Abstract
A particularly striking educational moment in the movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix occurs during the first meeting of Professor Umbridge’s fifth-year Defense Against the Dark Arts (DADA) class. She announces to the students that they will not be practicing spells, but instead learning them through a “… carefully structured, Ministry-approved course of defensive magic.”2 She then proceeds to distribute their new textbooks, which look to be at least 50 years old and highly reminiscent of our “Muggle” elementary school primers Dick and Jane.
Hogwarts school motto: Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus (Never tickle a sleeping dragon)
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Notes
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (New York: Scholastic, 2003), 244.
David Yates, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (USA/UK: Warner Bros., 2005).
David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of Urban American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Milton Chen, Education Nation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), Kindle edition, chapter 1.
Antonia Darder, Culture and Power in the Classroom: A Critical Foundation for Bicultural Education (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1991).
Giselle Liza Anatol, “The Fallen Empire: Exploring Ethnic Otherness in the World of Harry Potter,” in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, edited by Giselle Liza Anatol (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 165.
Ernie Bond and Nancy Michelson, “Writing Harry’s World: Children Coauthoring Hogwarts,” in Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives, edited by Elizabeth E. Heilman (New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2003), 109.
Luis C. Moll, “Bilingual Classroom Studies and Community Analysis: Some Recent Trends,” Educational Researcher 21 (1992): 20–24.
Edmund Kern, The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices (New York: Prometheus Books, 2003), 14.
For discussions of Potter’s literary roots, see essays in collections such as Giselle Liza Anatol, Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Giselle Liza Anatol, Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009); John Granger, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures (New York: Berkeley Books, 2009); Elizabeth E. Heilman, Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives (New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2003); and Lana A. Whited, The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004).
Veronica L. Schanoes, “Cruel Heroes and Treacherous Texts: Educating the Reader in Moral Complexity and Critical Reading in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books,” in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, edited by Giselle Liza Anatol (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
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© 2011 Catherine L. Belcher and Becky Herr Stephenson
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Belcher, C.L., Stephenson, B.H. (2011). Harry in the Classroom: Waking Sleeping Dragons. In: Teaching Harry Potter. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119918_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119918_4
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