When Pop Stars Take Over the Classroom

Back-to-school season is upon us and students all over the country are returning to campus to study the works of world history’s most important figures. While for some people, these figures encompass traditional academic luminaries like Einstein and Shakespeare, for others, they include Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny.

A new crop of college courses has emerged in recent years that center around the lives and careers of today’s biggest pop stars. These range from music classes that dissect the work of Lana Del Rey, to African Studies courses about Beyoncé and Rihanna’s feminism, to sociology courses about how artists like Harry Styles are received and treated by the public.

Brian Donovan, for example, is a cultural sociology professor at Kansas University who has just begun teaching a new course titled The Sociology of Taylor Swift. The class aims to use Swift as a means of understanding concepts ranging from celebrity culture to feminism to notions of authenticity.

“I noticed during the pandemic in my [cultural sociology] class that some of the conversations would drift toward Taylor Swift,” Professor Donovan, who has since gained traction on TikTok for his sociological analyses of the “All Too Well” singer, tells The Daily Beast. “I had an idea that I could teach a lot of the topics and themes of cultural sociology through the lens of Taylor Swift.”

But are pop stars actually useful pedagogical tools, or are these classes just easy A’s designed to create news headlines and boost enrollment numbers?

Dr. Nathian Rodriguez, a media studies professor at San Diego State University, thinks such cynicism completely misses the objective of his work. Dr. Rodriguez teaches multiple courses about pop stars ranging from Selena Quintanilla to Bad Bunny, and believes such artists offer important insight into how representation and activism interact with mainstream media.

“I’m not teaching ‘Selena,’ just like I’m not teaching ‘Bad Bunny.’ I’m teaching through them,” Dr. Rodriguez explains. “I’m teaching through them in order to show students how we can use these pop culture individuals to better understand the things that they read in their textbooks.”

Rodriguez’s class on Selena, titled Selena & Latinx Media Representation, was such a success when it was introduced in 2020 that it has now become a permanent fixture in SDSU’s curriculum. Not only that, it has also given him the confidence to create similar classes on Bad Bunny and Cardi B — accomplishments that are deeply meaningful to him as both a professor and a member of the Latinx community.

“[SDSU is] a Hispanic-serving institution on the border in San Diego, and we had no classes that dealt with Latinx and Latino individuals,” he says. “This was the perfect opportunity to bridge not only theory and professional work, but also bring that cultural element into the classroom where students got to see themselves represented in the classroom.”

All this runs counter to the common assumption that courses like these are nothing more than glorified music appreciation classes—a theory that becomes tenuous when you consider the amount of work that goes into creating a syllabus that has to pass multiple stages of university approval. Dr. Louie Valencia, a history professor who teaches Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity at Texas State University, began teaching the course knowing that even if students came into his classroom expecting a “fluff” class, the work he put into it would eventually speak for itself. In addition to the music of Styles, the syllabus for his class covers the works of a wide berth of writers and musicians who have influenced the three-time Grammy Award-winning singer.

“Most of [my students] understand that it’s a pretty significant class that has a lot of reading,” says Dr. Valencia, whose assignments include pieces by writers such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. “Whenever the students got there, they saw a pretty hefty syllabus and knew from the get-go that it wasn’t going to be that easy.”

Not only do these students take the coursework seriously, but several claim that they left these classes more engaged by their studies than when they walked in.

“In undergraduate discussion-based classes, a lot of kids don’t really have much to talk about or are too shy or too quiet. But this class seemed like [it] would have lots of fun conversations,” says Matthew Sepko, a history major who took Valencia’s course last semester, and who claims he wasn’t even a fan of Styles when he enrolled.

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Likewise, Ella Rhuems, a freshman currently enrolled in Professor Donovan’s course, claims that by focusing on a singular phenomenon like Swift, students are able to achieve a deeper and more practical understanding of cultural sociology.

“I definitely learn really well through examples,” Rhuems tells The Daily Beast. “Being able to apply it in the real world is where the learning comes in. If we say someone’s image can change how they’re perceived in the media and we link that back to sociological theory, great, but what’s an example of that? Well, when Taylor Swift was younger and she stayed quiet, the media was less critical of her than when she spoke out politically. So, while Taylor Swift examples don’t apply to everything, the examples that do apply are so much easier to think through because Taylor Swift is something that most of us in the class are familiar with.”

To recap: These courses have carefully crafted syllabi written by impressive scholars, encourage discussion-based learning, and give detailed and practical examples of important phenomena pertaining to their fields. So why is there still so much cynicism around them?

“When we announced [the Selena course] and made it official on social media, we got a lot of pushback,” Dr. Rodriguez recalls. “They just saw a poster that said ‘Selena.’ They didn’t hear all the important stuff that students learned about it. And we got the same thing with the Bad Bunny and Cardi B classes because people don’t take the time to really understand the importance and the relevancy.”

Academia has a long history of this kind of snootiness when it comes to incorporating modern celebrities into lessons. According to Dr. Valencia, it partly stems from a negative perception about who normally engages with pop culture.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that things that are enjoyed primarily by queer people and women are oftentimes dismissed as unserious topics of scholarship,” he explains. “If you look at the Beatles in the 1960s when they first came out, most of their fans who were showing up at concerts were young girls screaming their heads off, and they were dismissed as an unserious band. As time went by, it showed that those young women actually had really good tastes and were ahead of the curve.”

When pop music is considered easy and unserious, academia revolving around it gets a similar rap. Professor Donovan concedes that part of the appeal of his class is that it makes sociological theory a little more digestible.

“​​There is an element of sociology or any academic discipline that is dry and not necessarily immediately engaging,” he says, “so I view Taylor as the sugar-coating of the more boring sociology medicine.”

But not all professors see this as a concession; to some, making their topics more engaging and accessible is an important part of the job description. When asked if he thought there were any students of his who were looking for an easy A, Dr. Valencia responded simply: “I think that there were students who were looking for something they really would enjoy.”

Rhuems certainly agrees.

“If you want students to do well, make classes they’ll enjoy,” she says. “Try to find things that students are passionate about, that makes them want to get out of bed in the morning and go to class. Because I will tell you, motivation is hard in college.”