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Congratulations to Dr. Jill Peterfeso on the release of a new edited volume with Alexis Franzese. Jill is a Professor with an endowed chair at Guilford College, where she has taught for over 13 years. She also serves as a Mizzou Academy instructional specialist, sharing her wisdom and care with learners in our global high school English courses.

The following book release story is based on a conversation between Dr. Peterfeso and Karen Scales, our Global Language Arts Department Chair.
The idea for Why the Magic Matters: Discovering Disney as a Laboratory for Learning, emerged from my (Jill’s) experiences discovering Disney, alongside my students, as a site of academic study. I taught my first college course focused on Disney in the fall of 2015. As a professor at a small liberal arts school, I had to design a first-year seminar that was not rooted in my expertise as a religious studies scholar. This course needed to be an intellectual adventure for the students and myself. I picked Disney.
I had been thinking deeply about Disney magic since childhood. Whether it was visiting Walt Disney World in Florida, watching Disney films with my family (in theaters, on VHS tapes, and later on DVDs), or listening to a Haunted Mansion record I found in my parents’ LP collection, Disney had always been a magical and nostalgic backdrop to my childhood. As I taught my first Disney course (and there would be nearly a dozen more, some including trips to Disney World), I found ways to share that lifetime of deep thinking with my students. I showed them how studying Disney is not just “fun” or “easy,” but in fact puts them squarely in the middle of a liberal arts education. You can study Disney from nearly every academic angle, and what better way than Disney to discover the richness that education has to offer?
This book is a compilation of essays written by educators of Disney courses and content from a wide range of academic disciplines. For example, a business professor explains the strategies behind Disney’s “magical” marketing prowess; a film historian shows how Walt Disney’s love for animals and nature documentaries made him the 20th century’s most impactful environmentalist; a pair of sociologists examine the emotional labor required of parents to enjoy vacations at Disney parks; a museum specialist argues that embodied, sensorial experiences on Main Street, U.S.A. shape American identity. Other chapters explore Disney within disciplines like American history, Asian studies, data science, disability studies, education studies, Indigenous studies, literature and composition, and media studies. Each chapter is an invitation to see Disney differently—and in turn, to understand education differently.

As an educator, I know that learning is more than just a path to a career. It can and should transform, inspire, and prepare students for a lifetime of collaboration, creative exploration, and discovery. So while this book includes authors whose careers started at or alongside Disney, as well as scholars who enliven their academic work with Disney studies, this book is a gift to all readers in hopes they will find for themselves “one little spark” of passion and curiosity about the ways Disney makes magic in the world—and the ways the world of learning is itself magical.