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Introduction
The current social and political climate has forced many fairy-tale scholars to face the question "What is practical about studying fairy tales?" Why dedicate class time in college to tales often perceived as only "children's stories"? How will this help students, perpetually hungry for relatable texts, grow as readers and writers? While the practice of considering fairy tales as solely material for children has made it easy for some to dismiss fairy tales in the classroom as frivolous stories unmoored from modern issues,1 we join the numerous scholars who argue that fairy tales can be pedagogically useful, particularly as a means of addressing questions of identity and empathy in the college classroom. As Christa C. Jones and Claudia Schwabe assert in their 2016 introduction to New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales, "Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Teaching Folklore and Fairy Tales in Higher Education," we too "wish to emphasize the educational opportunities offered by fairy tales, which can fill a broad range of curricular needs: instructors in a variety of academic fields can draw on fairy tales to help students improve critical-thinking abilities, strengthen writing skills, and explore cultural values" (6). In our own teaching, we have found that fairy tales, when deployed thoughtfully, can be both deeply relevant to our students' own lives and enable access to unfamiliar identities and experiences.
We are confident that we are not alone when we express frustration with the troubling contemporary trend among high-school and college students to heavily judge texts by their relatability or their reflection of an assumed shared or universal experience. This term is typically used to denote a text that has a "character or situation" with which the reader or viewer can somehow easily identify (Mead). A text is relatable when students can recognize themselves or their own lives in some aspect of it. Rebecca Mead, writing for The New Yorker, notes that, while "[t]o seek to see oneself in a work of art is nothing new, nor is it new to enjoy the sensation…, to demand that a work be relatable expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer" (Mead).
In the classroom, the word...