Teaching Disney in the Age of Perpetual, Disposable Consumption

Document Type

Presentation

Presentation Date

4-2017

Abstract or Description

Presentation given at the American Educational Research Association Conference (AERA).

Purpose: This exploration of Disney culture will consist of three parts. First, Disney is placed within the context of the politics of the neoliberal culture of consumption. Second, critically teaching Disney within that context of consumption is examined through an autobiography of teaching experiences as a basis to understand the current attitudes of youth toward Disney. Third, Disney brand loyalty is placed within perpetual, disposal consuming in the 21st century and within lines of flight that provide a micropolitics of resistance.

Theoretical Perspectives: This work draws upon previous research done on the influences and repercussions of Disney on American culture (Giroux and Pollock, 2016; Author, 2016). Disney culture is also placed within the larger global, political context (Bauman, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2011) and notions of public pedagogy (Savage, 2013). This places Disney within the larger neoliberal corporate culture and works to further discussions of Disney and teaching. Additionally, references (Deleuze, 1987, 1995) will be used to discuss the ways in which educators might find lines of flight to interweave resistance to the territorialization of the corporate world view.

Methodology: The work that informs the research in this investigation is based upon critical autobiographical methods and pedagogical experiences of the author and research in autobiography (Authors, et. al., 2008; Pinar, 2011). These conceptualizations are designed to analyze one’s own professional practices. The work analyzes fourteen years of teaching Disney critically to the millennial generation in Colleges of Education and that generation’s response to critical analysis of a media icon.

Results: As a result of the autobiographical analysis of teaching Disney within a critical perspective a number of conclusions are drawn. When critically teaching Disney to the millennial generation or the zero generation (Standing, 2011) issues of nostalgia arise. Nostalgia is discussed as a protective response to an uncertain future for prospective teachers. The manner in which Disney is critically taught can lead to the possibilities of lines of flight for micropolitical avenues of resistance to the neoliberal agenda in education and society.

Significance: The knowledge produced as a result of this work provides not only an analysis of the millennial generation’s unwavering tie to a particular icon of popular culture and its resistance to its critical examination, but also a discussion of the micropolitics of lines of flight. Those micropolitics enable prospective teachers and teacher educators to think and work from a type of middle space between the zero possibilities provided by neoliberalism and the escape of a type of nostalgia for things as they never were. This thinking and working in lines of flight and from spaces in the middle provide potential resistance without guarantees.

Sponsorship/Conference/Institution

American Educational Research Association Conference (AERA)

Location

San Antonio, TX

Source

http://tinyurl.com/honbufv

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