"Adaptation studies," as the title suggests, refers to how adaptation informs and educates learners in a larger sense. Such borrowing, as Raw (author of other Scarecrow Press books) and Gurr (independent educational consultant) explain, exposes people to "a dialogic sphere of influence, appropriation, and citation." The authors further define "adaptation" as a principal educational vehicle for millennial culture involving skills in valuing, communicating, social interaction, and aesthetic engagement. A chapter on 21st-century learning, for example, cites a Jane Austen seminar utilizing blogs. This book functions as a "curriculum generator," inspiring skills in critical thinking, conceptualizing, and analysis. It rejects memory-based curricula and disparages literary study based on "what you knew rather than what you could do with what you knew." Regarding Shakespeare, the authors argue that adaptation becomes less textual and more a vehicle to change behavior and add "flexibility in perspective," resulting in collaboration, feedback, and reflection. Borrowing ideas from cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, they suggest that new transmedial adaptations arise from the selection and transformation of material, and the result is an axiomatic shift that privileges process over content. The authors affirm that "all texts borrow from a wellspring of textual annunciations with no static, explicit point of origin." Summing Up: Recommended. All levels of students and instructors. CHOICE
