2019 Annual Conference

Colleges and Universities

Shared Concurrent Session (Approx. 12 or 20 minutes)

The purpose of this presentation is to discuss how Grey's Anatomy's special episodes, like Silent All These Years are rich sources for analysis and serve as legitimacy narratives for adults in various settings. Using examples from a popular television program integrates relevant content and experiences in a learning environment.

This session is relevant to adult educators at institutions of higher or continuing education. This session will also be helpful to individuals seeking different practices and approaches to create more inclusive and relevant learning environments. Also, this session could be of interest to administrators and practitioners in organizational development and learning. This also would be interesting for ABE or ELL classrooms.

In an effort to create a more engaged classroom, it is valuable to relate to students as extensively as possible in the learning process. Frequently teachers resort to discussion as an engagement tool but discussions are more real and relevant when course content is connected with popular culture. Using examples from a popular television program integrates relevant content and experiences while also including all voices in the classroom can affect student learning and participation in the classroom.

On March 28, 2019 an episode of the popular television program, Grey's Anatomy, aired titled Silent All These Years. The focus of this particular episode was the horrors and trauma of sexual assault. After the airing of this episode, the national sexual assault program, RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), experiences a 43% increase in people reaching out for services (ABC7, 2019). In this presentation we discuss how Grey's Anatomy's special episodes, like Silent All These Years are rich sources for analysis and serve as legitimacy narratives for adults in various settings.

Pop culture can serve as useful sites for narrative analysis that also capture relevant moments in time. Alexander-Floyd (2014) discusses Grey's Anatomy as a narrative site which boasts multi-cultural and multiracial issues at the episode level. This is leveled as a critique of the entire show because the entire premise of the show is not grounded in a recognition of structural inequities, yet this limitation of the series makes it a prime site for us to select episodic topics to deconstruct the ways that particular episodes address social issues of violence and health in ways that are often not discussed in mainstream discourse.

This session with begin with an overview of the content, including the design, purpose, and implementation. Participants will engage in a discussion about the ways that pop culture in general and Grey’s Anatomy specifically provide legitimacy narratives, and possible applications in other disciplines or contexts. In this session we will use methods that engage the group in learning and will discuss the challenges in using this method.