The politics of children's literature and the actors surrounding it have never been more visible than they are now, in the digital age. As one of the first children's series to gain widespread popularity concurrently with the spread of the internet, the Harry Potter septet arrived on the global stage at the perfect moment to develop an avid,…

Hip-hop, born after the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, is an expression and embodiment of liberation. This book explores the creative liberation, political liberation, and communicative liberation for youth as one exemplar of culturally sustaining pedagogy. The authors share what students and teachers learned in a high school class where…

In this collection, scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia examine the concepts of villainification and anti-villainification in social studies curriculum and popular culture, as well as within broader sociocultural contexts. Villainification is the process of identifying an individual or a small group of individuals as the sole…

Basic medical sciences education is characterized by the provision of large amounts of theoretical information that leaves little opportunity for promoting student creativity or motivation. In response, the authors investigated meme-related project-based learning (PBL). Memes are humorous media that are widely exchanged online. 1477 students were…

Historical novels, films, and other media can disrupt or reinforce dominant narratives about the past. Educators must be careful that when they attempt to select material from a range of seemingly diverse perspectives, they do not choose content that nevertheless maintains problematic depictions of people, places, and events. Time travel stories…

Most western countries face either existing or looming teacher shortages. No doubt there are many and varied reasons for this and no simple remedy. Contemporaneously, film and television can have profound, often unintended attitudinal and behavioural consequences. As reflectors and creators of societal values, axiomatically, they provide insight…

Research on the effects of mass schooling on social cleavages in Africa ignores descent-based hierarchies despite their affecting 218 million people on the continent. In contrast, I show how pursuit of social mobility and honor to overcome descent-based discrimination underpinned Haalpulaar parents' and youths' engagement with secondary school in…

Race for the Red Planet was designed by Daphne Fauber to teach engineering design principles through the contextualization of popular culture, science fiction, and the current race for Mars. The goal of the lesson was for students to learn how people may be living on Mars in the future through a variety of interdisciplinary sources and various…

This article presents the results of a survey among rectors of schools of music and performing arts in Norway. The aim was to map the schools' offerings in terms of musical genres and related instruments and ensembles, and to determine how the availability of different genres was distributed demographically and geographically. A questionnaire…

Toys both guide and foster the play--and stimulate the imaginations--of players of all ages. The authors investigate adult use of toys as a point of entry to the world play of both transmedia-connected and stand alone toy characters--dolls, action figures, and soft toys. They point to how adult toy players engage actively in world building in…

This feature describes the efforts of the Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge to offer programming presenting hip-hop and spoken word poetry. These events, begun in 2016, feature genres relevant to the university's diverse and global enrollment. Though not traditional library presentations, they recognize the wide appeal of…

Emergent language learners develop literacy through social interactions in multiple, overlapping communities: home, school, peer groups, and popular culture. The author focuses on how classrooms can be spaces that cultivate authentic literacy engagements while incorporating and valuing students' existing language resources.

The purpose of this narrative case study is to explore the use of pop culture as curriculum as embodied by Black women educators (BWEs) in their respective college courses. The bodies of research that ground this study address the foundations of curriculum, curriculum as it is informed by experiences, and how pop culture serves as a critical…

In 2018, the toy manufacturer Playmobil launched a 'History Class' as an addition to its 'Furnished School Building'. The materiality of this toy, and the selection of teaching media represented in coloured plastic (a blackboard with timeline, magnifying glass, parchment roll, stone axe, posters and other sources), convey an idea of history…

It takes a lot more than just telling students that a topic is important for them to find value in the lesson. In order to get students as enthused about a subject, it is important to utilize topics that the students are already interested in, then create a link between that and the science objective. The framework for this type of instruction is…