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  • Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us ed. by Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton
  • Lydia McDermott
Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton (eds.), Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2017, 264 pp.

"Monsters are, at their base nature, by their essential ontology, pedagogic tools," writes Asa Simon Mittman in the first essay of this collection (19). If such is the case, then we should all be making better use of monsters in our classrooms, and this collection could arguably help us to do that. Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us provides pedagogic strategies for incorporating monsters into the classrooms of a variety of disciplines. We could consider Simon Mittman's declaration to be the overarching argument that stitches together these essays into one timely monster. Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton, the editors, suggest something similar in their introduction to the collection, "While we have always learned from monsters in one way or another, we seem to be living in a peak moment of monster pedagogy" (9). The breadth of disciplines and approaches represented in the book attests to this claim.

Despite the disciplinary breadth of essays concerning philosophy, literature, religion, Japanese, and secondary school English classrooms, the editors have distilled the collection into three main pedagogic themes: teaching difference, transforming space, and disrupting systems. Though many of the essays in the collection [End Page 375] could conceivably fit into any of these categories, the tripartite structure gives the reader a sense of progression from a simple encounter with difference to a disruption of systems that bind these distinctions. These three themes indicate the utility of the monstrous for challenging students to think differently about their worlds. The authors have a wide range of expertise and seniority, but all are accomplished in their particular fields, and all engage the monstrous in their general scholarship as well as teaching. Additionally the book is peppered with example syllabi and assignments that fellow instructors will appreciate. Monsters in the Classroom successfully bridges the academic and theoretical with the practical and pedagogical, creating its own unusual form, a kind of guidebook for teaching difference through the lens of monsters.

W. Scott Poole, author of the award-winning, Monsters in America (2011) and prolific scholar of American History, horror and popular culture, contributes the Foreword to the collection, which paints the popular culture landscape of horror within which our students already live. "We don't need to convince our students that monsters matter," he states, "They can turn on the TV, queue up Netflix, or spend a few minutes online and learn this, if they somehow have missed the horrific menagerie that lives in our current popular culture" (7). Rather, it is our obligation to engage what they are already enmeshed in: "We have to teach about monsters" (7). Editors, Golub and Hayton, pick up the theme of the proliferation of monsters in current popular culture, but with a playful twist, opening with the release of the 2013 film, Monsters University, an animated, humorous children's movie. This example illustrates for them the ubiquity of monster culture, while also reinforcing the essential connection to higher education, suggesting "we are living in an age of Monsters University writ large" (8). Golub and Hayton invoke the monstrous university as a counter to common discourses of "safe" classroom spaces, but do so gently by presenting monsters as already among us. The book as a whole challenges preconceptions of safety in classrooms as always a valid pedagogical goal. This collection suggests that there are no "safe" classrooms, and that we should make use of that reality.

We are introduced to monsters in "Part I: Teaching Difference, The Monster Appears." The essays in this section introduce ways to incorporate monsters as a foil to normalcy. The section begins with Simon Mittman's essay "Teaching Monsters from Medieval to Modern: Embracing the Abnormal," which makes the above claim that monsters are in essence pedagogical. Through the lens of monstrosity, Simon Mittman is able to lead students through medieval art to modern art, all the while accomplishing a less assessable teaching goal: a sense...

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