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. The movement of traditional paper magazines to websites, and the appearance of periodicals with entirely digital existences, both enrich and complicate this genre. 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 - accidental pedagogy - 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 <https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies> http://camden-rutgers.academia.edu/PatrickTCox/Blog "In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." --Albert Camus "Don't let your studies interfere with your education." --Colonel Henry Rutgers "the jUdges of nOrmalitY are present everywhere." --Foucault, of course