Teaching popular media and culture through the American family lens

This article focuses on the teaching of the American family via a large lecture course that examines ideology, culture, family, gender, sexuality, race, class and nation through the study of media texts. The course applies a student-focused approach and attends to the material through a cultural studies frame. First, we describe the course and its goals and then we reflect on the practices we have brought to teaching the course that have garnered a positive reputation so that the course fills on the first day of registration. Through a reflective account of our experiences of teaching this class, the authors address how we engage students with media texts that they normally would not know of or would find difficult or even boring due to students’ curated media environments. We conclude with reflections on what we have learned from teaching this course. We hope this article helps other teachers of popular media and American culture as they construct their own courses to fit both student and teachers’ goals.