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, from print on paper to digital content, both enriches and complicates 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 lessons 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 variety of (or precursor to?) “edutainment.” They are, as the motto of *Highlights for Children* puts 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
periodicals and/or their auxiliary products in the marketplace

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

NeMLA Conference link: http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/