Maddening Lessons: Critical Engagements With Mad Men and Curriculum Thought

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Animated by the wide critical and popular acclaim for the television series Mad Men, this session presents an array of diverse readings of differing “lessons” learned from critical engagements with the serial drama and curriculum thought. The curricular analyses employed in this paper session critically engage Mad Men to suggest its lessons neither as accurate reflections of the 1960s, nor as cultural anxieties of the present day, but as charismatic provocations to think about the workings of nostalgia, artistry, femininity, and failure as critical idioms for curriculum thought beyond a pure past and present. Through these four idioms, the scholars in this symposium contemplate what lessons we may learn from Mad Men.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 1: Culture and Commentary (The Readings/Makings of Curriculum)

Chair

• Mark Helmsing, University of Wyoming

Papers

• Mad Men's Don Draper as Artist as Teacher - Gabriel Stephen Huddleston, Texas Christian University

• Mad Men and the Curricular Pastiche of Nostalgia - Samuel Rocha, The University of British Columbia

• Learning to Fail: Mad Men and Failure as a Mode of Curriculum Thought - Mark Helmsing, University of Wyoming

• The Help: Secretaries, Servants, and the Imagined Black Feminine in Mad Men - Stephanie Troutman, Appalachian State University

Discussant

• Robert James Helfenbein, Loyola University Maryland