Cosmopolitanism And Inclusive Education Through 21st Century Disney Films

"By highlighting the links between cosmopolitanism and inclusive education, this book explores the potential of 21st-Century Disney films to tackle some contemporary social and cultural issues in order to promote inclusive values. This manuscript claims that the link between both fields is cosmopolitan education, which brings together the values and theories of cosmopolitanism and inclusive education. In particular, it examines three 21st-Century Disney animated films under a cosmopolitan lens to explore how they help to construct and reflect discourses about cosmopolitan issues such as geographical and cultural borders, global cities and climate change. The case studies were chosen on the basis of the Index for Inclusion: A Guide to School Development Led by Inclusive Values (Booth and Ainscow 2016), a document that aims to provide a new form of school curriculum adapted to 21st-Century social needs. The Index contains a list of sixteen inclusive values, which were used to determine the inclusive potential of the films. The inclusive values explored in each of the analyses were "community" in Tinker Bell and The Secret of the Wings (chapter two), "respect for diversity" in Zootopia (chapter three), and "sustainability" in WALL-E (chapter four). This book uses textual analysis to explore how these three films can be used to teach and promote cosmopolitan issues such as the roles and meanings of borders (chapter two), the global city (chapter three) and ecology (chapter four) in the classroom"--

Based on case studies from public schools in Toronto, Canada, this book aims to develop a theory and practice of teaching multiliteracies in culturally diverse, linguistically heterogeneous urban classrooms. Lotherington argues that in a globalized world literacy must be reassessed on an international scale and multilingualism must be theorized - and practiced - as a component of multimodal literacy.

In the second edition of The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, David Whitley updates his 2008 book to reflect recent developments in Disney and Disney-Pixar animation such as the apocalyptic tale of earth's failed ecosystem, WALL-E. As Whitley has shown, and Disney's newest films continue to demonstrate, the messages animated films convey about the natural world are of crucial importance to their child viewers. Beginning with Snow White, Whitley examines a wide range of Disney's feature animations, in which images of wild nature are central to the narrative. He challenges the notion that the sentimentality of the Disney aesthetic, an oft-criticized aspect of such films as Bambi, The Jungle Book, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, and Finding Nemo, necessarily prevents audiences from developing a critical awareness of contested environmental issues. On the contrary, even as the films communicate the central ideologies of the times in which they were produced, they also express the ambiguities and tensions that underlie these dominant values. In distinguishing among the effects produced by each film and revealing the diverse ways in which images of nature are mediated, Whitley urges us towards a more complex interpretation of the classic Disney canon and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role popular art plays in shaping the emotions and ideas that are central to contemporary experience.

Screening the Nonhuman draws connections between how animals represented on screen translate into reality. In doing so, the book demonstrates that consuming media is not a neutral act but rather a political one. The images humans consume have real world consequences for how animals are treated as actors, as pets, and in nature. The contributors propose that altering the representations of animals can change the way humans relate to non/humans. Our hope is for humans to generate more ethical relationships with non/humans, ultimately mediating reality both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. To achieve this end, film, television, advertisements, and social media are analyzed through an intersectional lens. But the book doesn’t stop here. Each author creates counter-representational strategies that promise to unweave the assumptions that have led to the mistreatment of humans and non/humans alike.