Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education is the first international and multidisciplinary effort to coalesce knowledge on education and popular culture studied as broad phenomena and not as a collection of case studies. In this volume, popular culture has been thematically treated as it appears in a variety of media, including movies, digital games, advertising, television, popular songs, and the internet. The book considers education in both formal and informal settings, and looks critically at the accepted dichotomy between education and popular culture. It argues that popular culture is capable of educating and that education shares many characteristics with popular culture, and tries to overcome these dichotomous relationships while also trying to clarify the reciprocal effects between the two. The book calls disciplinary and media boundaries into question in an effort to widen the possibility of enlarging the vocabulary and the verbs of all that stays unnamed by what is considered knowledge.
"Few books capture as clearly the critical place and influence of popular culture on education. Silberman-Keller, Bekerman, Giroux, and Burbules have launched a collaboration that helps educators understand the learning process outside the confines of classroom pedagogy but provides the conditions of possibility for improving schools. Its expert contributors travel through social experiences that no educator can take for granted any longer as extra-curricular. If schooling is education of the whole person then this book takes us one step closer to that transformation." (Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley)