Literary scholar Clare Bradford gives voice to a pervasive anxiety that arises when a child audience meets unsettling ecological narratives. She remarks: "to explain to young children that pygmy hippos are under serious threat or that elephants are still being killed for their tusks or that wilderness areas are disappearing is to construct a…

In an online graduate-level early childhood education course, the authors sought to playfully disrupt and transform educators' conceptions of children's "dark play," as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the course participants problematized and expanded their…

In this article, we present CTRL_SPACE: a design for a software environment with companion hardware, developed to introduce preliterate children to basic computational concepts by means of an animatronic face, whose individual features serve as an analogy for a programmable object. In addition to presenting the environment, this article briefly…

Describes a course on social and personality development in which students wrote term papers about 10 aspects of child and adolescent development depicted in an animated film of their choice. Students had to provide two examples of each aspect from the films. Student response to the assignment was generally favorable. (MJP)