THE CEA FORUM - Wands or Quills? Lessons in Pedagogy from Harry Potter - Summer/ Fall 2015

Oct 15, 2026

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“Wands or Quills? Lessons in Pedagogy from Harry Potter” examines how popular culture texts, especially the Harry Potter series, can function as powerful classroom touchstones. Tracing a college instructor’s teaching experience from 1994 onward, it argues that Harry Potter supports inquiry-based, active learning through diverse teaching models, experiential practice, and collaborative rather than competitive learning. It also reviews prior scholarship while noting that meaningful learning often emerges despite traditional classroom instruction.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time26 min

AccessFree to download

Wands or Quills? Lessons in Pedagogy from Harry Potter

Teaching with popular culture

Harry Potter as a classroom text

Pedagogical models and learning styles

Related academic research

THE CEA FORUM Summer/ Fall 2015 Wands or Quills? Lessons in Pedagogy from Harry Potter Melissa C. Johnson Virginia Commonwealth University “The real world, then, becomes somewhat illuminated by these characters who can span both worlds. For example, teachers at Hogwarts can be imaginative and compassionate; they are also flighty, vindictive, dim-witted, indulgent, lazy, frightened and frightening. Students are clever, kind, weak, cruel, snobbish. Lessons are inspiring and tedious—as in the best and worst of real schools”(317). – Roni Natov from “Harry Potter and the Extraordinariness of the Ordinary” When I first began teaching first-year college students in 1994 as a graduate student, I was in my mid-twenties, not much older than my students, and a product of the same popular culture. I frequently made reference to that pop culture and used it for comparison, analysis, and discussion to help my THE CEA FORUM Summer/ Fall 2015 students develop their thinking and writing skills. Every year, I grew older and a new class of eighteenand nineteen-year-olds began their first year at the university or college at which I was teaching. The popular culture of my teens and twenties became a part of the great depth and breadth of events encapsulated in the common student phrase “back in the day,” as the double atrocities of“reality”television and movies based on toys began to capture my students’ interests and as the World Wide Web further atomized those interests. Slowly, but surely, I found myself less skilled and less successful at using pop culture in the classroom as a touchstone or an example. But then there was Harry Potter. After a slow conversion, I, like many of my students, eagerly awaited each new book and even went so far as to wait in line at midnight for book seven, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read it in twenty-four hours. Once again, I had a text that I could refer to in the classroom that the majority of my students were familiar with, either from reading the books or watching the movies. Sadly, I am afraid that this interlude of once again being able to connect with my students over a popular culture touchstone will soon be coming to an end. No doubt, I will continue to re-read the books and re-watch the movies, just as I have done with The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, and The Secret Garden, but their usefulness in the classroom as a communal text will slowly decline and eventually vanish as a generation of students who grew up with Harry, Hermione, and Ron is replaced with a generation of students who grew up with Bella, Edward, and Jacob from the Twilight books or trying to keep up with the Kardashians. Despite its declining relevance to my students, I am sure that I will continue to find the Harry Potter series useful to my pedagogy because of the models of teaching and learning that it provides. As I have expanded my research focus to include the scholarship of teaching and learning, I have become interested in the ways in which the Harry Potter books highlight a diversity of learning and teaching styles, privilege active experiential learning and problem solving over passive rote learning, and emphasize the benefits THE CEA FORUM Summer/ Fall 2015 of collaboration over competition in a learning environment. In the books, I recognize an effective argument for inquiry-based, active learning, but only when coupled with a supportive, non-threatening, non-competitive learning environment in which risk-taking is rewarded. I am not the first academic to examine the models of teaching and learning in Harry Potter. Renee Dickinson was one of the first to address the books as a source of pedagogical inspiration and modeling in “Harry Potter Pedagogy: What We Learn about Teaching from J.K. Rowling,” published in 2006. An English professor who teaches composition, Dickinson uses Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains as a tool for measuring the effectiveness of the instruction

FAQs

How does the author connect popular culture to teaching and writing in college classrooms?

The author describes using popular culture as a reference point to support students’ thinking and writing skills, enabling discussion and analysis through familiar stories and comparisons.

Why does Harry Potter remain useful for the author’s pedagogy despite changing student interests?

Harry Potter is valued for the models of teaching and learning it illustrates, including active experiential learning, problem solving, and collaboration, supported by a non-threatening environment where risk-taking is rewarded.

What prior research does the article summarize about teaching and learning in Harry Potter?

The article cites multiple scholars who treat the books as pedagogical inspiration, use Bloom’s taxonomy to evaluate Hogwarts educators, apply principles from How People Learn, and focus on specific teaching roles and learning culture in the series.

Oct 15, 2026

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