SATURDAY MORNING MAGIC AND MAGICAL MORALITY⁽¹⁾

Chapter included in Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy. Toby Daspit and John A. Weaver, editors, NY: Garland, 1999.
 

Peter M. Appelbaum
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
William Paterson University
Wayne, NJ 07470
(973) 720-3123

appelbaump@wpunj.edu

What follows is one story of my work with children, teachers, and Saturday Morning television. It is a story of a curriculum project, but also a story of how such a project forced me to reflect on the difficulties of presenting practice as a narrative. The moral turns out to have something to do with the impact of technoculture, and the "free-spaces" not seen in curriculum research. But this is also the story of a picaresque quest, a movement from Foucault to Deleuze and Guattari, from action researcher to rhizomic practitioner, and back again.
 

AFTERMATH: TRIAGE

This project had as a primary impetus my need to work through the implications of a triage⁽²⁾ of terms highlighted by Bruce Mazlish's book The Fourth Discontinuity: the Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines.⁽³⁾Mazlish argues that, just as Copernicus, Darwin and Freud overturned our illusions of separation from and domination over the cosmos, the animal world, and the unconscious, it is now necessary to relinquish a fourth fallacy -- that humans are discontinuous and distinct from the machines we make. As I continue to re-read Mazlish, I persist in trying to unravel these three words: 'animal', 'human' and 'machine'. We see in Mazlish the enormous play already accomplished in (primarily Western, AmeroEurocentric) thought that sets up one or two of these as a potential "other" through which a third can be defined.
 

I note as well Andrew Ross' characterization of the "cyberpunk embrace" -- an oft-posited "emergent stage" of human development that integrates the tenets of evolutionary humanism with a "frontier rhetoric of discovery and creative invention, [linking] the LSD spirit of synthetic transformation with the technofantasies of cybernetic consciousness."⁽⁴⁾ Ross makes a nice contrast to Mazlish in his critique of discourses that channel the "discourse of the maverick" into the evolution of human beings, "headily pursuing its goal of an 'assault on limits' in the name of individual self-liberation. Juxtaposing Mazlish and Ross need not set up a polarity or continuum, however; indeed, the problematic of cyberculture and technohumanity contructs a multiplicity of epistemologies that structure fields of possibility for practice and concomitant technologies of morality and power.⁽⁵⁾ In this study, one facet of the problematic is this very multiplicity and its implications for research, in which my own, and others', perspectives and forms of meaning construction become examples of the conflicts themselves.
 

As I turn to the focus of my exploration in this instance, Saturday Morning Television, my excitement mounts: here we have film, video, animated, claymated and digitized combos across and over the three realms that Mazlish posits for triage -- spheres? categories? ("Please don't let yourself tumble into the abyss" my simulacrum of early Foucault cries out) -- in a plethora of images and representations that demand our attention. They demand our attention first of all because of the importance of these forms of entertainment and edutainment in the lives of our students. But they are important as well in our own lives -- as people who work with and through those who consume and translate the images and stories for us, and as people who confront and celebrate the same images and stories in our own lives. The latter can be expressed in several ways: (a) Saturday Morning Television can be said to be communicating the fears and fantasies of the adult world. (b) [sometimes dubbed "the reception fallacy":] We must realize that although Saturday Morning Television is often referred to as "Kids' T.V.", its audience is not limited to children,⁽⁶⁾ and likely includes a fairly sizable proportion of teachers as well (even if they claim their own kids have the T.V. on, or that they are forced to familiarize themselves with the garbage slung at their students). (c) There is the argument that life is merely an enactment of the imagined possibilities first explored through fiction (sometimes described as the amazing quality of authors, e.g., sci-fi to "predict" the future); there is also the argument that change is so frantic in contemporary society that it resembles immigrant cultures in which the children teach the adults the new conventions they must adapt to.⁽⁷⁾
 

Triage as cultural practice follows several options, including: Triptych -- here the three speak to us and each other as distinct images juxtaposed in order to establish a larger or more coherent "meaning". Triangle -- in this option we have a representation of three distinct categories and their relationship among each other, including a continuum between each pair. 3-D Space -- in which, by convention, each ray of infinite possibility has its origin in a common point, and all reality can be defined by linear combinations of the three defining axes. Overlapping regions -- here the categories are no longer distinct and overlap each other in a Wittgensteinian or Gombrichian way, structuring the model as collections of "family resemblances"; the terms are informative references but are not necessarily foundational in any epistemological sense. My discussion claims that different Saturday Morning programs construct different epistemologies of the animal-human-machine triage in different ways. The epistemology is not necessarily foundational to practice and cultural politics, but is symptomatic of these features of self and related technologies of morality, thus enabling an entry into theory about these issues and their relationship to pedagogy and the professions of teaching and learning.
 

Another impetus for my work was the need to work through the dilemmas of textual and reader-response analysis regarding media and technology. We might phrase the dilemmas in terms of production/consumption, or perhaps in terms of aesthetics/reception.⁽⁸⁾ I was concerned that I could construct a reading of Saturday Morning Television programs, and that this could be useful to me as a teacher, or to other teachers as information pertinent to their teaching, but that others might not "read" these programs the same way, or that the creators of them might not have anything like what I have read in mind. Differences among students, teachers, and curriculum constructions should be expected rather than viewed as confounding research. You've heard all this before, I am sure. I aimed to avoid the anxiety by structuring in a variety of forms of hermeneutic "triangulation". I looked for a saturation of the discourse in repeated viewings of as many programs as possible, and entire series of those programs I videotaped. I applied the assorted checks for coherence and sensibility we all learned in graduate courses in hermeneutic research. But I also interviewed a group of 6-8 year old boys and girls about the programs they found most important to share with me. And I interviewed teachers about what they thought about my interpretations as well. The process of my research was as follows: I interviewed children and asked them what programs I should watch and why -- I told them I was researching Saturday Morning television and needed their guidance so that I would watch the right programs and then be able to talk to their teachers about the programs I watched. Repeated versions of this text were shared with teachers; I asked teachers how they might use what I have been working with in their teaching and interactions with children.⁽⁹⁾ Advice on what I should look for and how I should think about the children's expert opinions formed a parallel set of expert knowledge that I attempted to combine with previous work. Meetings with teachers were working projects over time, in which we planned curriculum changes, and assessed implemented curriculum. I then returned to a subset of the expert young people to talk about how adults and children think about Saturday Morning Television. In these later meetings we found significant shifts over time as those interviewed began to critique their own former declarations as well as those of hypothetical prospective teachers. I remain convinced that popular culture is simultaneously a commodity to be consumed, collected and traded for other cultural capital, and a cultural resource, out of which individuals and groups construct ways to form meanings and new comprehensions in their experiencing and remaking of the world.⁽¹⁰⁾ At any rate, we know that people watching these programs CAN use them as "tools" for constructing meaning. How, though? And how does this relate to the SELF? To quote the eminently quotable Andy Hargreaves, "Postmodernity brings changes not only in what we experience, in our organizations and institutions, but also in how we experience, in our fundamental senses of self and identity."⁽¹¹⁾ In other words, as I ask us to ponder Saturday Morning Television, it seems we must focus on that television and its relationship to a new kind of way to comprehend the self; at least, I claim, we have to entertain what options for constructing "selves" are available as a cultural resource. Hargreaves is helpful here as well:
 

In the high-tech world of the instantaneous image, what once stood for the substantial self is increasingly seen as merely a constellation of signs. With the collapse of moral and scientific certainties of foundational knowledge, the only intelligible reality appears to be that of language, discourse, image, sign and text. But even these have multiple meanings, infinite readings, and are open to endless forms of deconstruction. So even the self is now suspect. It has no substance, center or depth. It is "enfolded in language which [it] can neither oversee nor escape." Selves become transient texts, to be read and misread, constructed or deconstructed at will. Human selves become things that people display and other people interpret, not things that have lasting and inner substance of their own. Postmodernity, therefore, sees a "suspicion of the supposed unity and transparency of the disengaged self [and] of the alleged inner sources of the expressive self.⁽¹²⁾
 

In the "end", the self becomes a continuous reflexive project, constantly and consciously remade and reaffirmed ("under construction" as Hargreaves says). This heightened orientation to the self and to its continuing construction can be a source of creativity, empowerment and change; but it can also be a source of uncertainty, vulnerability and social withdrawal. In any case, the self is important, is surely a central concern to those who spend a lot of time with children, and can be seen to be related to the available construction of human self within the amorphous triage of animal-human-machine.
 

WHAT IS HUMAN?
 

The origins of many cyborg and other transmutated characters on Saturday Morning Television⁽¹³⁾ are found in adult fears of the cold-war and emerging technologies. Adult fantasies such as Batman and the X-Men can be deconstructed in order to unravel the dynamics and implications of these fears for cultural and historical patterns. Children's reactions to these adult fantasies are interesting because of the ways in which the cold-war ideologies both create fears for children and "alleviate" them by offering particular solutions to the fears. The type of fear and solution is crucial, because it is interwoven with an implicit technology of morality. Just as Donna Haraway asks us "would we rather be a cyborg or a goddess?",⁽¹⁴⁾ the placement of "good guy" and "bad guy" in the animal-human-machine geography constructs a notion of identification and value.
 

Similarly, the role of "technology" on Saturday Morning -- both technological items and symbols of the technologicization of social life -- conveys a story about a "morality of potential," in the sense that James Macdonald once articulated, as the function of MAGIC in constructing a field of human potential:

It is my personal myth that today's technology is yesterday's magic. Further, it is my intuitive feeling that technology is in effect an externalization of the hidden consciousness of human potential. Technology, in other words, is a necessary development for human beings in that it is the means of externalizing the potential that lies within.⁽¹⁵⁾

Douglas Rushkoff has raised this issue once again:
 

When we look carefully at the reaction of younger cyber-denizens to their Sega-environs, we find that they make no distinction between information and matter, mechanics and thought, work and play, or even religion and commerce. In fact, kids on the frontier of the digital terrain have adopted some extraordinarily magical notions about the world we live in. Far from yielding a society of coldhearted rationalists, the ethereal, out-of-body experience of mediating technologies appears to have spawned a generation of pagan spiritualists whose dedication to technology is only matched by their enthusiasm for elemental truth and a neoprimitive, magical worldview. To a screenager, these are not opposing life strategies but coordinated agents of change.⁽¹⁶⁾

In making machines, humans have become themselves Creators who endow their creations with movement. Automata, ... express this form of creation dramatically. An automobile, a locomotor, and airplane, these also move under human inspiration. Until the Renaissance, it appears ... that Western Man [sic] built automata and other machines not so much to dominate nature, but to copy it; not to rival God, but to imitate him. Increasingly, however, in the West, humans came to smudge the image of God as the Creator and to substitute their own, first turning God into a Newtonian machine, and then merging him with nature as an evolutionary process. In doing so, humans united within themselves extraordinary powers of destruction ... and of creation. Whether in taking on creative powers humans are also able, in the form of their machines, to bring into being a new evolutionary step remains our next question. If Man [sic] succeeds in taking this step, he would certainly be doing something admittedly unique.⁽¹⁸⁾

Masked Rider

Masked Rider is a teenager named Dex, sent to Earth from Eegonon. He's able to form a crystal on his forehead to communicate with his grandfather (the leader of Eegonon) -- until "the attack." The leader of the attack is no more than his Uncle. His Uncle sent down to Earth the "destructosphere." It was a buglike creature that was like a cyborg, too. It could unfold shooting machine blasters, transform into a ball, and transform into a rock and sail underground.

Dex saw the message on T.V. He quickly ran into the backyard of the house he lived in with his two friends and their mother and father. And he quickly transformed into the bug alien cyborg known as "The Masked Rider." He was attacking when he was losing energy and he only had enough for one more strike. Fortunately, that one strike destroyed the destructosphere. Then Dex quickly transformed back into Dex. He ran to a cave he knew of and telepathically communicated with his grandfather, and he made a jewel on his forehead to communicate with his grandfather, who told him to use the jewel to create power sources he needed. He shot a light beam from the jewel at a rock and the rock fell open revealing a bird which quickly transformed into a solid cyborg motorcycle (it's a cyborg because it can talk). He shot another light beam which created a monster which became a cyborg car. The motorcycle is called "the combat chopper." The car is "the Magno."

His uncle then sent down a monster known as the "Battle Beetle." It was a cyborg because it was half tank, half bug monster. The combat chopper tried to attack it. But when it tried to crash into it, it did nothing more than make the Combat Chopper lose energy. Then Magno was ready to charge in, but not yet (She sensed the Masked Rider was coming). Then Masked Rider came and tried to destroy the Battle Beetle, but lost energy. Then Magno charged at the Battle Beetle. The Battle Beetle was knocked over. Then Masked Rider jumped onto Magno. They destroyed the Battle Beetle together.⁽²⁰⁾
 

Hargreaves writes that one of the key post-modern paradoxes is a "personal anxiety;" the search for authenticity becomes a continuous psychological quest in a world without secure moral anchors.⁽²¹⁾ Viewing Saturday morning is an exercise in the simulacrum of anchor in this respect. In my interviews with my 6 to 8 year-old authorities, I often dwell on the geography of cyborgness. I ask, what is human? Is she human? Is she a cyborg? what is a cyborg? What is an animal? A machine? My own interpretations are often critiqued by my authorities. I think at this point that they tend as a group to use the triangle-continuum model. For virtually all interviewees, a cyborg is a living being combined with a machine in a way that is not easily disassembled into component parts. The machine aspect provides extraordinary abilities, such as enormous strength or laser ray projection. A person or animal inside a machine or a person using a machine as a tool can not be a cyborg in this typology. I tend in my own reading to be more general in some ways. I want to include human/machine combos that the children find inappropriate. The why of this difference must be explored further, and bears some resemblance to differences between "adult" and "child" definitions of "living thing" described in common science education methods textbooks.⁽²²⁾
 

Megaman

Megaman is a robot fighting against the evil Dr. Wiley. Actually, he's a cyborg. He is able to transform his arm -- or should I say pull his hand in?-- into a blaster and blast. He can take others' powers by touching his hand onto their forehead or arm. Dr. Light, the guy who made Megaman, was awarded "Best Scientist" (not for Megaman but for lots of other stuff). Then Dr. Wiley attacked. So Dr. Light made his son into Megaman!

Megaman fights the robots known as Bombman, Gutsman, Blademan, Cutman, Torpedoman, Waveman, Diveman, and even against his OWN brother, known as Protoman, who is a cyborg (made, like all bad guys, by Dr. Wiley). Dr. Wiley and Dr. Light used to be partners; now they're worst enemies because Dr. Wiley wants to take over the world. He thought it would be a good idea to have Dr. Light's son fighting against Dr. Light. In the beginning of when Dr. Light attacked, he tried to capture the son who's now megaman, but he escaped! And Megaman has a sister who is a cyborg because she has a mechanical bracelet arm which can make anything on it. She can pull her hand into the bracelet part and pull anything out of it. Her name is Rol. Their dog, Rush, is a robot, not a cyborg.

(How he was made:) mechanical devices with pointy things and static and stuff like that. You don't see much about that. You don't know much about his life.⁽²³⁾
 

I and my authorities consistently identify science and scientists as the source of danger in most programs where cold-war and post-cold-war fantasies are enacted. There is a long tradition of this characterization. In early Japanese anime¢ and Gundam (represented in the 1960s programs Gigantor and Speed Racer) it is the children alone who are capable of harnessing the sometimes frightening applications of technology, or understanding the inner struggles and gentle nature of the monsters mutantly wrought from toxic spills and nuclear accidents. "Adults accidentally create monsters and catastrophes by letting their technology get out of control, while the children -- thanks to their ability to understand the inner workings of technology and the secret hearts of monsters -- are uniquely qualified to clean up the mess."⁽²⁴⁾ Like their predecessors, contemporary North American children's programs are heavily influenced by their Japanese counterparts. Indeed, Power Rangers in its earliest version was dubbed sequences of Japanese programs, with Americanized plots spliced in. Like their Gundam cousins, these North American versions enact plots that develop a relationship between the evolution of the young main characters and the human-directed evolution of technology. Each side in a battle between good and evil for the fate of the Earth and all humanity continues to develop new prototypes of technological wizardry; in response, the child-stars test out the new prototypes. The eternal war serves to create better technology through which the new children can test and develop their powers. In the home we see the plot behind the series' producers' obsession with technological innovation: The shows are sponsored by toy companies who want to sell as much as they can. Every innovation in body suit or technological prototype is mirrored by a new toy version whose price is higher than its forerunner. Douglas Rushkoff has suggested that the creation of child characters who have extrasensory experiences through technological devices is an attempt by the toymakers and television producers to convince children that they can really feel what it would be like to move, strike and be like a powerful mobile suit gundam. He also notes that the influence might be in the reverse direction, from children to the producers of the programs and makers of the toys:

Ironically but not at all coincidentally, these programs ... are driven as much by technology as they are by any personal visions of their adult scriptwriters. The shows and their themes are wrapped around technological innovation -- toy robots with movable parts. The evolving features of these high-tech dolls advance the stories and concepts in this otherwise market-driven cosmology. Therefore, whether they realize it or not, the gundam marketers are merely reacting to their young viewers. Because their viewers are children of chaos, these two forces turn out to be immensely compatible, and their marriage is depicted in the stories themselves.⁽²⁵⁾
 

Not all programs construct cold-war fantasies, of course. A second category of fiction posits post-radioactive trauma or cyborg developments as a positive solution because they give the characters "new" powers over the toxicity, radioactivity, or rampant technology. Here superheros, mutants and cyborgs are translated through "Kids' T.V." into a potentially positive friend rather than threat. Which in the long run, I suppose, suggests tipping the invisible balance toward "good" for science and its effects in general. Yet the positive nature of the new powers are ambiguous. The X-Men are people we are to like, and are the potential harbingers of an increasingly pluralist society, yet they live on the margins in a perpetual state of alienation and isolation, frozen in interminable, "illegal" immigration. Saturday Morning versions of Batman and Spiderman wield technology to tame the cyborgs and psychotics of contemporary society, but also suffer never-ending isolation and marginality, and experience severe levels of depression and anxiety. The overarching message, nevertheless, is that cyborgs and mutants are "more powerful" and hence "better" than humans.

In this case, the cyborgs have much in common with Marge Piercy's enhanced humans in He, She and It,⁽²⁶⁾ and less in common with her golem, or (humanly)-enhanced robot. Born of catastrophe and crisis, they symbolize continued hope; yet the hope lies closer to the human end of the human-machine continuum than the machine end. While Piercy in her writing actually presents a vision of overlapping family resemblances, Saturday Morning preserves the god-dream of Descartes in the triangle. Some test-cases in my discussions with the 6-to-8-year-old experts: R.L. Stine's scarecrow in The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight⁽²⁷⁾ is not a cyborg; neither are Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an evil brain from the fourth dimension who must remain attached to a machine to function on our Earth, nor Arthur, The Tick's sidekick, a man who derives his identity and life-project from the Moth-suit machine he always wears.
 

Technoman

Technoman's real name is Slade. He fights the evil Darkon. Darkon sent down another technoman named Gunner. At technoman's and Gunner's first battle, Technoman went away; in the next battle Gunner went away; in the next battle Technoman blasted Gunner; in the next battle, he threw a sword in Gunner's face and cracked his technoarmor. The next battle Gunner won by destroying Slade's crystal. Fortunately Slade made a new one and went back. With the new crystal he blasted his technoblaster at Gunner and destroyed him. Darkon's normal soldiers who Technoman always destroys are named spidercrabs. He also has two friends from a space crew, and more friends from the space crew.

Slade is a cyborg because the crystal sent the power of his armor in his body to where the armor is inside him, forcing the armor out. For the same reason as Ronin Warriors, the exoskeleton is a machine because of things like technoblasters that blast technoblasts.

He kind of and kind of doesn't like being Technoman. He's happy that he was able to remake his technocrystal and he's very happy because he's able to destroy things with his armor. Slade does not really like being Technoman because he's very unhappy about having enemies and stuff like that. Slade fights and everybody relaxes while he fights because HE has the technocrystal and the skills, so he should do the fighting.⁽²⁸⁾
 

In the spoofs of cold-war fantasies, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, and The Tick, the cold-war mentality is no longer ambiguous but clearly and unilaterally positive. The Turtles do not want to go back to being turtles; the Rangers revel in their role as fighters of enormous vitality and success (indeed, in the motion picture version, we see that younger children dream of one day becoming a Power Ranger themselves); The Tick and his superhero rivals bound with delight into each new adventure, turning every nightmarish threat into recreation (in the athletic pleasure sense). Here transmutation or robotization is a gift one must celebrate. Two programs help us see how the line from ambiguity to positivity has been crossed: The Masked Rider, and Sailor Moon. Masked Rider, A Power Ranger take-off (the simulacrum of the simulacrum), is a sort of I Dream of Jeannie revenge fantasy: Dex must keep his powers secret in order to keep his identity hidden from the bad guys, but he uses them freely without disapproval to the delight of himself and his friends. Sailor Moon, touted as a "girl superhero show," can transform with "moon power" into a superfighter who battles the megaverse, and in doing so, proves how great she is. (Oddly, Sailor Moon turns out to reproduce the same ol' boring ideology -- she often gets into trouble and must be saved by the only major male character, her uncle.)
 

Rushkoff tells us the children watching these programs are not reveling in the violence. Most of the destruction is done to and by machines. And the joy comes instead from a vicarious feeling of power. Mirroring the cyberpunk literature read by older brothers and sisters, these programs depict children who understand technology better than the adults who designed it; having evolved they also exercise a greater control over and a genuine friendship with this technology.⁽²⁹⁾ Adults are intimidated by these programs because they exalt this relationship. "The battle becomes one between our evolutionary future," writes Rushkoff, -- the combined efforts of a rainbow of children -- and our evolutionary past: the efforts of a single, technoimprisoned dictator to maintain personal control over our planet."⁽³⁰⁾

The overriding theme of the show turns out to be co-evolution with technology. In addition to the way the Power Rangers use technology to fight monsters of the tyrannous past, they depend on technology for moral and spiritual guidance. When the Power Rangers are in trouble, they turn to Zordon, a disembodied ageless sage who acts as a techno-oracle from within a computer. Pure consciousness available only through a communications device, Zordon demonstrates that the wisdom of the ages has the ability to speak to us through technology, just as the Power Rangers show how children may be able to bring us into our evolutionary future via the same means.⁽³¹⁾
 

CYBORG SELVES
 

In creating machines, humans are often said to take on the god-like role of "creator". Yet we often see the machine as the image of doom or evil. Is this odd? "After all," writes Mazlish, "the machine promises perfection, and, if it threatens to take over life, in return it promises to do away with death."⁽³²⁾ He suggests that we turn to Harold Searles, who has noted our frustration at the knowledge that we have created a technology which, seemingly omnipotent and immortal itself, has not extended our own allotted life span. Searles suggests that we thus identify unconsciously with the technology itself, which, being inanimate, can not die. The juxtaposition of these two impulses has been eloquently described by Jim Paul, in his account of building a catapult to launch stones into the ocean.⁽³³⁾ Early in the process, he and his friend Harry step back to look at their work:
 
 

Look at that, said Harry, in satisfaction. The proportion seemed right, like an arm's to a baseball. We were making an effigy of a human being, it seemed, one stripped of all capacities except stone-throwing, and that capacity amplified, as if in compensation for whatever else a person was.⁽³⁴⁾

... I had to confess that the catapult's meaning hadn't really come up that evening. That we could afford it, that we could make it work, those were our concerns. That thought gave me the sinking feeling, as I drove home beneath the Bay Bridge's towers and cables, that I wasn't outside the catapult anymore, seeing it as an object in the world, but inside it somehow, assuming the world from its viewpoint. As if we were its eyes, its mind, on the lookout for the best way to make it manifest. And that was no observation at all -- just a kind of mechanical vision, fascinating and persistent, against which my need to observe was an eddy to the main current.⁽³⁵⁾

Why, we might ask, do we cling to the idea that a human-tool link is transformative, as potential merged beyond dissociation, while children freely make a categorical distinction? Why might we favor the family resemblance, the overlapping regions, while children so comfortably assimilate the triangle of contuua? Good questions. Here we confront Andrew Ross' "discourse of maverick humanism in fullflow, headily pursuing its goal of an 'assault on limits' in the name of individual self-liberation." The self is Rushkoff's "screenager," the chaos-acclimated kid who laughs at the paranoid superstitions of elders, satirizing their inability to cope with self-simularity and recurrence by creating mock cults and collectives, and distancing themselves in shells of self-conscious media.
 

By accepting the notion that technology can play a part in the forward evolution of humanity toward its greater spiritual goals the children of chaos exchange the adult, paranoid response to the impending colonial organism with a philosophy decidedly more positive: pronoia.⁽³⁷⁾
 

Another question, which children find perplexing, is, why are cyborgs always fighting? Why is it weapons which represent the machine-like aspects of the cyborg? I asked my authorities about this. Why don't we see them building buildings? Fixing cars? Transporting children to school? Playing games and cleaning scrapes? Because we are talking "Cyber-Chatagua," declare Queen Mu and R.U. Sirius.⁽³⁸⁾
 

... bringing cyberculture to the people!
 

We're talking about Total Possibilites. Radical assaults on the limits of biology, gravity, and time. The end of Artificial Scarcity. The dawn of a new humanism. High-jacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games. Flexing those synapses! Stoking those neuropeptides! Making Bliss States our normal waking consciousness. Becoming the Bionic Angel.

Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!⁽³⁹⁾

As Rushkoff puts it, "in stark contrast ... kids' culture stands as a delightfully mixed-up common ground for all these digital, magical, and biological sorts of development."⁽⁴⁰⁾
 

THE TEACHER MAKES A DRAMATIC ENTRANCE
 

Masked Rider

His driving teacher was captured by Lord Dragonon's evil Maggots, and they made a clone of him who was actually an electricity force monster. He let Dex drive safely to the place they were going to; then they decided they would switch so that the teacher would drive back. The monster who was the clone of the teacher changed his hand into a weapon, and Dex turned into the Masked Rider. Both are cyborgs. Dex was able to hit the teacher-cyborg into an electrical equipment thing, but this turned the teacher-cyborg into an even more powerful cyborg. Dex called Combat Chopper and together they finished off the bad cyborg monster. Meanwhile, before that happened, Dex found out that his weirdo creature-pet Furbis was hiding in his backpack. (He's not a cyborg.)⁽⁴¹⁾
 

Teacher

As a teacher I am like a dentist. The dentist tells you what you have to do to have good teeth, but essentially you have to do it. Some days it is as hard as pulling teeth. And if they didn't brush their teeth last night, they come back and you can't get near them because they have bad breath. And you have this faint feeling as if they fail you in some way, or you failed because you did not press upon them the importance of doing it. They come with cavities and you have to fix them. They come to you two hours before you have to turn in the grades and they ask, "What can I do?" "Well, you really should have brushed. Let's see if I can fill it. We'll stick some silver in there and see if it holds. But next time remember to brush!" (female, 44, High School, Small Town)⁽⁴²⁾

The leader of the Ronin warriors is named Ryo. The Ronin warriors are cyborgs because of their machinery-like armor, which is part of them. The armor's, like, inside them. It becomes like an exoskeleton, like bugs have. The names of them are Ryo, Roin, Kento, Sage and Cie.

However, the Ronin warriors action figures -- if you happen to see them -- you will not think they're cyborgs even though they are. Because the armor snaps on them. But on the T.V. show the armor is on them and doesn't snap on or anything.

They show their armor to fight to save the world from the evil dynasty master Talpa. They have to fight Talpa so he will not crash Earth into his netherworlds. If Talpa crashed the Earth into his netherworlds, he could rule the Earth and change the people into his evil dynasty.

Kento, especially, likes to be a Ronin Warrior. Although he is always hungry and needs to work on skills for everything, he likes to attack, and even though he is not very good at defense skills, he's very good at fighting. Ryo kind of likes being a Ronin Warrior because he's very good at fighting and he's the most powerful Ronin warrior. He's also able to defend them really well because he's able to call on the "white armor".

Most people on Earth do not know about the Ronin Warriors. Nobody knows abot them. They don't have secret identities. You can even see their face through their helmet so you can know them instantly. They travel to Talpa's netherworlds for long periods of time to fight and even when they're on Earth, they live in a big city, and nobody knows about them really, except for their friend, Mia, and their other, five-year-old friend, Uli. They know Uli because he got lost in a crowd of people trying to run away from a dynasty warlord; Ryo found him and now Uli lives with Ryo.

They know Mia because she was sent out to find the Ronin Warriors from her grandfather to tell the Ronin Warriors that the dynasty would attack. She doesn't go back to her grandfather because he got too old and died.

I think the Ronin Warriors are interesting because when Ryo was fighting Saber Strike, he lived in a very hot desert jungle area, and then he lived in the big city.⁽⁴³⁾
 

Teacher

It's the magic that strikes me, the magic and the power and the control. My students love magic tricks, performing magic for each other. Their favorite thing is to REVEAL the way to perform the trick! I don't remember this anymore from when I was young, but from my children I believe I must have felt this way too when I was a kid: sharing the magician's secret is actually more powerful than performing the trick, because the sharing of the KNOWLEDGE is the POWER. I wonder about what sort of leader I should be in my classroom: I put on different costumes --sometimes literally!-- and I become an enhanced person, who can perform new tricks. The parents and the administrators never share this secret with us, and the magic comes from that LACK of sharing in this case ... I can become a leader in my classroom by showing the students how they, too, can become the teacher, share the knowledge working in groups to teach each other something that they just learned ... we're tapping into something in common that helps us find the magic.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Joe Kincheloe has written:
 

The professional educational research community too often has been guilty of viewing research in a manner that inhibits teachers from becoming critically reflective practitioners. This is the problem with modernist social and educational science: What is the benefit of the knowledge it produces? By the very techniques it employs, the very questions it is limited to legitimately asking ... educational research creates trivial information. The response of practitioners is often, "So what?"⁽⁴⁵⁾

One response from the teacher interested in Saturday Morning as curriculum content, is to use discussion of Kids' T.V. to accomplish curricular goals. After having read Karen Gallas' discussion of Science Talks in her 1-2 classroom,⁽⁴⁶⁾ one teacher imagined basing weekly open talks on asking, "How'd they do that?" about amazing accomplishments that happened on specific programs. The point of these discussions would not be to debunk the science as absurd but to theorize what would have to happen in order for such an accomplishment to be possible. More directly, another teacher found that students can develop an interest in science because they desire to perform some of the tricks they see on Saturday Morning programs. Yet another teacher emphasized the positive impact of fantasy on her classroom: Many children are used to being told what to do; it is hard for them to draw a picture after listening to a story. These children can benefit from exposure to a wide variety of fantastic depictions, as an aid in thinking about what they might imagine themselves. The same children can use the stories and characters of common programs to role play, and after starting off reproducing a narrative they have viewed, move on toward improvising their own story. A shy child watching cartoons can take on their own destiny, finding better ways to speak to classmates or express themselves, feeling secure in being able to be a monster or hero after sharing a character's experiences before emulating them; children who want to be leaders or are tired of always being expected to take on leadership roles by their peers can find a variety of models of leadership in the main characters of these programs. Explosive behaviors that result from watching these programs can be "teachable moments" that enable discussion of what constitutes excessive violence as opposed to a positive outlet for frustration or anger. Students who do not have enough opportunities to talk with others might benefit from an intial exposure to a world of a consistent character that they can share time with, if this time together is then handled in a reasonable way by some adult, possibly a teacher. Other children do not know "how to be" in reality, while some move back and forth between reality and fantasy; a discussion of Kids' T.V. can help a teacher understand children in this context either by way of private conversations or through what they choose to relate to in class activities.
 

Teachers often suggest that discussion of Kids' T.V. can promote self-esteem because a child can easily compare themselves to a "cartoon character" that is not fully developed, noting in what ways they differ from the character, including instances in which they are "better" or "not as good as" the character. Such discussions, generalizable to the processing of any literature or narratives in various forms, and not unique to the habitation of technoculture and popular mass media, respond more directly to my initial interest in morality and constructions of self. Students can identify aspects of a character that they would or would not want to copy. Such a conversation helps to promote students as "evaluators", forming skills for judging "good/bad", "like/don't like", and what they'd change. One teacher suggested it would be a powerful experience to run cartoons from ten to fifteen years ago and ask the children for their reactions, comparing the stories and characters to those that are aired today. What these pedaogical strategies have in common with the science talks is that the teachers ask not only unique questions but create classrooms where student learning is grounded on questions that students themselves ask.⁽⁴⁷⁾
 

Another direction of response to my talks with children highlights the ways that teachers can use Kids' T.V. to transform their relationships with their students. By viewing these programs and talking about them with children in ways that are not hostile but invite response, some teachers believe students see them in a different way, as "more human" and less as a "teacher-person" animal or machine. Perhaps the first time such a discussion is attempted might result in silence, but students often come back a week or two later to talk about what you said. In contrast, relationships that result from a T.V.-saturated culture involve teacher-entertainers who are expected or expect themselves to "edutain" with increased pace and variation in media-dosage. Some teachers relish the cyborg imagery and find empowerment through it. They respond positively to the information that many students find some programs more interesting than others because of the novelty of the program (different artistic style in depicting characters on Sailor Moon, or in plot development as in Iron Man); they note with interest that many students prefer the cartoon-based programs to the ones that feature live actors because the animated programs can depict more fantastic things not realizable within the budgets of the live-action programs. They are, in the ways they talk about their presence in a classroom, "cyborg teachers", and they use the metaphor to their advantage, seeing various tools and equipment as enhancing their ability to provide novelty and extend their power to magically teach. Cyborg teachers promote proactive bricolage, seizing materials and unusual events of the day as opportunities for enacting the cyborg curriculum.
 

I search for ways to enhance MY power to effect change for students. Scientistic technologies of teaching in the ideological battle over "best practice" become toys for me to enhance my potential: to break the limits in a Cyber-Chatagua.
 

In this way, cyborg-teachers construct in their practice Hargreave's "self", constantly and consciously remade and reaffirmed. The implication is a heightened orientation to and reflexive attention to themselves as teachers, an enhanced sense of creativity, empowerment, and change in their work; a parallel observation is the need over time for these teachers to embrace rather than recoil from a practice defined in terms of uncertainty, vulnerability, and the threat of social withdrawal. Like Jim Paul and his friend Harry, these teachers exalt in the power to magically externalize the human potentiality they believe lurks within themselves while wary of the pull towards engulfment by that technology of externalization.
 

Those other teachers who initiate the use of Kids' T.V. as curriculum content find a view of the teacher as more "human" results in fewer expectations that they act like a "superhero" or "cyborg" and can begin to behave in a different way. The effect is similar to being seen shopping in the local supermarket. Some of these teachers then find that school can be an oasis of special time in a child's life, largely because the pace and techniques of working in a group are significantly different; students can slowly discover school as a unique opportunity to escape the entertainment-focused public realm of T.V.-tainted life. A recognition, however, of the powerful attraction of Saturday Morning television as a time to be away from other components of life, retreating into the escape of fantasy, has led some teachers to incorporate similar ways to meet this need in their teaching and learning. A discussion of Kids' T.V. supports the recuperative function of Saturday Morning throughout the week. An institutionalized space or time for being away within the classroom, such as a big refrigerator container turned into a By-Myself-Box for students to be alone, or a time when students choose something to do by themselves, are examples of this response by teachers. The point is to provide an opportunity for students to have a part of their life when knowbody knows what they are thinking or feeling, and during which they are not being judged or assessed in any way. Moments in time and space like science talks that begin and travel through student questions, by-myself areas, and journals of certain types, are examples of what some have called "heterarchic freespaces"⁽⁴⁸⁾ -- "material constructions that do not fill some metrical space, but are projective, producing, and appropriating their own spaces."
 

Viewing Kids' T.V. also helps teachers respond to students if they try to view the programs, not as adults, but as children do: avoiding a discussion of "use" of the programs in favor of immersing oneself in the fantasy has helped several teachers think about what it is like to be engaged in an activity in their own classroom as a child. In this respect, the curriculum takes on dimensions of currere as posed by William Pinar, in facilitating teachers' movement towards an inner world of psychological experience, their own life histories with respect to television and technoculture, and school.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Currere calls for teachers to be mindful of the potential for the provided-curriculum to construct the teacher as the gundam/child, and the students as the mutant monsters to be tamed. Teachers as technochildren sometimes try on new prototypes in order to experience a new sense of their powers of perception, production and destruction. At other times they experience the melancholia of the gundam, capable of harnessing the sometimes terrifying applications of scientistic pedagogical techniques in order to lead the student-monsters in an effort to save society from invasion or technological disasters.
 

When teachers use characters from various programs as examples of possibilities, encourage students to share their evaluations of those characters, or imagine themselves as teachers in terms of various characters, they are metaphorically thinking about their own thinking about teaching and learning. Metaphor, like constructing opportunities for curriculum based on students' questions, is important in post-formal pedagogy.
 

Metaphoric cognition is basic to all scientific and creative thinking and involves the fusion of previously disparate concepts in unanticipated ways. The mutual interrelationships of the components of a metaphor, not the components themselves, are the most important aspects of a metaphor. Indeed, many have argued that relationships, not objects, should be the basis of scientific thinking. When thinking of the concept of mind, the same thoughts are relevant. We might be better served to think of mind not in terms of parts but in terms of the connecting patterns, the dance of the interacting parts. The initial consciousness of the "poetic" recognition of this dance involves a nonverbal mental vibration, an increased energy state. From this creative tension emerges a perception of the meaning of the metaphor and the heightened consciousness which accompanies it. Post-formal teachers can model such metaphoric perception for their students. Such perception is not simply innate, it can be learned.⁽⁵⁰⁾

Thus Saturday Morning television, as currere, like other aspects of culture, can be a cultural resource with any number of possibilities for interpretation and application, incorporating potential ideologies and expectations yet consumed or enacted in ways both forseeable and surprising.⁽⁵¹⁾
 
 

Researcher as Rhizome

Some difficulties in carrying out my research emerged as I asked teachers to suggest what the research should be about. Holding expectations for education research grounded in their experience with a traditional style of expert pronouncements, some would not understand my questions because they were listening for declarations about what they should do. Because research "is supposed to tell me what's best" rather than "facilitate my work as a critically reflective practitioner", sharing summaries of interviews with children and inchoate attempts to make sense of this as an adult were received as "bad research" that confirmed the notion that educational research in general is trivial and useless. Most teachers see Saturday Morning Television, and Kids' T.V. in general, as a collection of information harmful to school learning, in opposition to high culture. In these discussions, it became clear to me that the people I was talking with were not "post-formal thinkers" who "see facts as more than pieces of information."⁽⁵²⁾ The introduction of my work had to be structured in a way that communicated that I was looking at this information regarding television and its young viewers "in relationship to the larger processes of which they are a part." Rather than "discovering" that teachers are uncritical thinkers incapable of applying such post-formal thought to reflection on their practice, however, I learned over time that I needed to translate my perspective and help them see that I wanted to talk about teaching in this peculiar, atypical manner.
 

For others, their construction of their function as a teacher does not include a critical examination of resources for potential curriculum; for these teachers, the practice of teaching is mostly technical and instrumental, and is separable from an engagement with curriculum content. Interviews with some teachers thus resulted in a difficulty in negotiating the purpose of the interview: having little exposure to cyborgs or cartoons, they would suggest that they had no authority to speak on the subject, and that they would have no knowledge of the correct way to teach the material. A common connection was made with a prevalent discourse that constructs many of these programs as productive of antisocial and violent behaviors.⁽⁵³⁾ Kids' T.V. as a potential resource for curriculum content or pedagogy runs counter to a view disparagingly summarized by Henry Giroux:

[Pedagogy] is what follows the selection of ideologically correct content, its legitimacy rooted in whether or not it represents the proper teaching style. In the dominant discourse, pedagogy is simply measureable, accountable methodology used to transmit course content. It is not a mutually conforming element in the construction of knowledge and learning, but an afterthought reduced to the status of the technical and instrumental.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Teachers with this approach to pedagogy seemed most attuned to issues regarding the accuracy of my "data", how representative my sample of children might be, and the most efficacious ordering of tasks in a curriculum based on the topic. I risk identifying this group of experts as the "walking zombies", stripped of their humanity, invisible, and mechanized by the technoculture of schooling. Joe Kincheloe echoes Ellison in this respect, linking the politics of marginality, teacher thinking, and post-formal thinking:
 

In this context teacher questions about the interpretation of information or questions about the moral and ethical nature of the curriculum are deemed dangerous. ... Here the point emerges that the post-formal ability to ask unique questions and to detect problems never before detected is politically dangerous as it tends to juggle comfortable power relations. Thinking is indeed a political act.⁽⁵⁵⁾
 

Finally, a small group of teachers wished to take advantage of my research project, but were unsure about how they might do so because of their very ability to multi-contextualize the research itself:
 

How should I interrogate YOUR research and my relationship to educational research? What role do you/I/the students/other teachers play in your project? I think YOU are the bad-guy uncle! I am the child gundam and the students interviewed are the hapless adults that have caused the problem but need my naiveté to fix things. Or I am the adult, of course! My students are the bad-guys, and YOU are the child gundam, attaching research gadgets to your body to morph into some superhero that can save us from the epidemic of post-nuclear standardized testing ... OR: ...⁽⁵⁶⁾
 

� The researcher is Piccolo on Dragon Ball Z. I have donned a costume of unusual color -- brighter and different. Special details, such as the little claws on my fingers (dark purple, not black, on the program -- who would have thought of that? Saturday Morning and school and personhood -- who would have thought of that?) heighten my uniqueness. Usually, I am a "bad guy," the intellectual-as-terrorist in Foucauldian terms; I aim to explode the bridges of common sense conceptual discourse. But, in some episodes, I align with the "good guy," Go-ku, my usual enemy, in order to defeat another "bad guy" (such as Raditz) who threatens the promise of public education. If nothing else, teaming up a bad guy and a good guy is more interesting for its novelty. Am I human? animal? machine? cyborg? Are educators human, animal, machine, cyborg?
 

Go-ku is stronger -- because he's actually Raditz's brother, and they're both aliens in a way -- they're not human. Piccolo is some special creature. Other good guys might like to help, but they're much too weak and would probably get beaten up in seconds.⁽⁵⁷⁾
 

� I am a Marvel cartoon hero. My program provides the metaphor for research because, in cartoons,
 

...you can make ANYTHING happen. Well, you can do that with real people but you can REALLY do that with cartoons.⁽⁵⁸⁾
 

My research pronouncements are thus transformative discourses of possibility rather than descriptions of reality or verifications of hypotheses. They reflect a basic reality in the sense of Baudrillard; yet by masking and perverting this reality, I foster pedagogical change.
 

� This research program should be compared to Iron Man, which is harder to follow than other programs, but worth the effort.
 

If one day you started watching it, you wouldn't know anything about it. They don't tell you much about it unless you see certain episodes. In other Marvel shows they make a littler number of villians, so it's easier to follow. Sometimes a lot of different characters will make it more interesting, but only if you watch it a lot. Like if you have a favorite villian, you may not see that villian again for a LONG time.⁽⁵⁹⁾
 

In this way, continuing with Baudrillard, my research masks the absence of a basic reality and demands the ongoing construction of an appearance of reality. The "magic" of research, while filled with good intentions, has ambiguous results. The good-guys/bad-guys are blurred into overlapping regions, and the subject of the study shifts from that observed to the observer and back, blurring these boundaries as well. We need to relinquish yet a different fallacy than that offered by Mazlish: that magic and morality are distinct terms. What are we looking at, and where are we looking? It is important to understand that we are not merely looking at the possibility of multiple epistemologies, but living in, with and through these epistemology/cultures.
 

� An analysis of relationships among animals, machines, and cyborgs is, in Donna Haraway's terms, a "technology of vision."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Research becomes a prosthetic device we attach to ourselves as part of the divine dream of Descartes' view from above, or the desire to merge with the machine into Mazlishian or Ellisonian invisibility. In such a paradigm, I have a choice: I can re-present a vision of reality more real than any other vision, or I can shrink out of YOUR sight, enabling the voices of those I have worked with to emerge, placing agency firmly in those voices. Surely you are not content with the hubris of the first option, nor with the abdication of responsibility and dehumanizing mechanization of the researcher in the second. We realize together that any act of triage is a technology of vision rather than a practice of pedagogy and/or research. It would be, as Jim Paul wrote, "just a kind of mechanical vision, fascinating and persistent, against which [our] need to oberve [would be] an eddy to the main current." Relationships among animals, people, machines, and cyborgs are not to be observed but lived; they are the stuff of the technoculture we breathe, dance, hate, use, and get used by. We are not looking at the epistemology but living in, with, and through it. We are surfing a mobius strip of technoculture, returning in every relationship to every other. The relationships simultaneously surf US, in an act of agency and triage that, in Haraway's new vision, may just as likely trick us, or treat us to their own humor. Harkening back to the origins of triage in Napoleonic battlefields, it is clear that any particular enactment wields morality in the service of power and ideology. Children performing their own mini-triage in selecting favorite programs from a menu of viewing options enact a parallel version of morality as a technology of vision. As do teachers who triagecurrere possibilities at the door to their classrooms, sending Kids' T.V. to either top priority, possible use, or low-status detritus. For me to add to the symbolic violence by selecting quotes that merged in my talks with children and teachers is perhaps a further act of immorality, perhaps a feat of magic.
 

It can only be magic if we read this act of research without expectations of appropriative knowledge stuff to look at. The research is rhizomic in character,⁽⁶¹⁾ forging relationships in evasive, extensive, and intricately interconnected ways, much like the relationships that were forged among researcher, children, and teachers involved in the project: inexpressible as conclusions of scientistic research, the rhizome is magically moral in its intentions, successfully living in symbiotic status with educational institutional practices, inherently non-mechanistic in structure and function. We have simply performed a new feat of magic: we've pulled the rug out from under the legs of the animal-human-machine triage and seen that we can leave all of the technologies of vision still and intact. The magic, though, is in the rug, which can be used as a new prosthetic as we choose: ride it as a magic carpet.
 

Of course the whole point of this paper is NOT to prove that Kids' T.V. is or could be a central component of the constructed selves of students, teachers and researchers. If we use technoculture and cyborg metaphors to look at the selves of pedagogical practice, the research becomes a technology of vision which splits what is observed and analyzed into a spectrum of technoculture. If we employ technoculture and cyborg metaphors as a mode of enunciation with which we speak and write a story of pedagogical practice, the research becomes a technology of sign systems, power and the self, and of production. This is not to say that such stories do not exist and are not rhizomatically linked in innumerable ways with the one that appears here. They might be more likely to be found in other spaces, and told by other characters from this story.
 

We can produce, transform or manipulate curriculum; we wield signs, meanings, symbols or signification practices in our discourse; we determine the conduct of people and apply templates of analysis that submit subjects to ends, domination, and objectification; and we permit some people to, as Foucault has described, "effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves."⁽⁶²⁾ Cyborg selves become a technology of morality when they enunciate a hierarchy between knowing oneself and taking care of oneself. The gundam or anime¢ hero surfing and breathing technoculture lunges for self care and begins to know his or her self through the act of self care, discovering self potential and realization. The machine-self of the invisible man shuns self care in the process of self knowledge. The cyborg teacher is positioned in a web of possibility that presents links to any technology of vision, enunciation, self-knowledge, or self-care, and is itself in relation to such technologies imbricated in extended webs of possibility, power, signs, and production. Technoculture is a node in the web, a region of the mobius strip, a character in a saga.

¹ I would like to thank my research assistant, Noah Appelbaum, and Belinda Davis, for the intital suggestion that Saturday Morning has shifted from cold-war anxiety to a celebration of technoscience in the solution of its own havoc. Thanks also for the great critiques from Stefanie Rotsaert, Shirley Steinberg, and John Weaver. 1/6/96

² Dividing into categories, or an act of triage. Triage in a different sense, but also compatible in its pursuit of a moral context and the social and cultural values represented by representations of education, can be found in Sue Books' article, Literary Journalism as Educational Criticism: A Discourse on Triage. Holistic Education Review. 5 (3), 1992: 41-51.

³ Mazlish, Bruce. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993.

⁴ Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits. NY: Verso, 1991, p. 162.

⁵ This work begins with an embrace of concepts found in the work of Michel Foucault. See, e.g., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980; Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck, and Hutton, Patrick (eds.). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press, 1988. For another discussion of self, subjectivity, and power see Julian Henriques, et al. Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulations and Subjectivity. London: Methuen, 1984.

⁶ Waught, Coulton. The Comics. Jackson, MS: Univ, press of Mississippi, 1947.

⁷ Mead, Margaret, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. NY: Doubleday, 1970: 72.

⁸ See, e.g., Charles Rosen, "Beethoven's Triumph" New York Review of Books. XLII, 14, 1995: 52-6.

⁹ My research is consistent with those of others who seek to respond to concerns about teacher empowerment. See, e.g., Janet Miller's Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990:
 

Within these daily spaces, clearings forged in the midst of permission slips and mandated curriculum and computer print-outs of test-scores, educators do recognize that the fissures of teaching and research, theory and practice, public and private, are artificial distinctions that separate us from ourselves and from the relationships in which knowledges about self and about our worlds are generated. (p. 172)

See also Joe Kincheloe's Toward a Critical Politics of Teacher Thinking: Mapping the Postmodern. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993:
 

The issue of knowledge control moves us into a direct confrontation with teacher power. We cannot maintain a view of students as democratic participants and teachers as disempowered technicians. Over sixty years ago, Dewey argued that teachers must assume the power to assert themselves on matters of educational importance with the assurance that this judgement will affect what happens in schools. Present thechnicist models of teacher education do not accept this argument, often teaching novices not to seek empowerment, not to think in an independent manner. Indeed, the hidden curriculum of technicist teacher education promotes a passive view of teachers, they are seen as rule followers who are rendered more "suspensable" with their standardized lesson plan formats and their adaptation to technical evaluation plans. (p.35)

¹⁰ Appelbaum, Peter. Popular Culture, Educational Discourse, and Mathematics. Albany, NY: State Univ. of NY press, 1995; Making 'Sense' of Curriculum as Commodity or Cultural Resource. American Educational Studies Association, Cleveland, OH. Nov. 1-5, 1995.

¹¹ Hargreaves, Andy. Changing Teachers, Changing Times: teachers' work and culture in the postmodern age. NY: Teachers College Press, 1994.

¹² Hargreaves, p.70.

¹³ It should be recognized that children enjoy viewing some programs not discussed in this chapter. Teachers mentioned, for example, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Wishbone, and Animaniacs. However, the children I spoke with did not suggest these programs in my interviews. Even those children who later agreed that these others would be worth my time viewing did not include such programs in their recommendations.

¹⁴ Haraway, Donna. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review. 80, 1985: 65-107. Reprinted in Feminism/Postmodernism. edited by Linda J. Nicholson. NY: Routledge, 1990: 190-233.

¹⁵ Macdonald, James. A Transcendental Developmental Ideology of Education. Theory as a Prayerful Act: The Collected Essays of James B. Macdonald. edited by Bradley J. Macdonald, with an introduction by William F. Pinar. New York: Peter Lang, 1995: 75.

¹⁶ Rushkoff, Douglas. Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Think in an Age of Chaos. NY: Harper Collins, 1996: 109

¹⁷ Mazlish: 213.

¹⁸ Mazlish: 214.

¹⁹ Mazlish: 216-19.

²⁰ Interview excerpt.

²¹ Hargreaves: 84.

²² Bell, Beverly. Children's Science, Constructivism and Learning in Science. Deakin University Press, Australia, 1993. The issue of difference between children's and adults' epistemological triage of cyborg opens up a host of dilemmas. I want to avoid reifying the distinctions in a backhanded age-ist construction of "adult" and "child" through my descriptions of these meaning-making activities. Yet there are important constellations of cyborg as "power" versus cyborg as "sex" in these discourses (see, e.g., Freudian analyses of cinematic cyborgs, virtual sex, cyborgs and goddesses ...). This is an area that requires a great deal of synthesis, ranging from Foucault's work on the care of the self (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. NY: Pantheon, 1978) to work of Evelyn Fox Keller on the sexual metaphors of knowing and knowledge (Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. press, 1985). The links become clearer to me when I think in terms of the Foucauldian collapse of power/knowledge. But there is much to be done here in respect to curriculum research and theory.

²³ Interview excerpt.

²⁴ Rushkoff: 69.

²⁵ Rushkoff: 74.

²⁶ Piercy, Marge. He, She, and It. NY: Knopf, 1991.

²⁷ Stine, R.L. The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight. NY: Scholastic, Inc., 1994.

²⁸ Interview excerpt.

²⁹ Much work has been done in this area of curriculum. For exemplary work see Noel Gough's Laboratories of Fiction. Deakin, Australia: Deakin University Press, 1993.

³⁰ Rushkoff: 78.

³¹ Rushkoff: 80.

³² Mazlish, p. 219.

³³ Paul, Jim. Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon. NY: Avon Books, 1991.

³⁴ Paul: 78.

³⁵ Paul: 145.

³⁶ Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. NY: St. Martins Press, 1990.

³⁷ Rushkoff: 154.

³⁸ Mu, Queen and R.U. Sirius. Editorial. Mondo 2000. 7 (Fall) 1989. quoted in Ross: 163.

³⁹ Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. NY: New American Library, 1947/52: 86.

⁴⁰ Rushkoff: 109.

⁴¹ Interview excerpt.

⁴² Joseph, Pamela Bolotin and Gail E. Burnaford, Images of Schoolteachers in Twentieth-Century America. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1994: 54.

⁴³ Interview excerpt.

⁴⁴ Interview excerpt.

⁴⁵ Kincheloe: 17.

⁴⁶ Gallas, Karen. Talking Their Way Into Science: Hearing Children's Questions and Theories, Responding with Curricula. NY: Teachers College Press, 1995.

⁴⁷ Kincheloe suggests this is an example of post-formal teaching: 115.

⁴⁸ Menser, Michael. Becoming - Heterarch: On Technocultural Theory, Minor Science, and the Production of Space. in Technoscience and Cyberculture. edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinson, and Michael Menser. NY: Routledge, 1996: 293-316. quote: 310.

⁴⁹ Pinar, William (ed.). Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1975.

⁵⁰ Kincheloe: 151-2.

⁵¹ See, e.g., Consumer Culture: Power and the Identity Politics of Mathematics Education. in Appelbaum, 1995.

⁵² Kincheloe: 156.

⁵³ See, e.g., Levin, Diane E. and Carlsson-Page, Nancy. The Might Morphin Power Rangers: Teachers Voice Concern. Young Children. Sept, 1995: 67-72; American Psychological Association. Violence and Youth: Psychology's Response. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1993; national Association for the Education of Young Children. NAEYC Position Statement on Media Violence in Children's Lives. Young Children 45 (5): 18-21. Pereira, J. Caution: 'Morphing' May Be Hazardous to Your Teacher. Wall Street Journal. 7 (Dec), 224 (111): 1, 8.

⁵⁴ Giroux, Henry and Roger Simon. Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy. in Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle. edited by Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989: page 238.

⁵⁵ Kincheloe: 151.

⁵⁶ Interview excerpt.

⁵⁷ Interview excerpt.

⁵⁸ Interview excerpt.

⁵⁹ Interview excerpt.

⁶⁰ Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge, 1992: 183-202.

⁶¹ Martin, Emily. Citadels, Rhizomes, and String Figures. in Aronowits, Martinsons and Menser (eds.): 97-110.

⁶² Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self. in Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck, and Hutton, Patrick (eds.). Technologies of the Self. Amherst, MA: The Univ. of MA Press, 1988: 18.