Edutainment Strategies: Sesame Street’s Story Book Community School

The first of four case study posts about my presentation for Western States Folklore Society’s Annual Meeting in April 2018. Introduced here, the presentation was titled Princess and the Letter P: Fairy Tales and Edutainment in Preschool Television. The other case studies can be found here. Sesame Street started in 1969 as one of the most groundbreaking shows in preschool television, originating the form of the pedagogical, publicly funded children’s show. The creators of Sesame Street had everything from a “pedagogical …

Preschool Edutainment and Fairy Tales: The Groundwork

My last big project was about fairy tale mashup episodes in children’s television, and took a large-scale data approach. In choosing a new research topic, I remained interested in the phenomenon that, currently, fairy tales are marketed as “kid stuff.” If marketers want adults to watch their content, they usually sell it as either “gritty” or as nostalgic. TV uses fairy tales because the audience is familiar with the plots and motifs, but what about a child’s possibly first interaction …

FTTV Takes Western States Folklore Society: 2018 Edition

The second week of April this year found the FTTV team in sunny Los Angeles, at the Otis College of Art and Design. Western States Folklore Society was having its 77th Annual Meeting, and we had been working on our panel for months. We applied as a complete panel, “Fantastic Realities of Fairy-Tale TV,” which gave us the opportunity to synthesize a panel that gave a diverse look at many different research approaches to studying fairy tale television. We had …