Abstract
No doubt, there is something about Harry. Whether you have read the books, seen the movies, love him or not, you know Harry Potter. The worldwide phenomenon and media franchise spurred by the young wizard has made his name an indelible part of popular culture. Following the initial printing of 12 million copies of the final book in the series, 2007’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 133.5 million Harry Potter books were in print in the United States. The first six books had sold an estimated 325 million copies worldwide.2 In addition to the books, the Harry Potter franchise includes eight feature films (seven released at the time of this writing, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II scheduled for release in July 2011). The film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, released in November 2010, garnered $125.2 million in its first weekend domestically and another $205 million internationally, one of the biggest global debuts to date.3
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Notes
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1997), 17. (Said by Minerva McGonagall to Albus Dumbledore.)
See, for example, Susan Gunelius, Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Yankelovich and Scholastic, 2008 Kids er Family Reading Report: Reading in the 21st Century: Turning the Page with Technology (New York: Scholastic, 2008). It is important to note the potential for bias in research commissioned by the publisher of the book; we provide these statistics not as definitive proof of the series’ impact, but one piece of evidence of the value of the Potter books.
Harrison Group and Scholastic, 2010 Kids & Family Reading Report: Turning the Page in the Digital Age (New York: Scholastic, 2010).
Edmund Kern, The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices (New York: Prometheus Books, 2003), 14.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). Ladson-Billings describes her approach in The Dreamkeepers as “methodologically ‘messy’ ” (xvii) in that her discussion focuses on both the classroom and school levels.
Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell. The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 48.
Carmen Luke and Allan Luke, “School Knowledge as Simulation: Curriculum in Postmodern Conditions,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 10, no. 2 (1990); Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, “Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core Concepts, Debates, Organizations, and Policy,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26, no. 3 (2005); David Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy, Learning, and Contemporary Culture (London: Polity, 2003).
Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979, edited by Stuart Hall et al. (London: Routledge, 1980).
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen” (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britian (London: Routledge, 1976).
Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle, Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 10.
Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle, Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009), 2.
Mike Newell, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (USA/UK: Warner Bros., 2005).
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© 2011 Catherine L. Belcher and Becky Herr Stephenson
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Belcher, C.L., Stephenson, B.H. (2011). Introduction: Why Harry?. In: Teaching Harry Potter. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119918_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119918_1
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