ABSTRACT
The instances of learning that I describe in this chapter focus on interrogating and analyzing discourses that are associated with McDonald’s Happy Meals™. The work that we did with the Happy Meal was initiated when Ali, one of the girls in the class, started a conversation with a small group of children about Happy Meal toys. By this time in the school year (spring 1997), my students already had many opportunities to analyze different school and everyday texts. Therefore, they had built up quite a repertoire of critical literacies and were comfortable interrogating McDonald’s Happy Meals as text.
