Episode 4: He-Man and Pop Culture Representation with Anne Haas Dyson

Episode Transcript

Nathan:
He-Man. (singing the theme song of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe).

Haeny Yoon:
Welcome back to another episode of Pop and Play. In this episode, we dive deep into childhood nostalgia with the watch of Netflix's Masters of the Universe: Revelation. Spoiler alert, we are about to reveal a major spoiler from the first episode of the newest series. So listen if you dare. Now that you've been warned here it goes. In this He-Man sequel, He-Man dies in the first episode, the show then continues following alternate characters as they try to pick up the pieces of their lives after the loss of their hero.

Nathan Holbert:
In true Pop and Play form, we don't really talk too much about the actual episode, but it becomes a starting point to talk about gender, superheroes and representation. We brought in our friend Anne Haas Dyson, professor of educational policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois. Her work is on childhoods, literacy and incidentally the intersection of popular culture in the lives of young people.

Haeny Yoon:
So Nathan's going to start our discussion about what he thought about the He-Man episode.

Nathan Holbert:
I thoroughly enjoyed the episode itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the season. I'm kind of curious though, for you Haeny, did you watch a lot of He-Man, whenever you were younger in the eighties? Did you watch She-Ra as a kid and then what are your thoughts on this new sort of sequel?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, I mean, if I was born in the 80s, just kidding. I was.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh... Ouch, that kind-

Haeny Yoon:
I'm kidding.

Nathan Holbert:
... Of stung, actually.

Haeny Yoon:
I wish, I wasn't. So I actually do remember watching He-Man. I do remember watching She-Ra because my brother is maybe three years younger than I am. And there was like very few overlap as to when we can actually agree on whatever we were going to watch, because I do remember like remote control fighting being like a very, very big thing, because we just have very opposite interest at some point. Yeah. Anyway, did you watch... Do you have salient memories of it? Because I'm wondering like who does it bring you back to? Like what, when, where, like where does all this happen in your life?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. So for me, I definitely do have very salient memories. My memories though are mostly of the toys, action figure, He-Man action figures that I played with all the time. That was, some people had sort of the GI Joe, some people had the Transformers I had the He-Man figurines. So for me, the toys and all the different... The castle, I had the castle of Grayskull and I don't really think I had any of the vehicles, but I remember them there being vehicles and things.
And so that was kind of the real hook for me for watching the show as well. One of the interesting things about He-Man is it came about in this time where instead of there being like a movie or a show or something, and then people making toys from those, it was reversed. They actually made the toys and they were like, oh, we need some sort of show around this. And so they designed a show and some comic, like little built in comics that would come when you would buy the toy. They made all of those things from the toys. So the toys actually came first and it was all entirely about trying to sell toys. It wasn't like we need something to make extra money off this show we've made. It was the other way around.

Haeny Yoon:
So I was thinking about like, as I was watching it, the one thing that I could, that was so obvious to me is how they over-correct for gender, right. That they are much more salient about representation, that they kind of create Teela to be like this anti-feminine person. Right. And all of that is like super obvious. And I'm wondering and I connected that with like the research that I've done with kids is that I think, so I have this story about like I was in a kindergarten classroom and I think we were really worried about gender because the children, the kids were having such weird discussions about gender, not weird, but ones that we didn't want them to have. Right. Because we're like, no, girls don't always have to be princesses. You don't have to do this da, da, da, da.
And I think we like tried to do the opposite of it. And so there was like this one day where we had like this dress-up center and the dress-up center basically had like only costumes that her sons like had growing up. So they were all like, quote boy costumes, right? Like Buzz Lightyear, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles masks, like capes and like swords and things like that. And it was still fun. Like all the kids wanted to be in that center or that area. And so, one day we're like, no, let's just do like the complete opposite and only put like feminine stuff in there so that everybody has to play with the feminine stuff.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Right? So we put like scarves and like butterfly wings and like tiaras and like little, whatever. And it was just interesting because I think the assumption is that if we just show them something different and force them to engage in a different way that they're going to respond differently, that in itself is going to change things. Right. And I feel like that happens with pop culture and TV for young kids. Is that-

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
... If we like over-correct for all of these things, show them and force them to understand these lessons. Right. That it's going to shift that or change that. And it's interesting because you were like, I actually don't remember a lot of the content of what I saw on those shows.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
I was just playing out the typical tropes. Right.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Fighting each other, putting each other in a triangle choke or whatever it is.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
So...

Nathan Holbert:
Well, before I answer, I'm kind of curious, so you mentioned that it was pretty apparent to you that they were trying to kind of be a little more representative, especially with gender. And did that annoy you that it was so kind of plain or, or...

Haeny Yoon:
A little bit.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
I mean, I will admit that there are some shows that I stopped watching because I was like, so sick of it, trying to teach me a lesson very overtly. Even as an adult, I was like-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
... I don't need to learn a lesson from watching the show. I can learn those lessons myself. And I probably won't rely on a television show to do that for me.

Nathan Holbert:
Right. Right.

Haeny Yoon:
Sometimes, actually I take that back. Sometimes I do, but I don't like those explicit overt messages.

Nathan Holbert:
So as we said before, we have He-Man and we also had She-Ra. Right. And like those shows, I mean, this show has got a character's called He-Man. Right. Like, and he's this-

Haeny Yoon:
And the guy's name is Adam.

Nathan Holbert:
That's true. His name is Adam. Right. And he's like this huge hulking white dude that just runs around in a loincloth. Frequently his sort of frequent battle technique is to pick up something massive and throw it at people or punch things. He does a lot of punching. There's actually a little line in the episode that we watch where I think Skeletor says, "Oh, you finally used that sword like you're supposed to". Because He-Man like stabs him, right. And because at no point in the old show, did He-Man ever like stab anything or even cut anything with his sword. He was always punching things or throwing things. So it's very ultra-masculine kind of idea. And then of course, She-Ra and the whole premise behind She-Ra was, remember, this is a toy company doing all of this was like, how can we sell more toys? Oh, I know-

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
... Let's sell them to girls. And so She-Ra, the whole premise of She-Ra was to be like extremely feminine. So there's always been to me, this kind of problematic relationship I have with, well, an awkward relationship I have with the show because of its problematic treatment of gender in those days. This is not meant to be a too far of an aside here, but so the She-Ra rebooted a few years ago. Have you seen the She-Ra reboot at all?

Haeny Yoon:
No. You've talked about it a little bit though.

Nathan Holbert:
Okay. Yeah. So, She-Ra rebooted a few years ago, and it's really good. I've seen a couple seasons of it, my kids and I watched some and they liked it as well. And one of the things that they did with this reboot is She-Ra had kind of developed this kind of cult sort of following around from the LGBTQ community. And when they did the reboot for She-Ra, they like fully lean into this. And so the show is really kind of takes on really interesting issues of femininity. They tackle LGBTQ topics, but they do it in these kind of reasonable ways. They don't like they don't like throw up these particular topics, like look at this, these people are... This is a queer person or anything like that. They just kind of like have lots of different types of people represented.
They have all these different body types represented, all these different sort of ethnicities represented. And then they do interesting things with them and like take on talk about interesting values and topics. And so I thought it was a pretty interesting and kind of cool show and taking something from my childhood and updating it to a more kind of modern sensibility and then doing fun things with it. And so when I heard about He-Man, my first thought was, well, if they do something like that, I could be interested in it, if it's just a big hulking white dude, like throwing rocks, then maybe, maybe I'm not super interested in it. So I was actually really happy to see that they did kind of play around with what the show is about. I mean, they still have big hulking dudes destroying things.
I don't know if you remember, but in the very first episode, Man-At-Arms punches a mechanical horse in the face, right. Like there's still that awesome, ridiculous action in it. But then as we said earlier, then they... The episodes quickly shift into like, let's talk about some different characters, let's kind of explore their motivations. Let's explore kind of what issues they might be going through. There's an episode later where Evil-Lyn is kind of reflective about the fact that like, she's been a sidekick to this idiot villain all this time and she actually is smarter than him. Why isn't she in charge? Those are the kinds of things I thought they're a little, perhaps they're a little more explicit than they need to be, but I kind of appreciated that.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
So I liked it. It didn't bother me that it was clear that they were sort of shuffling some things up for perhaps a more progressive sensibility. It didn't really bother me.

Haeny Yoon:
And it does remind me though, of going back to that example in that classroom is that as soon as we put the feminine stuff in there, there was most definitely a wedding happening at some point, it was going to be a wedding and someone was going shopping. Okay. And then when we had the other stuff like Buzz Lightyear and Ninja Turtles and all of that stuff, there was definitely a fight. And almost every instance, even though it was a different version of a fight with different characters, it was basically a fight. So I just-

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
... Wonder if, I don't know, like something like He-Man or something like She-Ra is ever going to move away from that idea, or it's always going to represent to young children. Like these people are the fighting people. These people are the ones that have weddings and go shopping.

Nathan Holbert:
We know of course that like artifacts and objects have certain affordances and those are often kind of cultural. We see an artifact and we sort of think that we're supposed to act with it in a certain way or do certain kinds of things with it. So we kind of create spaces for kids. Right. And we, in those spaces that we create, like I said, those artifacts kind of communicate a certain set of things. And so-

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
... Which spaces do we want to create? Do we want to create spaces that take gender extremes and put those front and center? Or do we want to, in either direction, like you were talking about with-

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
... The experience that you were discussing and do we want to sort of, kind of create systems or spaces or media that allows people to have multiple possible ways they might move through it or use it or interpret it.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. And I guess maybe you can't rely on one thing to shift the whole conversation, right. It's got to be accumulated, right. And a lot of different examples. So if there's only like one show like He-Man, where... We're going to tell people that we're doing spoilers, right.

Nathan Holbert:
Definitely.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. Like where He-Man dies the first episode, right. Then like, it re-shifts and focuses on the women characters. And then there's like a different kind of women character, maybe kids just need to see like multiple ones of that and maybe the cynicism in me is like, and it's never going to change. But maybe it's got-

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
... To be multiple stories on top of each other to get that kind of changes the narrative or the discourse, right. I'm thinking, like I've said this so many times, but there's this author Viet Thanh Nguyen. And basically he talks about this idea of like Narrative Plenitude.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
And it's not just that you have this different story that you've never seen before about like an Asian person or a black person or somebody who's genderqueer or whatever, but that you have to have a lot of them, right? Because then you see that these stories are complex and there's like a lot of... Multiple ways that you can move through the world. And maybe that's like, the beginning of it... Is the idea that we have to have all these like stories on top of each other. And not just one story that represents, like here's a different thing.

Nathan Holbert:
Right. Right.

Haeny Yoon:
Because that's not going to shift the tide, right.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
It's not going to shift the discourse. So...

Nathan Holbert:
And we did the one, so we can now dust our hands off, pat ourselves on the back and...

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah and maybe it's an opening, it's an opening, right. For different kinds of stories.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Thank you for watching the Masters of the Universe: Revelation with me. I hope you watch the rest of it, but if you don't, that's understandable. I know you have a lot of things to do, but I'm curious, what's your take on this? Is this show poppin' or not?

Haeny Yoon:
Ooh, I don't know. You go first. Let me think about it.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh, it's definitely...

Haeny Yoon:
It's obviously popping to you.

Nathan Holbert:
It's definitely popping for me. Oh my goodness. Totally. So, like I said, I actually was not planning on watching it until a friend texted me yelling in his text message. Oh my God, you have to watch it right away. So I did watch it and I did thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed, I thought the sort of different take on the characters and elevating the side characters and having them kind of go through interesting challenges. It was fun. It was something new for the show to do, which I really appreciated.

Haeny Yoon:
I don't have a solid conclusion yet whether it's pop or not, I'm just going to go with ponop.

Nathan Holbert:
Ponop?

Haeny Yoon:
Perhaps it could be poppin' it could be nop, not sure yet, so jury's still out on it, but I will watch some more just to see.

Haeny Yoon: So Anne Dyson, thank you so much for joining me and Nathan, we just are grateful that you're here with us to talk about superheroes, gender, just like a lot of the things that we're all interested in collectively around childhoods. And so we wanted to have this conversation with you because you've been doing research for a really long time with young children and I've personally learned a lot just about paying attention to popular culture, paying attention to children's play. And I think that's kind of what has brought me to Pop and Play, our podcast-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
... Is just this intersection of play and pop culture and what that means for kids, but then what that means for me too. So thanks for coming.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Oh, you're welcome.

Haeny Yoon:
So what kinds of things have you encountered lately that sort of like reminding you of childhood, are like things that are kind of like these time capsules or artifacts that are kind of returning.

Nathan Holbert:
It's an interesting question to ask about like these time capsules for us, because so much of the things that were kind of at the center of Haeny and I's childhood are being rebooted and remade and put into different kind of formats and different forms. And so like this nostalgia is just like, I don't even always want to be nostalgic, but you kind of can't escape it. It's kind of constantly on us.

Anne Haas Dyson:
That's true. And people have written about that. I remember when I was working on a book that's called Writing Superheroes that I read a lot of the increasing literature from cultural studies. And I remember reading this piece and if anybody was interested, I could find it, but it was about Spiderman. And it was about how each generation, since Spiderman began thought their Spiderman was the best. And there was all of this emotion and identity and tied to childhood, conveyed through or mediated-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
... Through the version of Spiderman that they knew.

Nathan Holbert:
Wow.

Anne Haas Dyson:
And it was just incredibly interesting.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
To me that I hadn't thought about, well, I was coming to think about those things, because my entry into popular culture and all these issues was because from the very beginning, the children's writing was full of the stuff, just full of it. And I needed a connection with the kids. And in the early years of teaching, they were all primary, I taught in bilingual schools, they were all, did I say they were, they were all kids of color and I needed a cultural connection. I had a low-income childhood myself. So at any rate I needed a connection and it was obvious to me, one clear connection was Charlie Brown. And there's one that comes back all the time. Charlie Brown has never, I don't think gone away if I say that to kids, now they know who Charlie Brown is. I don't know what's happened in terms of kids who can't afford all these streaming services. I think there may be new kinds of class-related distinctions because so much is now that used to be available to the public is now through all these private sources, it makes a difference.

Haeny Yoon:
I mean, I think you brought up two really big points, right. And one is about representation, like a long generations, but then I think the other part of it access right and accessibility, I think is such a big one too. And I do want to return to the access part, but can I return to the representation part? Because I love the example that you gave of Spiderman.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Where every generation thinks there's Spiderman is better.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
And I also feel like along the way, like there's been like upgrades to Spiderman, but then there's also been attention to representation, right. In those same characters, right. And sometimes people don't like that, right.

Nathan Holbert:
Yes.

Haeny Yoon:
Like they don't want to see a Dominican Spiderman in the last few years. If you asked like media makers, I think they would say that they tried to address that by increased gender representation or increased racial representation.
Right. I think there is moves to do that, but I wonder what do you think about that? Like do you think that is creating opportunities for young people to imagine different possibilities for themselves or feel like they could take up different roles? Or is that not enough? I don't know. I'm just thinking about like things like Ghostbusters, right. Where it was just an all male cast and then it got remade and it was all females. Right. And maybe that was a very intentional move. And does media, as they increased their representation, does that flow into children's play or is there something more that we should be thinking about?

Anne Haas Dyson:
I think that's a really good question. And I think representation is important to little kids. I remember in a very early project, the kids were supposed to pick a book out of the school library to do some project with, and this group of Black girls searched all over. They couldn't find anything. And then one of them said, "Let's do an animal." Forget the people books, just find some animal, that it was important to them. I think that is important. I want to say this before I address your question or these people who Thanksgiving is only about the Pilgrims and the helpful Indians. They all got along so nicely. And I remember it was a really good teacher, but this teacher went through the whole usual Pilgrimy thing. She started asking the kids what they were going to do to celebrate Thanksgiving.
And this one child who was an Indigenous American said, "I'm going to go to the library so I can learn about my people." He was six and in another classroom, a little Black girl said after that same story, "What about the Black people who were here?" And the teacher said, "Oh no, they hadn't come yet." And then look what we have now, the 1619 project, they actually were here, but nobody knew. So I think that building on the fact that representation is important, but nonetheless, it depends how in the face of the kids it is. And if it's somebody they can identify with. And I think that's one worry about what kind of media is accessible to what kids. If there were Black stars, they knew.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
And they were in a form that appeals to kids. I remember the first time I became aware of that was when Space Jam came out. I mean, wow-we, there's Michael Jordan and they knew who Michael Jordan was. I watch-

Nathan Holbert:
Be Like Mike.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yeah. Be like Mike.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
And they, well, the Tweety Bird and all those folks-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Right.

Anne Haas Dyson:
... in there. And that was, I mean, they watched it so many times that one little girl said to her teacher, "We've been really good. Why don't we all watch Space Jam on Friday?" The teacher whom I love dearly said, "Good idea."

Haeny Yoon:
Well, now there's a reboot, there's a reboot of Space Jam.

Nathan Holbert:
I know. I was going to say, there's another reboot of that. Yeah. We've had a recent example of this though in the Black Panther movie that came out a few years ago. Now this was a, it was a massive phenomenon. It was huge. And living in New York it was this really kind of, I think important experience for me. And certainly I think also, perhaps for my kids where we live next to Harlem and the movie theaters were just cram packed for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. And a lot of the public schools, my kids public school, which is also in Harlem included, they had movie nights where they were taking all the kids to go see the Black Panther movie. It really was this kind of cultural phenomenon where people were sort of saying like, that's us, that's us on screen. And it was so well done. I think that they also didn't feel like it was a pander. They felt like they actually were being represented in a real way.

Anne Haas Dyson:
I thought that was a good movie.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. But it's interesting though, because that's an interesting contrast between that. And this He-Man episode, we watched, one of the things I think that Haeny brought up in our conversation, we had earlier about this was that the key thing here is that Teela, the sort of female character of the He-Man show becomes the main character of the episode arc that we watched. And there was an aspect of that. That was actually, I found really enjoyable and I found like it really kind of pushed on some issues that I've always had with He-Man, but also there's a bit of a ham-fistedness to it. Right. Of like, no, seriously, we're going to care about gender this time. We're not going to be so bad about this. Like we were in the eighties, we're really going to try hard.
And so then it comes across a little bit overtly, like they're trying to, I think Haeny put it, like, they're trying to tell, teach us a lesson. Right. And I'm wondering, I mean, if you have any thoughts about that sort of tension between this need to, and very important steps that we take to start creating opportunities for more kinds of representations, as well as this danger of being so overt, that we're kind of like, it's like, we can't fake out the kids. Right. Like they know what's going on here, but that line seems important.

Anne Haas Dyson:
It does. I want to back up just a minute and make sure that I was clear that I think representation matters to kids, but I think it has to be in terms that are important to the kids' world now. I'm thinking when Obama was elected, that was a very big deal to the kids, but I didn't hear any, and I can be president out of that. What I heard was that they were very interested in their children. They knew all the kids' names. They knew the dog's name. They knew that there was a Black man and a Black family in the White House, and that mattered to them, but it mattered to them in kids' terms. So I don't know.

Haeny Yoon:
Well, that's just making me think of how we think that, because we fixed the representation part, like we as a society that'll fix it when we have all these structural issues, right. That you're alluding to. Right. That it's not because they saw more representations of themselves that we fix the problem of racism. Because I think a lot of times like fixing representations a lot easier than fixing actual racism.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
Right. So.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yes. I think that's what I was trying to say.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
And if we look what we're doing now, we don't listen to kids. These people who are making these laws, they know nothing about children. I feel sorry for their own kids. They must not listen to them-

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
... Or they have them segregated.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Right.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
I mean, if we like talking about gender in particular and about how there's increased possibilities for females, I guess, in these media productions. But then at the same time, we have all these issues with gender right now. Right. And gender freedom and sexuality and children's identities, right. That are happening right now that are not consistent with the fact that there's increased gender representation or fluidity on screen.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yes. I agree with that. I think an example that reveals the, what I think of as the white supremacy at the root of all these movements against inclusiveness in school.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Anne Haas Dyson:
I mean, they say they're worried about making kids uncomfortable. Well, they're certainly not worried about the kids I mentioned who don't see themselves represented or who wonder, why am I being left out of the story? They don't give a crap about that. As a pardon of me, you can edit that out. That little crap. But, oh, I know what I think is a good example of what Haeny's talking about is that in most, every classroom I've been in for years, there's usually one or two kids who have two moms or two dads, but they don't want sexuality or anything about gayness in the schools. But if they do that, what do they do when these kids are asked to draw a picture of their family? What are you doing here? We're not supposed to do that. Exclude kids. These rules make no sense. It's a contradiction that we don't want kids uncomfortable because of who they all are, but you're making kids uncomfortable.

Nathan Holbert:
It feels like that conversation that's happening out there around schools and in the kind of ugliest places of our politics right now, it does seem divorced from what people experience. It also seems divorced from what kids and are capable of. Like you said, I mean, they have those difficult conversations, whether or not a teacher holds up a book that says critical race theory on it or not.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yeah. And then the teacher doesn't get to mediate it. The school leaves the kids on their own to deal with things that adult generations haven't dealt with well.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Anne Haas Dyson:
And run out we're going to let these kids make some sense of it, but you can see what I usually think media offers. And then if it's appropriated by some public, it becomes popular culture, at least an everyday meaning making thing for them. And you can see what it is. That's captured their attention. If they're allowed to play, if you watch the kids play out in the playground, or if they're allowed to play like through, if writing is a form graphic play, then you figure out what interests them, what do they gravitate towards? Definitely they like things where kids have agency and power. They're not so into the adults. They're interested in the kids. I think that's what I was saying. When I was talking about Obama, actually I was trying to say they were into the things they identified with as kids, but if it match their identities, then it is partially because of representation, but it's also accessible representation to them as kids and they're into play. So that tells us you have to pay attention to what they're paying attention to.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. So I think it's like that. I think this is great because this brings us the last segment of our podcast, which is what's popping? And I feel like that intersection, I mean, that's the thing that we wanted-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
... To emphasize right. Through our podcast. It's like the intersection of pop culture and play can be-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
A really productive space. Right. And we see that in young children's writing, we see that in Nathan's work and like the idea of making and like how children like, or young people just tinker, right. And make things and design things and imagine like different possibilities. So I think that intersection is a really interesting thing. So, and at the end of our show, we like to ask people the question what's popping? And basically that just means like something that you're listening to on the radio, it could be, or a podcast that you're really enjoying, or a book that you just recently picked up that you want to talk about a TV show that has been like grabbing your attention. And so maybe each of us can just talk about what's popping in our lives right now. Nathan, you want to go first?

Nathan Holbert:
I have a couple things, but I'll mention one. That's really connected to what you just said. And that was, and that is that my daughter's play is popping, and it's popping in a way that's very connected to this idea of trying on these different representations through play. Taking on these different roles and trying to fit them into your interests. My daughter did two things today that are directly connected to this. One was we were at the playground and there was this kind of like balance beam kind of thing. That's intentionally wobbly and kind of tricky. And she got up on it and she needs some help initially. And then I said, "No, you got to do it yourself." And so she kind of did it. And then she kept getting faster and faster. And she, she started saying that she was a ninja while she was doing it.
And so then she would say ninja pose and she sort of jump off and do like ninja moves. And she's never seen like a ninja show or a movie that I know of, but yet she had this from conversations with kids probably and things, she sort of-

Anne Haas Dyson:
Probably play ninjas.

Nathan Holbert:
Exactly. She's connected to this idea of a ninja. And then right before our meeting today, we were talking and my daughter walked in and she was fully geared up in a knight outfit that she had made from paper.

Haeny Yoon:
It was impressive.

Nathan Holbert:
Like helmet, shield, sword. And she said "She was a Knight and she was a Knight because she needed to protect us from the lady with snake hair." Again, like she's sort of taking on these and all the roles she's taking on is this sort of warrior role. And one of protector, one with grace and it's fantastic. Right. I love it. So that's popping.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. Anne do you want to tell us what's popping?

Anne Haas Dyson:
Well, I can't find the exact book and I don't know for sure that it's related, but I think it is, it's a book called Palaces for the People. Has anybody heard of that book? It's about what kind of spaces are left for the public. But as the book goes on, it starts talking about these spaces that are created for play and linked to popular culture. And one of them are these programs, like there's one in Chicago after-school program where the kids can come in and write their music. And they're certainly inspired by what's going on in their world in terms of music and there's all this equipment. So they can actually do demo tapes.

Nathan Holbert:
YOUmedia, right?

Anne Haas Dyson:
Huh?

Nathan Holbert:
It's called YOUmedia.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yeah. You know that program.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Yeah. Very well. Yeah. It's a fantastic program. Yeah.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Yeah. So that's the kind of thing he talks about that there are so few public places left, so we need to help create them. And if the schools, unfortunately, are under so many regulations that it may be that we will need to support also these out of school programs. But I will never give up on schools themselves. I will never give up. No, not till I'm dead and gone. And then I'll be shouting from the wherever I am. But still, I think we can take inspiration whether it's in the classroom or out.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. So I'm going to end by telling you what's popping for me. I'm going to say magazines because I subscribe to this magazine called The Believer. And basically it's like a hodgepodge of like different things. Like there's artwork in it. Sometimes people submit poetry. Sometimes there's essays. It's just a really cool creative like outlet. And it just it's called The Believer. Yes. And I feel like they published their last print volume, like recently. And it's so sad because I'm like, I just always loved magazines growing up. And I won't tell you what kind of magazines I liked, but not like professional sophisticated ones, but now I'm like, this magazine is so great. And I feel like it's such a great creative space. So now is at every meeting that I am in with Nathan, I try to convince him that we have to write a magazine or-

Nathan Holbert:
It's true.

Haeny Yoon:
Put out a magazine because that's like the thing I'm obsessed with. So that's, what's popping for me. Okay. Well, thank you so much, much, Anne this was so fun.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, I think so-

Haeny Yoon:
You been so generous with your time.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Thanks for asking me. It was so fun to talk to.

Haeny Yoon:
It was.

Nathan Holbert:
It was a delight to meet you and it was super fun to talk to you. So thanks for joining us today.

Anne Haas Dyson:
Oh, well, thank you. Thank you very much.

Haeny Yoon:
Pop and Play is produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudevan, and Joe Riina-Ferrie at Teachers College Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute.

Nathan Holbert:
This episode was edited by Jen Lee, Billy Collins, and Lucius Von Joo. For a transcript, and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay.

Haeny Yoon:
This episode was assistant-produced by Lucius Von Joo.

Nathan Holbert:
Our music is selections from Leafeaters by Podington Bear used here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time.

Listen to the Episode

Meet our guests

Explore Further

Episode Transcript