Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy

Toby Daspit, the Assistant Professor Formerly Known as Sparky, teaches secondary education and curriculum courses in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership at Western Michigan University. He is the co-author, with Pamela Dean and Petra Munro, of Talking Gumbo: A Teacher's Guide to Using Oral History in the Classroom. Although transforming Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rap/rock music, and collage art into educational theories is a full-time job, he still finds the energy to write essays on popular cultural studies and alternative forms of curriculum theorizing, and to fish in the swamps of Louisiana Educated at the University of Pittsburgh and in the wasteland of TV land, John A. Weaver is the author of (Re-) Thinking Academic Politics in (Re-)unified Germany and the United States (RoutledgeFalmer) and co-edited with Marla Morris and Peter Appelbaum (Post) Modern Science (Education) and Difficulty Memories: Talk in a Post-Holocaust Era. He also has written on Rap, The Simpsons, information technology, the Post-Human condition, and Higher Educational reform. When he is not writing and reading, he is furthering his education at the movies or in front of the television.