives of the readership of the publication; for example, horoscopes in a magazine for bourgeoise women will predict the typical daily life of such a group.
References
Barthes, R. (2009). Mythologies. (J. Cape, Trans.). Vintage.
Friesen, N. (2017). The pedagogical relation past and present: experience, subjectivity and failure. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 49(6), 743–756.
Friesen, N., & Kenklies, K. (2022). Continental pedagogy & curriculum. International Encyclopedia of Education, 7, 245–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.03028-1
Silberman-Keller, D., Bekerman, Z., Giroux, H., & Burbules, N. (2008). Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education. Peter Lang.
Youngs, I. (2025, 31 March). Adolescence hard to watch as a dad, Starmer tells creators. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx28neprdppo
Published 19/06/2026
Image - Pixabay