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Building on theories of adolescent learning, including cognitive, personal, social, and moral development, this chapter considers how using media literacy techniques to analyze a children’s television program can create wide-awake, active learners while dissecting media messages. By analyzing children’s television for its portrayal of race and ethnicity, this chapter will explore the role media play in children's understanding of people and cultures outside of their own. A textual analysis of episodes of Maya & Miguel, the chapter describes the depiction of several cultures found represented on the program including White, Asian, African, Dominican, and Mexican and how race, ethnicity, and culture is framed in the television program.

Some theories suggest that television is a primary tool in the socialization of children. Children are attracted to the animation in cartoons, the colors, the movement and the easy-to-follow simplicity of the dialogue. Given the impressionable nature of children, it is possible that they begin to act out the biased nature of the cartoons they watch. Thus, considering their vulnerability, information literacy is relevant to discerning media messages. In this way, information literacy converges with media literacy and visual literacy. Guiding children to interrogate what they view is critically important especially when they are at an age where they can be easily influenced by misinformation or dominant messages. Additionally, the volume of information is steadily increasing in the 21st century as are the modes for accessing, creating and manipulating information. Thus, this work will demonstrate how promoting participatory learning by objectively viewing media and exercising reflective thinking will be important components of children’s education in this millennium.

Researcher Highlight: Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950)

This chapter focuses on Norman K. Denzin's vast and enduring contributions to sociology and the study of research methods and methodology, particularly with respect to “us[ing] the tools of the critical sociological imagination” (Denzin, 1989) as we conduct our research. Through revisiting and extending lessons and principles from his book The Research Act (1989) – especially the need for “triangulation” – in relation to C. Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination (1959), this chapter explores how cultivated critical sociological imaginations can help researchers best meet our “obligations to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference” (Denzin, 1989) throughout all phases of the research act.

Bruner (1985) once challenged learning theorists to define their model of the learner rather than design curriculum and instruction materials directed at a vague, and perhaps nonexistent, target. We suggest that motivation theorists do the same. The model of co-regulated learning that we describe (McCaslin, 2009) first posits learners who: (1) are social by nature (biological adaptations) and by nurture (socialization) (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Geary, 2002; Olson & McCaslin, 2008); (2) have basic needs for participation and validation that can inform student dispositions toward school (McCaslin & Burross, 2008); and (3) differ in how and in what they participate – their adaptation (McCaslin & Burross, in press, p. xx). Second, the co-regulation model of the learner asserts that motivation and identity are mutually informative; what I am and am not willing to do inform who I am and the person I might become. Both motivation and identity are based on opportunities denied, taken, or missed and on the interpersonal relationships that do or do not support and validate them. Opportunities and relationships are based, in part, on cultural norms and challenges that delineate individuals historically and presently in time and place (see McCaslin, 2009 for full explication of these and related constructs). Motivation is at the core of identity. Thus, motivations of today's learners inform not only their school achievements, but also the adults they may become. If motivation is the core of emergent identity now and in the future, what then is at the core of motivation?

In this chapter, I explore how the queer-coding, gendering and policing of the monstrous female villain figure of twenty-first-century fairy tale media is interrogated and renegotiated in the transformative narrative tradition of femslash fan-fiction. With fan studies often focusing on the most popular, vocal fandom spaces and cultures, femslash (female-female) fan-fiction has been undertheorized in academic scholarship, just as queer female desire is routinely invalidated by the mainstream media properties that inspire femslash fans (Cranz, 2016; Gonzalez, 2016; Ng & Russo, 2017; Stanfill, 2017). By romantically and sexually pairing female villains with the heroines against whom they are canonically cast as antagonists, femslash fans of Once Upon a Time and The Devil Wears Prada subvert the heteronormative and anti-feminist plot machinery that pits women against each other. The engagement of femslash fan authors with the depiction of the characters Regina Mills and Miranda Priestly as literal and figurative ‘Evil Queens’ in their source texts highlights the extent to which both women are situated as ‘villains’ because of their position as ‘unhappy queers’ who obstruct heteronormative happy endings (Ahmed, 2010; Pande & Moitra, 2017; Strauch, 2017). While in the Swan Queen fiction somewhere, someone must know the ending (maleficently, 2012), Regina is only the Evil Queen in her son's imagination, as he tries to make sense of her infidelity, The Lily and the Crown (Telanu, 2013) recasts Miranda Priestly as Pirate Queen Mír, guilty of mass-murder, rather than merely acerbic barbs (as in the film). Through close readings, I argue that the way these texts ask their readers to consider the limits of both villains' desirability, by playing with the terms of their respective criminality, shows the extent to which nuancing and negotiating the ‘evil’ of these ‘queens’ is structurally embedded in these femslash fandoms. The femslash fannish investment these texts reflect, in both the figure of the queer female villain and those who desire her, proposes an alternative version of happiness to the heteronormative happy ending, one that does not attenuate the queer codes that position these ‘Evil Queens’ as monster-outsiders to it, but embraces that monstrosity as a site of power, progress and futurity.

Using a semi-autoethnographic layered account format, we present the voices of 16 Native American adults as they talk about their lives and Native American Caricature Iconography (NACI). First, we explore their impressions and lived experiences with “racial formation projects” such as tribal identification cards, blood quantum calculations, genocide, child removal, boarding schools, and reservations, to contextualize why some Native Americans interpret NACI as much more than “an honor,” “tradition,” or “just good fun.” Next, we explore the Native Americans' perceptions of sports mascots, cartoons, and sculpture, after exposing them to a series of eight images of NACI. We conclude that NACIs are racial formation projects as well. By unmindfully producing and consuming NACI, we fail to interrupt and reform the racial formation projects that continue to define us all.