The Curriculum and Cultural Pedagogy of Medievalism Across Mediated Spaces

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Issues in Social Studies Research

Abstract

This paper draws upon one research team’s efforts in studying medievalism as an expressive form that exists in popular culture, material culture, and in everyday life. The paper theorizes how medievalism, as an object of social studies curriculum, shapes our historical consciousness and how medievalism exists as an example of what Hayden White calls “the practical past” (2014). Grounding the research in social/public pedagogy, the paper provides examples of how we encounter medievalism in the television series Game of Thrones; the video game Assassin’s Creed; and the global chain of Medieval Times dinner theatre productions. The implications of this research for social studies education invite critical and experiential awareness of the presence of the (medieval) past in our present.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University