Powers, Heather, editor. Fairy Tales in the College Classroom: Essays to Spark Lesson Plan Ideas Across the Curriculum. McFarland, 2024

Abstract

As a curation of finely crafted essays on “the closest thing we have to a universal antidote” (8), Heather Powers’s Fairy Tales in the College Classroom: Essays to Spark Lesson Plan Ideas Across the Curriculum provides important resources to locate the pedagogical impact of fairy tales. Revisiting narratives that most readers are fairly well acquainted with, the essays span across the discursive terrains of linguistics, critical race studies, gender studies, visual studies, and adaptation studies. Exploring the potential of fairy tales as educational tools across various disciplines, the collection offers important perspectives on how these narratives can resourcefully enrich college-level teaching. Along with its rigorous academic approach, a reader’s familiarity with the background makes it an insightful read. This combination of academic rigor and familiar reading experiences makes the work an intriguing exploration of the several approaches the study of fairy tales invites: social, historical, anthropological, philological, and literary.