Final prepublication version. Please cite as: Sternadori, M. (2020). Magazines as sites of popular pedagogy and edutainment. In M. Sternadori and T. Holmes (Eds.), Handbook of Magazine Studies, 278-292. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Magazines as Sites of Didacticism, Edutainment, and (Sometimes) Pedagogy Miglena Sternadori Introduction One of the main ways in which magazines appeal to audiences is by guiding them “to a better version of themselves” (Forster 2015, p. 1). This guidance is accomplished through aspirational how‐to articles, which encourage audiences to learn a new skill, improve an already existing one, or simply contemplate humanity’s achievements in science, art, and technology. One’s improved future self exists only within magazines’ “wider world of leisure and consumption” (Lackey 2005, p. 329). In addition to imagining self‐improvement, magazine audiences can also assess and compare their own lives to those of others by reading letters to the editor and advice from so‐called agony aunts, who “dictate the moral parameters of personal dilemmas or choices” (Forster, p. 169). Intertwined with the utility of such social and moral instruction are the pleasant sensations of the mind that magazine narratives can arouse: curiosity, excitement, titillation, validation, voyeurism, and schadenfreude, to name just a few. Although research on the effects of magazine instruction is limited, Luke (1996) argues these “public texts of popular culture are probably a more powerful pedagogy than the generally decontextualized knowledge and skills taught in formal institutions of learning” (p. 184). Indeed, the significance of magazines’ role depends on the subjective parameters of teaching and learning. “A tendency to equate ‘education’ with schooling means that we may not automatically think of magazines as pedagogical sites” – but they most certainly are, even if learning from them is self‐paced and does not require sustained attention, contends Lackey (2005, p. 324). Similarly, in an argument positioning mass magazines as sites of popular instruction, Bashford and Strange (2004) suggest that education must be considered not “in its narrow institutional sense but more broadly – as advice, as instruction, as communication” (p. 73). Numerous studies by historians of education and knowledge (e.g. Wrigley 1989; Bashford and Strange 2004; Proctor and Weaver 2017) have analyzed instructional articles in magazines. Wrigley (1989) viewed magazine content as a more accurate reflection of contemporary social norms than the instruction in self‐help books because “books reflect the idiosyncrasies of individual authors, while magazine articles have to pass editorial muster and … [are] less likely to reflect strikingly original or deviant thinking” (p. 45). However, the instructive and pedagogical functions of magazines have rarely attracted the interest of magazine scholars. This chapter aims to fill this gap in magazine studies by considering the didactic and pedagogical