Playing to belong: Sharing princesses and mediating preschool cultures
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Date
2015
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Peter Lang
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Abstract
Children's extensive engagements with princess culture have sparked controversy over the potential identity-shaping effects of popular media on young girls, evident in high levels of public debate in social media spheres around recent mass-market books, including, My Princess Boy (Kilodavis and DeSimone 2010) Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Orenstein 2011) and The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (Hains 2014). Educational research in the past decade shows benefits to literacy learning when teachers build upon young children's diverse strengths and popular media interests that show up so often in their play (Dyson 2003; Marsh et al. 2005). For young preschool girls today, these literary repertoires often connect to their deep knowledge of princess characters and stories in popular culture (Sekeres 2009; Wohlwend 2009). At the same time, literacy studies have alerted us to the gendered and consumerist ideological messages in these identity-shaping princess texts (Mackey 2010; Marshall and Sensoy 2011; Saltmarsh 2009). Yet we know little about the ways that the target consumersvery young girls-actually enact princess media messages during play. What happens when girls play together in classrooms where teachers provide princess dolls and encourage children to remake the princess stories into versions of their own? In this chapter, I share findings from a year-long study of critical media literacy in preschool and primary classrooms that suggest when children collaborate during play, storytelling, and media production at school, they work out issues of belonging in friendships, brand affiliations, and classroom routines in ways that open opportunities for remaking princess texts and mediate children's cultures.
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Wohlwend, K. E. (2015). Playing to belong: Sharing princesses and mediating preschool cultures. In R. Hains & M. Forman-Brunell (Eds.), Princess cultures: Mediating girls’ imaginations and identities (pp. 91-114). New York: Peter Lang.
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Book chapter