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I want to revisit a concept I began toying with in a post<\/a> a few months back. In it, I reflected casually on the role of marketing and participatory media in the culmination of Kanye West’s release of My Dark Twisted Fantasy<\/em>. I spoke broadly about the role that the mechanisms that musicians like Mr. West utilize to successfully launch an album’s release also have strong implications not only for what educators can <\/em>do in a classroom, but\u2013what I argue\u2013they will have <\/em>to do in order to maintain an equitable approach to teaching America\u2019s youth.<\/p>\n In conferences, courses I am teaching, and occasionally on this blog, the statistic I’m regularly calling attention to (other than the continually frightening statistics related to the achievement gap) is the dwindling rate of college completion in the United States<\/a>. It’s a large focus of the U.S. Department of Education’s Blueprint for Reform<\/a>, and it meshes well with the books<\/a> that have held me captive<\/a> on a smattering of longish flights lately<\/a>.\u00a0And while policymakers and district officials continue to search for solutions to equip more students with the proficiencies needed to matriculate to and, eventually, graduate from four-year universities, I would posit that the skills to learn so are being represented by a sole College Dropout<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n I hope to provide a handful of case studies (like Kanye) of the ways the tentacles of a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy are creeping into mainstream culture, influencing how we interact, think, and make choices about how we engage with the world around us. These examples are not emerging on the fringes of popular culture. On the contrary, they are the essence of what is revealing itself as a participatory youth culture. Kanye’s album was a critical and commercial success. These are examples that are, for now, largely lacking in the kinds of instructional practices most teachers are utilizing in their classrooms. They are not themselves critical. On the contrary, they are capitalistic by nature and are seen in the marketing ploys of musicians, film companies, and general products.<\/p>\n Too often, we look at the realm of capitalism and disregard it wholesale; naw, that [person, product, event] ain’t down.<\/em> And yet, while the content is a problematic perpetuation of marketing practices, the approaches themselves speak to the ways students are engaging, interacting, and approaching informal learning.<\/p>\n Approaching the challenging domain of capitalism with a lens of pragmatic optimism, I’m trying, here, to direct our attention toward the potential of participatory media as enacted by for-profit companies and think through ways these can be harnessed for wholesale social transformation.<\/p>\n All that being said, today, I want to talk about Wheat Thins<\/a>.<\/p>\n