Panel: “Fun With a Purpose”: Periodical Pedagogy and Early Edutainment

43nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 15-18, 2012
Rochester, New York – Hyatt Rochester
Host Institution: St. John Fisher College


Panel Description:
Children’s periodicals published in the US over the last 300 years provide a wealth of textual and visual insight into US culture, pedagogy, and conceptions of childhood. This panel will engage with this under-examined body of texts in their most salient mode: as pedagogy. Children’s magazines have been used as instructional tools with subject matter spanning literacy, manners, morality, crafts, citizenship, “mental hygiene,” and beyond, transmitting enduring lessons in an ephemeral format. By packaging their lessons in an entertaining and disposable blend of fiction, non-fiction, images, activities, games, jokes, and riddles, these magazines can be considered a print medium precursor to “edutainment” or, as the motto of *Highlights for Children* calls it, “Fun with a purpose.” This panel is open to explorations of particular mechanisms, contents, and contexts of periodical pedagogy past and present, including examinations of child-readers’ participation in, subversion against, or re-creation of, that pedagogy.

Possible topics from all disciplines may include:
histories or analysis of particular children’s periodicals
pedagogies in periodicals (ideological, curricular, religious, etc.)
convergences of traditional magazines and digital media
pedagogy, periodicals, and power
magazines produced by children
fiction and poetry in magazines
use of periodicals in classrooms
transnational periodicals
production, distribution, and circulation of pedagogy
cross-cultural comparisons of periodical pedagogy
marginalia and ephemera
pedagogy in the home (or doctor’s office waiting room)
periodical pedagogy as pop culture
children’s responses to and uses of magazines


Please send 500-word abstracts to Patrick Cox at ptcox@camden.rutgers.edu by Sept 30. Thanks.

Patrick Cox
PhD Student
2010-2011 David K. Sengstack Fellow
Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University
http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/
2010 ChLA Hannah Beiter Graduate Student Research Award Recipient
https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies
http://camden-rutgers.academia.edu/PatrickTCox/Blog