Episode 8: Connecting Generations through Research with Tran Templeton & Sahana

Going Bonkers article by Henry Jenkins

Going Bonkers Revisited Blog Part 1

Going Bonkers Revisited Blog Part 2

Sahana's previous Pop and Play appearance on our "Choose Your Own Adventure" episode

 

 

 

 

[theme music plays]

Nathan:
Hey, it's another week. It's another Pop and Play.

Haeny:
Get excited.

Nathan:
I'm always excited.

Haeny:
So basically all season, and we've been talking about intergenerational relationships, and part of that is listening to each other.

Nathan:
You and me listening to each other?

Haeny:
No, children and adults-

Nathan:
Okay, thank god. Okay.

Haeny:
And across generations listening to each other and hearing people out.

Nathan:
Right, right, right. Yes. Yes. That's a big part of what we've been discussing, and how generations share with one another about their interests and their lives through media.

Haeny:
Yeah. So on that note, let's talk about "Going Bonkers." Nathan, tell us about this "Going Bonkers" piece that we both love.

Nathan:
Totally normal segue.

Haeny:
Mm-hmm.

Nathan:
I feel like you are the one who should really introduce it, because I think I've told you this before. You're the one who introduced this article to me. I had not heard of this article until you shared it with me.

Haeny:
What?

Nathan:
Yeah, yeah.

Haeny:
Oh, I did not know that. Okay.

Nathan:
You are the origin of this, of the "Going Bonkers" article.

Haeny:
Oh my gosh. Okay.

Nathan:
So tell us, tell us about "Going Bonkers."

Haeny:
Well, okay, so "Going Bonkers," I think it's a chapter from a larger book by Henry Jenkins, who's like, you would call them like a media pop culture scholar.

Nathan:
Yeah.

Haeny:
Right? Yeah.

Nathan:
At USC, I believe.

Haeny:
Mm-hmm.

Nathan:
Yep.

Haeny:
And so basically what he did was he gathered his son, who was five at the time, and a bunch of his friends, to watch them watch television, and specifically Pee-wee's Playhouse.

Nathan:
Right. Which for our listeners, our listeners are of a certain generation, I suspect, so I suspect most of them know what Pee-wee's Playhouse is. But if you don't know what Pee-wee's Playhouse is, it's kind of an insane variety show. Pee-wee Herman was obviously the main character, and he was surrounded by a lot of ... Sometimes people that would come by in costume, sometimes inanimate objects that also happen to be characters. I distinctly remember the chair named Chairy, I believe.

Haeny:
Yeah, Chairy.

Nathan:
He was his good buddy, right? And all these other-

Haeny:
Other Laurence Fishburne, the whatever he was. I forgot. Like a cowboy, or?

Nathan:
Oh, yeah.

Haeny:
Yeah.

Nathan:
Yeah, but it was a kid's show, but it like was a kid's show, if you took the idea of a kid's show and you cranked it up to an 11. It was just kind of off-the-walls crazy.

Haeny:
Mm-hmm.

Nathan:
Go ahead.

Haeny:
Yeah, which I loved.

Nathan:
Yeah, same.

Haeny:
I remember very distinct parts of it that I love. He would have this giant aluminum foil ball, and basically he would roll it over, and it's gigantic, and people would come to his house and gift him a piece of aluminum foil to add onto the aluminum foil ball, which is actually really cool. I just loved it, because as an adult looking back on it, it was the epitome of just ... Everything was not linear. It was a sideways. It was like this queer space before queer spaces became cool. It was just a very cool thing.
And so he just watched the kids watch Pee-wee Herman, and basically, I think he said that "going bonkers" is basically how the kids describe themselves watching Pee-wee Herman. "We're just going bonkers." Right? And so they're not even really paying attention to the television screen. They're just screaming, running back and forth, going to the bathroom, eating snacks, sometimes watching for a second, then starting to laugh, and then playing games and doing all of these other things.
And basically at the end of the day, they're just enacting what the spirit of Pee-wee's Playhouse is. Let's not all do the same thing. Let's just be nuts, and let's just go bonkers. So that was the chapter in a nutshell, right?

Nathan:
Yeah, yeah. But he goes into some depth also about the ways in which the forms that the play takes starts to represent the various kinds of interests of the kids, or particular needs of the kids, or ways in which kids are testing their identities, testing their boundaries. So this form of media, which was very popular, but also something that I think parents in general were a little skeptical, a little confused by, a little unsure of, because of as you noticed, the queerness of the space ... It was a child's space, and it was a child's space to work out child issues.

Haeny:
Mm-hmm, yeah. And I also like, I think the idea that play is all of those things. Really confusing, complex, messy, no one understands it. It's just this joyful space that you can't even describe really, because it's never going to happen like that ever again.

Nathan:
It's just going bonkers.

Haeny:
Yeah, going bonkers. Exactly. So that was the idea of it, so let's tell the audience why we're even talking about going bonkers.

Nathan:
Right, other than the fact that it's just a delightful read. A number of years ago, Henry Jenkins wrote a blog post where he invited his son, who is now an adult, to read the article, the original article, and then they had a conversation together about this piece, and about the memory of his son of this experience, his sort of reflection on does this research sound right, all of those kinds of things.
It got us thinking about the ways in which we often are really interested in continuing those relationships with the kids that we work with, the ways in which we often wonder the extent to which the research that we do, how it reflects what we think we're reflecting. Both of us do research where we really get in there with kids, we really engage with them as people, and we spend time with them, and we kind of explore their interests. It's not like we're these outsiders who are trying to not touch, not affect, not be part of the research. When you're part of the research, you also develop these sorts of relationships, friendships, those kinds of things.
That sort of revisited idea I think was really intriguing.

Haeny:
And I don't know about you, but I always wonder, I always imagine, what if this kid picked up this article that I wrote five years later? What would they think about it? Sometimes I imagine, "Oh, I wrote this about this kid when he was six, now he's 11. I wonder what he would think about what he said here." It's almost this weird thing that their actions when they were five years old are basically sedimented on this piece of paper, right? For all time.

Nathan:
Right.

Haeny:
It's interesting because the article doesn't change, the kids do change.

Nathan:
Right.

Haeny:
Yeah. In that revisited piece, Henry Jr kind of talks about that. The unsettling, weird. It's weird to read about yourself as a 30-year-old versus when you were five, you didn't really care what was on this piece of paper. I think that is really fascinating, and I think one of the things he said is that when he read it, it was really unsettling, because he had so much distance from that five-year-old version of himself, and he doesn't recognize who that is. I thought it was really interesting take on it.
I feel like as researchers or ... Not even researchers, right? Just anybody who is in any kind of vicinity with kids, where we're responsible for hearing them out in some way, whether it's a teacher, child, adult, or parent, caregiver, child, whether it's a researcher and the researched, whatever you want to call that. I think there's this responsibility to hear these young people out, and sometimes I have to question whether I've really heard them fully.
I think that's been something that I've been thinking about more and more, because I think when you start off as a researcher, you're just so glad you even collected data and you're so happy about it.

Nathan:
I got the interview on, thank god.

Haeny:
I did it, I did it. But then now, I'm starting to think about, "Well, what did I do?" When I said I did it, what did I actually do back then? And did I really listen fully? And are there other ways that I could have heard somebody out? Maybe there is this point where I think it'd be really a beautiful next step to be like, Should we ask them if this is accurate? Should we ask them if we heard them correctly? Did we give them an opportunity to shift the way we thought we interpreted something?

Nathan:
Yeah. Well, and there's methodologies to do that, right? There's like member checking, and things where you do sort of show your work to the person under study, and investigate with them the extent to which your interpretation of events, or your retelling of what they said reflects what they mean. But it's something different about coming back to it, right?

Haeny:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Nathan:
Of putting, like you said, with the Henry Jenkins articles, putting distance between yourself in this moment and then yourself, who you are, who you've grown to be.

Haeny:
I have done it a few times in different ways. One thing that I have done is I have tried to make these little videos, where I culminate a lot of the data that I found and some things that I've analyzed to show them.

Nathan:
Oh, cool.

Haeny:
And then I would show it to them, and then they would comment and reflect back on it or give me feedback, and I actually loved it.

Nathan:
That's cool.

Haeny:
I wish that I wrote a whole paper about that part, because it is so ... They're brutal. Sometimes they're not nice to me when I show them this video that I spent a whole 40+ hours trying to make. I show it to them and they're like, "Oh my God, this is way too short. You didn't talk about all the things."

Nathan:
More of me!

Haeny:
Yeah, and then all the things that I spent time juxtaposing all the artifacts that they made, the things that they loved were Google images I found in three seconds. They're like, "How did you find that image of Roblox? How did you find this?"

Nathan:
Terrible.

Haeny:
And I'm like, "Oh my God, that's not even the hard part." Right? But it was really interesting just to hear them. They also had a take on things that I thought they said, right? And then my interpretations of what they were saying and additions to that. I think it's really fascinating just to get their take and perspective on some of these things.

Nathan:
Yeah, that's really cool. That's really cool.

Haeny:
Yeah. So-

Nathan:
Let's talk to somebody. Let's talk to a researcher. Let's talk to a researcher and a kid they've done some research with, and see how they think about all this.

Haeny:
Wait, do we have one?

Nathan:
I sure hope so, otherwise, what the hell are we doing here?

Haeny:
In that light, the reason why we invited our next two guests, Tran and Sahana, is because I think that they did that. They did the things that we dreamed of, right? Tran had Sahana read an article that she wrote with some distance from the time of the research project, and she also got feedback from her, and I think they have a relationship where they're able to give each other constructive critique, and the way that Tran hears it, I think is really lovely. Yeah, yeah.
I think just to bring a whole season of thinking about relationships, and especially intergenerational ones, and how we have productive, thoughtful, respectful relationships with one another, we thought that we would investigate how these two people who came together under ... Obviously, there's a hierarchy between adults and kids, right? But then how do two people come together and actually destabilize some of that hierarchy, and then create a different kind of relating to one another, right?

Nathan:
Yeah.

[theme music plays]

Haeny:
We're going to start by introducing both of you, okay? We're really lucky today to have two very distinguished guests, one repeat guest from our pod, so we'd like to call Sahana a friend of the pod.

Nathan:
Friend of the pod.

Haeny:
We have the Sahana Narayan, friend of the pod, who famously coined the term, "What's poppin? Art and avocados." Very, very excited about that.

Nathan:
Famously, yeah.

Haeny:
And then we have Dr. Tran Templeton, who is an assistant professor here, of Early Childhood at Teachers College, and we are very lucky to have her here at the college, and also on the pod.

Nathan:
That's what I was going to say.

Haeny:
Yeah, that's what you're going to say. Okay.
We thought, okay, instead of you having to tell us more about yourself, because I know Tran never likes to talk about herself, we thought we'd start with you just talking about each other. Tran, do you want to start us off? What's something that you remember about Sahana, maybe when you first met her? Or just even a really interesting story or something that stands out to you about Sahana. And don't cry.

Tran:
I won't. Although I did almost do that when I was taking notes. I met Sahana, I met you when you were two years old, in the toddler classroom at the Rita Gold Center, which is the childcare center here at Teachers College, but I think one of the things that I remember most about you ... Are you kind of nervous about what I'm going to share?
Since Sahana was two, one of the ways that she communicated was through this really, really high pitch scream. It was probably the highest pitch that I've ever heard a human being manifest. Sahana had this ... Haeny knows this, I love gestures, so I love observing people's gestures. I'm studying your gestures as we speak. Sahana has great gestures, and when she was two, one of her classic gestures was finger sucking gesture, but not just any regular, because usually kids do thumbs, or ... I don't know. What's another? Just putting your two fingers.

Nathan:
Yeah.

Tran:
Yeah. She had this one where if you put your hand out in front of you, and your palm is facing someone else, but then you take your first finger and then you put it inside your mouth ...

Haeny:
It's kind of backwards.

Tran:
Yeah, it's kind of the reach-back. I don't know. Can you still do that, by the way?

Sahana:
Yes.

Tran:
I would say that that's a visual memory of Sahana that I have. I have other salient memories, including her obsession with the color orange. She used to sort of forage the classroom, the world for objects that were that color, and she'd put them together in these really beautiful assemblages, is what I call them. That's two memories. I could share others, including her fear of toilet flushing.

Nathan:
Still?

Sahana: 
No.

Haeny:
I have to note that Sahana is now rolling her eyes at you for mentioning that one. So do you still like the color orange, Sahana?

Sahana:
Yes.

Haeny:
Excellent. And you can still do the back bend?

Sahana:
Yes.

Haeny:
Excellent.

Nathan:
I'll also note that when you were telling about the high-pitched scream, that our producer definitely reached over and got his hand on the volume just in case.

Tran:
Do you still have that high-pitched scream available?

Sahana:
I think so. I remember I didn't like when people laughed, because I always thought they were laughing at me.

Nathan:
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Haeny:
I can relate to that though, because I think that a lot of times too, I would actually in the middle of teaching, be like, "Wait, are you guys laughing at me, or laughing at a joke I told? Because I can't tell."

Nathan:
Yeah, I usually is the other issue where it's like, "Why aren't you guys laughing? I'm trying to be funny and no one is laughing. This is not-"

Haeny:
That tracks.

Tran:
But I do remember that. I remember when we would look at you and have some kind of exaggerated expression, like laughing or whatever it may be, and it did not make you happy.

Haeny:
Yeah, nice.

Nathan:
What about you, Sahana? What are some memories that you have of Tran, or maybe a story that you could tell us about your first experiences that you remember?

Sahana:
There are so many stories that I still remember, but the one that always stands out to me is that time I asked you where you got your nail polish, and you said Whole Foods.

Tran:
Wait, why is that funny?

Nathan:
We're not laughing at you, Tran-

Haeny:
No, we're laughing with you.

Nathan:
We're laughing with you.

Haeny:
Ah.

Nathan:
That's good.

Haeny:
I didn't even know they sold nail polish at Whole Foods.

Tran:
That's exactly what Sahana said. We actually have an audio recording of that conversion.

Sahana:
Yes. We still have the video.

Haeny:
Yeah.

Nathan:
Data. Yeah. Well, we're super excited to have both of you here, and one of the things that we like to do to get started, to get us kind of thinking together and laughing together is play a little game. Okay? We have a little game for you guys to play this week. All right?
Here's how this game is going to work. As Haeny mentioned in the introduction, you sort of famously coined this phrase, art or avocados. That is something that Haeny and I have both repeated multiple times since, and so we thought we'd create a game where you had a choice, art or avocados. You have to make a decision at some point here. I'm going to give you a scenario and each of you are going to respond of whether you would prefer art or avocados. Okay?

Sahana:
Well, this is a hard question-

Nathan:
I know. Well, you don't know the question yet.

Sahana:
Because art can make avocados and avocados can make art.

Nathan:
That is very, very smart, and you might be able to use that to your advantage here in answering some of these questions, okay? So here's the first scenario. You've just finished a long day of school or work, and you come home. Which do you dive into first? Art or avocados?

Sahana:
Origami.

Haeny:
So art.

Nathan:
Art.

Tran:
Art or avocado, which do I dive into first? I'm usually famished when I finish work, so I probably would go for avocados.

Nathan:
Avocados for you.

Haeny:
Good answer.

Nathan:
Okay, good. Second scenario, you're stranded on a desert island and you can only bring one. Do you bring art supplies or do you bring a bushel of avocados?

Sahana:
Avocados, because I'd get hungry. I'd get hungry.

Nathan:
A whole bushel, yeah.

Tran:
I would think that I could find other sources of food, so I would probably go for art supplies so that I can nourish myself that way.

Nathan:
Oh, wow.

Sahana:
You could always use a stick and then draw in the sand.

Haeny:
Exactly. You could be resourceful. Well, I guess you could be resourceful both ways. I'll allow it. I'll accept both responses.

Tran:
I guess you could make, like you said-

Nathan:
You could make art with the avocados. Yeah.

Tran:
That's exactly right.

Nathan:
All right. Almost done here. You're starting your first business. The question is, do you make the world's best art store, or the first grocery store that only sells avocados?

Sahana:
Art store, because not that many people would come for just avocados. It's like, What do we need today? Oh, we're making tacos. Okay. Instead of going to the regular grocery store, which sells everything, we'll go to the Just Avocados store for the guacamole.

Nathan:
That's a catchy title for your store already. Catchy, catchy business name. Just Avocados.

Haeny:
Just Avocados. I'd like to point out that-

Sahana:
There's one called Just Food for Dogs, which is not a very creative-

Haeny:
But that's useful.

Sahana:
But it works.

Haeny:
That was really fun. Thanks for playing the game along with us.
Okay, so I kind of already asked you all those what you remember about the first time you guys met, and I think you've also talked about what you appreciate about each other. Maybe over the years, how long have you all known each other? How many years has it been? You knew each other when Sahana was two?

Tran:
How old are you now? 10? Eight years.

Haeny:
Wow, you've known each other for eight years.

Nathan:
That's how long Haeny and I have known each other.

Haeny:
Yeah. Wow. Oh my gosh, that's so true. Can you talk about maybe how your relationship has changed? Because you used to be teacher-student, right? And now you are something else, which I'm not going to try to say what it is, but maybe you could talk about how your relationship has changed over the years. What's different?

Sahana:
I still wonder about that nail polish from Whole Foods.

Haeny:
Have you noticed other quirks that Tran has besides the nail polish?

Sahana:
No.

Tran:
Because there are none.

Nathan:
I am super normal.

Tran:
Well, so I was your toddler teacher, then I was your preschool teacher, and then we did research together. Although, I do wonder if you-

Sahana:
And you took me to the cat cafe.

Tran:
I did, yes. I actually was Sahana's babysitter for a number of years.

Haeny:
After? During?

Tran:
During Rita Gold, and after, I believe. I think the last time I watched you was 2017, then I moved away, so it was harder to stay in touch. I've stayed in touch with your mom. I did watch you play guitar at a recital on Zoom while I was away.

Sahana:
Oh, yeah.

Tran:
Our relationship, I guess, has shifted in many ways, and now that I'm back, I feel like we are restarting a new part of our relationship. Primarily because Sahana is older now, and I sometimes wonder how much she remembers about my role, because I feel like as an adult, we remember, especially as a teacher, a caregiver, we remember a lot more about children than perhaps children remember about us.

Haeny:
Yeah.

Nathan:
What do you think, Sahana? How has your relationship with Tran changed over the years?

Sahana:
Well, I remember from kindergarten I used to see her more, but then I wasn't very happy when she moved.

Haeny:
Why not?

Sahana:
Well, because I liked her. I liked seeing her every day, but then-

Nathan:
Here come the water works.

Sahana:
But then I did geometry.

Tran:
I would say you've always done geometry, but okay.

Nathan:
A big part of your relationship, in addition to the many years that you guys were together, was also the research that you mentioned, that you did together. I'm wondering, could you talk briefly about what this project was about?

Tran:
Yeah. My research is in looking at how children represent themselves, I had been taking photos of children for many years as a teacher, and I realized that I'd never had handed the camera over to children themselves. Looking at the internet, you see just millions of images of children taken by adults, and I wondered, "Well, how do children present themselves to the world?" What would the images they take look like? Would it look like the kinds of images that we see adults taking of children?
This is inspired by one of my mentors, Wendy Luttrell, who does this with children and teens, and so I decided, let's see what it looks like with very young children, two to five year olds. Sahana was in the group that I conducted one of the studies.

Haeny:
Sahana, why don't you tell us. I want to hear what you thought was happening when Tran was doing this research. What did you think you guys were up to?

Sahana:
I mostly liked the camera, I remember. I liked walking around with it and just ... When I was little, I thought everything was pretty much a toy. It's like this camera was just a bright, flashy toy. What's better for a little kid than a bright flashy toy?
But I think it's similar, because you don't really see what kids take pictures of, because they can take pictures of all sorts of things that grownups wouldn't take pictures of, because when grownups take pictures of kids, they're often like, "Okay, you stand in the middle, smile big. Now we won't move you near here because it's too dark here, and there's like this pile of garbage over here. We'll move you to the section with all the flowers, and the sun is shining, and the sky's blue. And then we'll position it in the middle."
And it's just not a very natural photo, because you don't smile with your eyes when you're told to, sometimes. They'll be like, "Cheese!" And you don't really smile with your eyes. That's why sometimes a photo that a grownup takes is not as natural.

Haeny:
Okay. Sahana, you said that you read the article that Tran wrote about you.

Tran:
Right.

Haeny:
Tran, how does it feel to have Sahana read your articles? Were you nervous about it? Were you happy for her to read it?

Tran:
Yeah, for sure. No, I was definitely nervous. I sent you one of the first ones right after it got published, and I think you read it, but you were five.

Nathan:
Wow.

Tran:
Sahana actually was an early reader, so she started reading when she was three. Do you remember this? And so just walking through the city was very different with a three-year-old who could read.

Nathan:
Yeah, I imagine so.

Sahana:
I would look at that and then I'd be like, "Oh, danger. That means we can't go there."

Tran:
You really couldn't lie to Sahana, because she could read the signs.

Nathan:
They're all out of ice cream, today on Wednesday. "No, it says it's open."

Tran:
Exactly. So yeah, I was definitely nervous to see what she would think, but I also think that I tried to represent the children in expansive ways for the most part, because that's my commitment, right? Is to portraying children in the myriad ways that they represent themselves. I was nervous, but I wasn't scared or reluctant to share the work with her.
I think when her mom texted me back and said, we approve in so many words, that certainly felt ... It felt better than even getting it published or having people compliment it. To hear your own participants speak to your work is super powerful.

Haeny:
Yeah.

Sahana:
I think it's interesting, because sometimes when you write an article, you think about your friends and family who will read this article, right? And you're like, "Oh, I'm so nervous. I should make this such a good article for them to read." But then so many other people read your article, except you sometimes don't think about that, because you're thinking about the other people.

Tran:
This is Sahana.

Haeny:
So deep.

Tran:
Always been a philosopher, even the age of two and three. Do you remember when you used to talk about yourself in third person? If she had something particularly important to say, she would say, "And she proclaimed."

Haeny:
I really love that.

Sahana:
Did I even know the word proclaimed?

Nathan:
Apparently so.

Tran:
Maybe you were coming into understanding it, because you were reading it in stories, like Wallace and Gromit and Peppa Pig, or the Peppa Pig Winnie the Poo.

Sahana:
Gromit!

Tran:
Yeah, I think Sahana also had a bit of an English accent when she was very young-

Sahana:
Maybe sometimes.

Tran:
Because of the Wallace and Gromit and Peppa Pig influence.

Nathan:
I think that's an excellent way to be raised.

Haeny:
Nathan's about to bust into English accent right now.

Tran:
Do you have a good English accent?

Nathan:
I can do a Peppa Pig with ... Muddy puddle! No, I can't do it. Muddy puddles! I can't do it.

Sahana:
George!

Nathan:
I used to be able to. Oh, that was good. I don't want to go to school today.

Sahana:
Peppa always wanted to go to school though. I can't remember Peppa saying I don't want to go to school.

Nathan:
Oh, well. That's all I could think of.

Sahana:
Peppa was always positive about everything she did. She was never like, "No, I don't want to do this."

Nathan:
Right.

Tran:
Sahana, it sounds like we need to do a Peppa Pig analysis.

Haeny:
I know. Sounds like that's what's poppin. Okay, so this is actually a serious question. This is for both of you, so either of you can answer this, but what does it mean to actually listen to kids?
All this season on each episode, I think one of the takeaways is that we want to have more intergenerational relationships, and that takes a lot of listening and hearing each other out, because there's so many misunderstandings between generations. What does it mean for adults to really listen to kids?

Sahana:
Well, I think they can often get a new perspective, because sometimes the grownups are like, they have a very fixed way of the way they see the world. They're like, "This is this, and this is that, right?"

Haeny:
Mm-hmm.

Sahana:
So it's like, this rose is pretty and this garbage is weird, and I don't want it here and it looks bad, but the kid might not say that. They might say, "Well, this rose could be pretty, but it has all these thorns, which are prickly and the prickly thorns aren't great. And then look at the garbage, there are so many colors inside of it. Wonder what it is."
So it's like it could change the perspective that grownups have. They're like, "This is what it is." But then the kid could be like, "Actually, no it's not."

Haeny:
That's such a complicated analogy too, right?

Nathan:
Yeah, that's a good one.

Haeny:
Did you just think of that right now? The idea that a rose could be so beautiful and we think that, but then there's thorns on it, so it could also actually hurt? And then garbage can be so disgusting, but then it could have a lot of colors in it, so it could actually be really beautiful? I love that.

Tran:
Did you just think of that?

Haeny:
Did you just think of that?

Sahana:
Yeah.

Tran:
I think that our roles should be switched. This should be the assistant professor over here.

Haeny:
I know, but I love that, shifting your perspective, right?

Tran:
Yeah, and I agree. I think it's shifting your perspective and then adjusting yourself in light of what you are listening to and what you're hearing. Right? That it's not just, "Okay, I heard you," but, "Okay, I heard you and here's what we're going to do to respond to that." It's not always possible to respond to what children tell us, as you know, as a parent, but just keeping that in mind as a serious thing, right? Really treating their perspective seriously.

Nathan:
Yeah, doing that I think is hard to do, and I think I really appreciate the research that you've talked about and the ways you guys have discussed this, because I think that's a powerful practice to engage in when you take a moment to try to flip your perspective, flip your view.

Haeny:
Yeah. That was so delightful. Thank you so much for being here with us. Before we let you go, we like to end the show by asking our guests, Sahana already knows this, what's poppin? Something that is out in pop culture land, it's a book, movie, whatever, whatever it is that you're really into right now that you think other people should be into too.

Sahana:
I don't know if other people would be into this, but I've been waiting to answer this question, because there's that singer, his name is like Rick Astley or something, and he's from so long ago, and everybody's obsessed with him.

Haeny:
I don't want to something, something.

Tran:
I don't want to give you up-

Sahana:
That's the one! That's it! And everybody keeps singing it.

Nathan:
I love that our last episode of the season is a Rick Roll.

Sahana:
It's so silly because like-

Haeny:
How did you learn about Rick Astley?

Sahana:
I don't know, because they all started singing it, and my teacher was like, "Why does everyone like singing this?" And they're like, "Oh, it wasn't some TikTok video." And then Miss Pick is like, "You do know that song spent the 1980s, right?" And then everyone's like, "What? It's from the eighties?"

Nathan:
You're saying Rick Astley's popping?

Sahana:
I don't know, but-

Tran:
I think he never stopped poppin.

Nathan:
I mean, he's been poppin for decades. Yeah.

Haeny:
I love that. Holy cow.

Tran:
I think that is actually a good one to end on.

Haeny:
That's a good one.

[Never Gonna Give You Up Plays briefly]

Tran:
There we go.

Haeny:
Oh my god, that's so great.

Tran:
That's going to be the closing song.

Nathan:
Wow, that was unexpected. I didn't expect Rick, Rick Astley to be popping today.

Sahana:
That's why I was waiting for this question.

Nathan:
That is so amazing. Thank you.

Sahana:
I was waiting for that question.

Haeny:
I love it.

Nathan:
That was perfect.

Haeny:
That was perfect.

Nathan:
Never going to give you up.

Haeny:
Never going to let you down.

Sahana:
It's kind of in every school.

Nathan:
This is such a perfect thing to end on, because I feel like Never Gonna Give You Up is maybe one of the most intergenerational media artifacts that we could be talking about. Something that has existed, as you said, for multiple decades, and it keeps having comeback after comeback. We're having a new comeback apparently at your school. That's absolutely wild.

Haeny:
That's awesome.

Tran:
All right.

Haeny:
Alright, thank you so much to Sahana and Tran. We really appreciate this conversation. It's been fun.

Nathan:
It's been a delight. Thanks for being here with us today.

Tran:
Thanks for having us.

Haeny:
Thank you.

[Theme music plays]

Nathan:
This season of Pop and Play was produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudaven, Billy Collins and Joe Riina-Ferrie, an assistant produced by Lucius Von Joo, at Teachers College, Columbia University with a Digital Futures Institute. Audio editing and production by Billy Collins.

Haeny:
For transcripts, and to learn more about our guests, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leaf Eaters by Podington Bear. Pop and Play, of course, would not be possible without the fabulous team that helps put this together.
Thanks to Oluwaseun Animashaun for running the Pop and Play social media accounts, where you should follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok under Pop and Play Pod. You can also follow us on Twitch under Pop and Play. Special thanks to Drew Reynolds, Jen Lee, Blake Danzig, Brianne Minaudo, Moira McCavana, and Lucius Von Joo, who all helped with our outreach and or website support. Shout out to Ioana Literat for the Trashies, watch on Instagram and TikTok. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.