What is Lolicon

Though millions of school-aged children and youth are increasingly drawn to Japanese animation, or anime, schools in the United States have not capitalized on this potential conduit for cultural learning. This entails a significant loss in terms of the potential to reorient internationally-focused humanities and social science curricula towards culturally-relevant pedagogy. It would be helpful to explore how two populations that would likely be directly involved in anime curricula's implementation make sense of anime's pedagogical potential. This chapter explores the attitudes of Japanese animation fans towards the prospect of using anime in K-12 school curricula in contrast to the attitudes of aspiring public school teachers. Interview data from forty-four anime fans and forty-four aspiring teachers were analyzed to locate plotlines involving hypothetical teachers and students using anime in a classroom setting. Implications for teacher training programs and school curricula are discussed.