The Popular Culture of Childhood

Tutor:  Michael Flanagan NT, BEd, MA, MALPC (Leadership and Pastoral Care), PhD.

Michael is a former Lead Tutor in History of Education in Hibernia College and Head of Primary School Placement in St. Nicholas Montessori College. He has considerable experience in the creation and delivery of adult education courses in the ALBA (Adult Learning BA) programme in All Hallows College, DCU. He has presented widely at conferences in the area of Media Studies and Popular Culture and has published extensively in this field.

This course aims to offer students the opportunity to study the role of popular culture, from the oral tradition, through the development of print media and up to today’s contemporary digital age, as a significant agent in influencing and shaping childhood. 

Such topics as the ‘hidden code’ of fairy stories, the fantasy world of boarding school narratives for boys and girls and the often-contentious experience of Irish children in the state’s educational system since Independence are considered over the twelve weeks of this programme. The scope of these modules ranges across such traditional media expressions as children’s literature, as in, for example, Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows and the representation of childhood in cinema through the films of Walt Disney. We will learn about the evolution of adventure narrative in the Victorian and Edwardian period. This course looks at the growth and development of such British serial papers for children as The Bunty and Judy, Victor and Hotspur, and the ‘Rolls Royce’ of the genre – the Eagle and contrasts this style of children’s magazine with its trans-Atlantic counterparts, superhero comics with Captain America, Superman, and Batman – and their high-quality colourful story strips and irresistible glossy covers, produced by DC Comics and Dell.

The Depiction of Food in Children’s Popular Culture will be considered  in this course and students will perhaps relate to such childhood memories as Alf Tupper’s ‘Tough of the Track’ who featured in the Victor, and rewarded himself each week after, inevitably, winning another race, with a large, steaming helping of fish and chips, The Beano’s ‘Bash Street Kids’ with their plates overflowing with sausage and mash and the illicit and tempting image of that perennial staple of the girls’ boarding school narratives  – the midnight feast. 

The influence of contemporary media saturation and the danger of young people’s exposure to an uncontrolled and frequently unsupervised online world is investigated and potential solutions discussed. We will, over the process of this twelve-week course, address the fundamental question of how society’s concept of childhood has changed over time and the manner in which popular culture has reflected these broader socio/cultural concerns. 

Tuesday Morning – 11.30 – 1.30pm             12 weeks                  Cost: €145