Can the media help?

Today I've been re-reading Kathleen Tyner's book Literacy in the Digital Age. In a chapter about classroom diversity - language and cultural diversity - she asserts that popular media have the ability to bridge gaps in the classroom, because the forms and stories are familiar and known to a wide variety of students. She sees popular media as a way to reach students where they are and bring them along, in an apprenticeship approach. Here are a couple of quotations:

"Without the bridge to student knowledge, the traditional canon of information, sanctioned by most schools, has not shown much promise in reaching students whose first language is not English, and who may not identify with the dominant, mainstream culture honored by the traditional literary canon." p.170

"Unlike many texts from the sanctioned canon, the codes, languages, and conventions of pooular culture texts such as movies, comic books, videos, and music are well known to students from a wide array of world cultures." p.171

A friend of my mom's did her dissertation on how popular culture (specifically Sesame Street) could help bilingual/ELL students as they entered kindergarten, providing a way to connect and bridge the differences between their English-only peers.

Just thoughts I am having now... I'd love to hear from anyone who agrees or not, and I'll keep working out my ideas about pop culture.

Here's the citation for Tyner's work:

Tyner, K. (1998). Literacy in a digital world: Teaching and learning in the age of information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.