Teaching with Monsters: From Whimsy to Shadow
Journal of Folklore and Education
2026: Volume 13
Camille Maria Acosta and Sheila Bock
About This Volume
Through “Whimsy” and “Shadow,” this issue seeks to create space for the broad spectrum of ways we as humans interact with monsters. While most often associated with fears and anxieties, monsters can also serve as entry points into other dimensions of the human experience, including playfulness and creativity. Together, the contributions to this special issue showcase some of the diverse ways that teaching with monsters can help learners of different ages and in different educational settings develop skills of close reading and critical analysis; navigate ontological uncertainty; and creatively reimagine the world we live in and our place within it.
In showcasing some of the innovative, profound, and thought-provoking ways educators in different parts of the world work with monsters in the classroom and beyond, readers will explore diverse elusive figures and the multiple contexts—personal, social, cultural, environmental, historical, political—that make them meaningful. Additionally, the same complexities that make the monstrous so pedagogically rich also present ethical considerations. The case studies, conversations, and frameworks that follow illustrate what must be considered when engaging monsters in educational practices.
Articles
Introduction: Teaching (And Learning) With the Monsters in Our Midst
Sharing personal stories and building theoretical frameworks, Camille Maria Acosta and Sheila Bock introduce the special issue, Teaching with Monsters: From Whimsy to Shadow.
Handle with Care: A Conversation About the Ethical Use of Monsters in Diverse Classroom Spaces
Rachel González-Martin’s interview with Domino R. Perez offers an overview of ethical considerations for the responsible teaching of monster folklore in diverse classrooms. It includes a list of monster study readings for teachers and media resources for classroom use.
Mapping the Legend: Transgressing Borders and Teaching Migration with (Literary) Monsters
This essay explores how combining literary representations of legendary monsters with narrative mapping activities offers teachers and students creative pathways for teaching and learning at the intersection of climate, migration, and literary folklore studies.
Flashy, Friendly, Ferocious: A Case Study of Mythological Creatures in Museum Family Programs
This article includes Classroom Connections
This case study examines monsters and mythical creatures as protective identity tools through a family-centered museum education initiative. Drawing on collection objects featuring guardian figures, hybrid beings, and protective adornment, programmers used prompts such as “What do you wear to feel fancy or fierce?” to invite playful, empowering explorations of identity, care, and belonging, offering transferable strategies for museum and community educators.
Hunting Ghosts in a College Classroom
Drawing heavily from student writing and monster theory, this article walks readers through the enriching, enlightening, and sometimes fraught pathway that opened when the author received a grant to buy ghost-hunting kits for an undergraduate folklore course and explores the structure and theoretical framework of the course.
Building Classroom Community and Practicing Deliberative Discourse Through Legends: What the Mothman, the Big Muddy Monster, and the Ghosts of Copp’s Hill Cemetery Can Offer Upper Elementary Students
A sixth-grade teacher wrestled with how to build community through discursive practice. Finding inspiration in legends, especially those about cryptids and the paranormal, students learned to compare legends with their own experiences. This case study shows increased student excitement about cultural exploration and improved engagement in discussions in other contexts.
We Are All Monsters Here: Teaching Monstrification by Making and Becoming Monsters
This article includes Classroom Connections
This essay introduces an undergraduate honors course that approaches monsters as products of monstrification, a discursive act of interpellation. Students move from analyzing to creating and inhabiting monsters, and the monsters they produce reveal concerns about identity, embodiment, and technological encroachment that echo themes from internet folklore and creepypasta traditions. By understanding monsters as constructs of participatory meaning-making activities, students grasp that monstrification affects themselves as well as others.
Monstrosity, Pedagogy, and the Snake-Son: Reimagining Shona Folktales in Informal and Formal Education
This article examines how a Shona folktale about a witch and her monstrous snake-son uses legend and grotesque imagery to express cultural fears and desires. Drawing on monster theory and feminist and postcolonial perspectives, the study highlights how monstrosity becomes a tool for cultural critique and empowerment. Ultimately, the author argues that Shona monster tales facilitate community reflection, enabling educators to explore sensitive social issues through allegory.
“Against life as we know it”: Working with Werewolves to Create Disability Counterstories
This article includes Classroom Connections
Werewolf and monster stories often have ableist narratives within them. Through counterstories, this essay examines the ways ableist monster narratives create a normative body/behavior and closes with a lesson plan for creating counterstories to disrupt, challenge, and oppose ableism, aimed at the college educator.
From Whimsy to Shadow: Rusalki as Bridge, Counter-Archive, and Ethical Method in Holocaust Theatre Education
From The Secrets We Keep, a Holocaust education musical rooted in Slavic rusalka mythology, the author argues that legendary beings can function as pedagogical tools when tethered to historical specificity and ethical boundaries. It presents rusalki as 1) a bridge into difficult history, 2) a counter-archive for grief and moral injury, and 3) an ethical method that refuses spectacle, especially around gendered violence. Transferable practices for educators are included.
Waste Not a Phantasmic Pedagogy: Childhood Monsters and the “Wastefulness Ghost” (Mottainai-obake)
This article calls on a combination of personal experience and observations of the mottainai-obake, the “wastefulness ghost,” a common monster from children’s folklore in present-day Japan. Exploring this monster, its context, and its developmental background, readers will find the stories we tell about monsters to teach may change depending upon context.
“Taking the Hand of the Monster”: Teaching Critical Mystery Studies in New Mexico
The liminal spaces inhabited by monsters and mysteries have the potential to transform us. Critical Mystery Studies (CMS) is a new field of study that engages the liminal, both in the object of study and how the field intersects with a variety of disciplines. This essay explains some of the history behind the creation of CMS and describes the critical and creative methods that students use to help them face the challenges of this work.
Jabberwocks and Snallygasters: Exploring the Role of Dungeons & Dragons in Environmental Education
This article includes Classroom Connections
There is a growing movement to integrate games, both serious and silly, into learning experiences. This article describes the successful implementation of games like Dungeons & Dragons into environmental education, using monsters and mystery to create immersive, meaningful experiences for students through a learn-by-doing approach to complex topics. These games promote learning, attitude and behavior change, awareness and empathy, and communication skills while supporting multiple learning styles.
Bad Bunny’s “Baticano”: Teaching Moral Panic as Digital Folklore
This article includes Classroom Connections
This classroom case study treats “monsterization” as digital folklore and informal education through Bad Bunny’s Halloween-released music video “Baticano.” Students analyze how online publics construct monsters through moral panic, genre framing, and competing “evidence” practices in comment threads and stitched videos. The module provides a replicable coding lab, discussion protocol, and ethical strategies for teaching religion, sexuality, and queer visibility in contemporary media.
2026 Journal of Folklore and Education Reviews
Boys Will See Boys: Folklore, Friendships, and Emotion in Boyhood Snapshots, by Jay Mechling | Social Justice Art Education, Second Edition: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy, by Marit Dewhurst | A Singing Game: A Personal History of “When I Was a Baby,” by Jeanne Pitre Soileau
Key Themes in This Issue
Narrative, Identity, Place, History, Community
The Journal of Folklore and Education (ISSN 2573-2072) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published annually by Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education. JFE publishes work that uses ethnographic approaches to tap the knowledge and life skills of students, their families, community members, and educators in K-12, college, museum, and community education.
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