Parenting Through Pop Culture

With the ever-increasing amount of media children are consuming, it has become important for parents to learn how to help them navigate this consumption productively. All too often, the only approach to screen time by parents is a question of limiting how much and what kind. Instead, if parents and educators can adopt a more nuanced relationship to media and education, adults and children can come together in order to engage with and deconstruct the messages that are embedded in popular culture. This enables children to become more informed citizens.
This collection seeks to do just that by providing a series of essays on strategies to engage children with varying topics and programming to ensure that media consumption is an active process that promotes social and political awareness instead of apathetic entertainment.

JL Schatz is the director of debate at Binghamton University, where he teaches courses on media and politics out of the English department. He has published book chapters and journal articles on representations of apocalypse, environment and disability, as well as subjectivity in relation to teaching pedagogy in debate. He lives in Vestal, New York.

Edited by JL Schatz
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 166
Bibliographic Info: bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2020
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7694-4
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3979-6
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction: Making Sure Media Matters (JL Schatz) 1

Part One

Parents? We Don’t Need No Stinking Parents: A Discussion of Television’s Pursuit of a Parentless Society (Ryan Vaughan) 12

Un-Parented Children: Media’s Message to Combat (Charity Gibson) 26

Cloudy with a Chance of Ecological Justice: Creating Alternative Storylines for Children (Amber E. George and Jacob E. Gindi) 40

Funneling Fatherhood, Masculinity and the Super-Dad Through a Critique of Mr. Incredible and Ant-Man (Anne Bialowas and Ryan Cheek) 57

Social Media and the Activist Child (Mike Catello) 73

Part Two

Curious George Explores the Diaspora: Postcolonial Children’s Literary Criticismb (Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre) 86

Odd Squad Pedagogy: Learning from Children Together as a Team (Kevin D. Kuswa) 104

Lying Our Way to Truth: The Fun of Exploring Life with Calvin and Hobbes (Amar Singh) 118

What Is Beauty, What Is Beast? The Edutainment Value of Condon’s Beauty and the Beast (Debaditya Mukhopadhyay) 128

The Mediation of Scientific Neutrality: She-Ra’s Warning of Erring Toward Evil Through Disinterested Inquiry (JL Schatz) 141

About the Contributors 155

Index 157