Cultural Studies: A Valuable Resource for Education

cultural studies becomes available as a resource to educators who can then teach students how to look at the media (industry and texts), analyze audience reception, challenge rigid disciplinary boundaries, critically engage popular culture, produce critical knowledge, or use cultural studies to reform the curricula and challenge disciplinary formations within public schools and higher education. For instance, Shane Gunster has argued that the main contribution cultural studies makes to pedagogy "is the insistence that any kind of critical education must be rooted in the culture, experience, and knowledge that students bring to the class room."(Intellectuals, and Cultural Studies,P.253).

While this is an important insight,

Pedagogy is no longer restricted to what goes on in schools, but becomes a defining principle of a wide ranging set of cultural apparatuses engaged in what Raymond Williams has called "permanent education." Williams rightfully believed that education in the broadest sense plays a central role in any viable form of cultural politics. He writes:

"What permanent education valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches. Permanent education also refers to the field in which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work for the recovery of control in this field is then,

The realm of culture for Mayoshi took on a new role because the actuality of economic power and its attendant networks of control now exercised more influence than ever before in shaping how identities are produced, desires mobilized, and everyday social relations acquired the force of common sense. Myoshi clearly understood that making the political more pedagogical meant recognizing that where and how the psyche locates itself in public discourse, visions, and passions and provides the groundwork for agents to enunciate, act, and reflect on themselves and their relations to others and the wider social order.

Mayoshi believes that pedagogy represents both a mode of cultural production and a type of cultural criticism that is essential for questioning the conditions under which knowledge is produced, values affirmed, effective investments engaged, and subject positions put into place, negotiated, taken up, or refused. Pedagogy is a referent for understanding the conditions of critical learning and the often hidden dynamics of social and cultural