“She Don't Know I Got It. You Ain't Gonna Tell Her, Are You?” Popular Culture as Resistance in American Preschools

Abstract

Popular culture is often a site of contestation in preschool classrooms. A multisited ethnographic design revealed preschools employed varied strategies to limit popular culture. Teacher and children's actions were considered through Michel de Certeau's (1984) concepts of tactics and strategies. Interviews and observations revealed children were well aware of rules limiting popular culture and agentively engaged in tactical resistance in order to insert their voices into the preschool curriculum. [popular culture, social class, resistance, preschool] It is a sunny, winter morning in an upper-middle-class, socially progressive Montessori preschool in the southwestern United States. A five-year-old girl arriving at school wearing a Minnie Mouse headband with large mouse ears and a bow begins playing on the playground. When she moves into the teacher's sight, she is met with a stern look of disapproval. The teacher walks up to the young girl and instructs her to "take off your headband and put it in your cubby. Those are not allowed at school." The young girl complies with the teacher's direction and returns to the playground. Ten minutes later she slyly sneaks back to her cubby, pulls the headband out, and, smiling, places it back on her head.

Brave is a dress: Understanding “good” adults and “bad” children through adult horror and children’s play

“…Many American teachers, parents, and other adults try to limit young children’s access to popular media in favor of adult-curated toys, stories, and games, which are more aligned with adult constructions of proper childhood (Jenkins, 1998). This is also a product of constructions of “good” adult identities wherein Barbies, Spiderman, and other figures of children’s media are “banal, superfluous, distasteful [and] plebian” (Henward, 2015: 208) and access to them a sign of supervisory adult shortcomings.…”

“…Henward (2015) looked specifically at teachers’ treatment of children’s popular media, including both boys’ and girls’ media. Henward found that teachers had dismal regard for children’s popular media and limited children’s access to that media accordingly.…”

“…Henward found that teachers had dismal regard for children’s popular media and limited children’s access to that media accordingly. In these early learning contexts, the “banning” of media highlighted the extent to which “adults’ voices are privileged, presumed to be superior at interpreting media effects, and children’s understandings are seen to be less important” (Henward, 2015: 208). The adults who forbade or otherwise made popular media play “illegal” employed a range of justifications for limiting children’s access to the popular media they loved, including the familiar, Bettelheim-era fairy-tale argument that Barbie, Spiderman, or the Disney Princesses distract from learning, that they are too violent or sexualized, and that they are politically unacceptable.…”

“…Many of the White, upper-middle-class adults in this context subscribed to the general belief that popular children’s media was a bad influence and that good adults would limit its influence. As Henward (2015) and Seiter (1998) describe, these parents saw children’s media as undesirable corporate contamination, but also personally contaminative: media would thwart not only children’s moral and intellectual development but also corrupt their natural creativity and personhood. This is especially pronounced for girl-oriented media: parents and teachers worry that the gender stereotypes, in particular, may rub off on their daughters (Hains, 2014).…”

Examining discursive formations in early childhood media research: A genealogical analysis

“…Scholars working in popular culture studies (Storey, 2018), media studies (Buckingham, 2015; Jenkins and Ito, 2015), literacy studies (Alvermann, 2002; Dyson, 1997, 2015; Evans, 2011; Marsh, 1999; Moje et al, 2004; Simmons, 2014; Wohlwend, 2017; Yoon, 2018) informal learning (Henward, 2015b), and digital learning (Hatzigianni, 2018) consider the incorporation of popular cultural texts and themes as salient pedagogical approaches and worthy topics of curriculum in schools. Typically employing ethnographic and highly contextualized qualitative methods, these scholars embrace symbolic or interpretivist, critical, post-modern, and post-structural traditions to recognized the social and cultural world of children and commercial media as a profound influence on, and a connection to, the education practices of children.…”