A Lacanian Reading of the Study of Big Brother in the English Curriculum

This article presents a Lacanian analysis of the legitimising event represented by the circulation of materials from the English DfES (Department for Education and Skills), a ministerial government office, to teachers of English in schools to use as a means to facilitate the study of the television show Big Brother. The attempt, through Media in English, to ‘pin down’ the meaning of ‘reality’ television presents for analysis here the identity crisis of English—the tension between what it is and how it recognises itself—its ideal ego and its ego‐ideal.     

L'évolution technologique,la société et l'éducation

In the first part of this article the author recalls and emphasizes the way in which education and society are interrelated. It is considered impossible to pose a problem of education without referring to the social framework in which its solution is to be found. Education involves preparing the child for tomorrow's world — knowledge of this world being the point of departure of all pedagogic reflection — and at the same time not cutting it off from its roots. Presenting personal experience rather than launching into technical demonstrations the author recalls some of the changes over the past fifty years. The different educational milieus which the child and adolescent encounter, such as family, school and professional life, are affected by such technical changes. As far as the school environment is concerned, technological revolutions modify the relationships between pupil and knowledge, and create new relationships between teachers and pupils as also among pupils themselves. In addition, a new type of creativity has arisen as a result of the utilization of computers and databases. Schools have in fact experienced a series of revolutions which deeply transformed the access to knowledge: books, daily papers and the mass media, informatics. According to the author the book presents the ‘day before yesterday's knowledge’; the daily paper brings you up to ‘yesterday’; radio and television up to ‘today’. Informatics will make the pupil accustomed not only to seek knowledge but also to reconstruct or even construct it. Where does the school stand amidst this vast reconstruction? What is its present role? What will become of the teacher and his new roles? If the school wants to prepare itself for tomorrow's world it has to change radically today.     

THE ‘ACTIVE’ TELEVISION VIEWER SOME PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS OF CONCEPTS AND MEASURES

This note summarises the main points that have arisen from the first phase of the Active Audience project, which the Centre for Television Research has undertaken with sponsorship from the BBC. This research has been designed to look at the nature of the television audience not in the usual way of counting heads and noting down who watches what, but in terms of why people watch television and how they respond to what they are being offered. Essentially this project is exploratory and represents an effort to analyse and understand the experience of the audience with television from two points of view. Firstly, by studying the motivation of the audience to watch television, as shown from the expectations different people attach to their viewing; and secondly, by concentrating more specifically on the perception and interpretation of the broadcast material which may determine programme preferences and strengthen or weaken the motivation of the audience to watch television.

These two ways of looking at television, that is from a ‘general motivation’ and a ‘perception and meaning’ angle, have been explored during the initial phase of the research, using the ‘family case‐study’ method. This involved the in‐depth study of a small number of individuals in their family context, by means of intensive repeated interviewing about their TV viewing and their life‐style more generally. The conducted case‐studies provided many insights of the role and significance of television within different styles of life and pointed to a number of practical implications for broadcasters, concerning both programme‐making and programme‐planning.     

The Struggle to Love: Pedagogical Eros and the Gift of Transformation

Why does anyone become a teacher, and why a student? Education in its contemporary form has evolved into a subsystem of society in which professional ‘teachers/ educators’ are confronted with an ever‐changing group of people called ‘pupils/students’; and the individuals in both groups now have to deal with this institutionalised confrontation. Neither one nor the other decision—to become a teacher or to become a student—seems to have much to do with a specific other person, and it certainly does not have much to do with the actual person(s) that one is related to by becoming a teacher or by becoming a student in a specific institution. However, if pedagogical relations were as depersonalised as suggested, why is it that teachers as well as students hold very different relations to different students and teachers—relations that are more or less ‘deep’, ‘affectionate’, ‘successful’? And how are we to perceive education outside of formally institutionalised contexts (or those special relations that occur even within formalised contexts but transcend them)? Is there another type of pedagogical relationship? And what would be the reasons for entering into a pedagogical relationship other than becoming and being made a part of a subsystem of society? Why do two people gravitate towards each other, freely recognising each other as teacher and student? Attempting to answer those questions, the following paper revisits some historic positions, being conscious that those answers are also part of the answer to a much greater question: What is education?     

Immigrant teachers: stories of self and place

Teachers’ lives have been the focus of much recent research on teaching, and we now have rich, detailed understandings of how teachers develop a ‘teaching self,’ in the context of concrete details of biography, school settings, relationships and educational systems within which teachers work. What we lack is a sense of the teacher in a place—a specific location that holds meaning, that matters to those who inhabit it. The concept of ‘place’ has been neglected in contemporary education, yet it seems to be an important one for postmodern times. This article will examine the stories of immigrant teachers in Israel, people who have undertaken to teach in a culture different from the one in which they themselves were educated. Teachers who have made a transition from one cultural setting to another are likely to have developed an awareness of teaching and schooling in the new culture that other teachers may not have. Their stories reveal what it means in the chosen culture to tell one’s story and give an account of one’s career and work as a teacher. The stories of seven immigrant teachers, in dialogue with the researcher’s story, highlight losses and gains in the journey toward a new teaching self, and reveal something of what the process of finding or making a place for oneself—both in the new culture and as a teacher—is like.     

Waiting on text: interpretation in educational research

Against the widespread insistence that educational research should be ‘scientific’, I attempt to change the terms of the debate. Instead of asking whether research is robust and rigorous, and whether it ‘works’—all terms derived from the ‘scientific’ view—I argue that we should ask whether we can have confidence in research. This way of putting it enables us to place the idea of interpretation back at the centre of our understanding of education, and to see that when we have confidence in interpretation, it is because good interpretation has quite different qualities from scientific knowledge. At the centre of interpretation lies the idea of text and of responsiveness to text. Good interpretation requires good listening or ‘attentiveness’. It does not pretend to represent the world accurately and conclusively, as ‘scientific’ research does: it opens up space for conversation, and brings a world into being.     

THREE STEPS TO A REVOLUTION

>The author, speaking at the 1979 Conference ‘Television in Society’, reviews the uses of television in education and considers the future as affected by the microelectronics revolution. A redefinition of television itself is only part of a radical series of events involving three major steps: the evolution of microelectronics technology, cheap storage of information and cheap transmission of it over long distances. The consequences for educational television will be manifold, but the problems will remain educational     

Whose confession? Which tradition? (A preliminary critique of Penny Thompson, 2004)

What does Penny Thompson really want? Reading her article in BJRE 26 (1) proved a baffling experience: it clearly wanted to say something, and to say it passionately, yet signally failed to do so. It fails largely because it lacks an argument; there seems also to be conceptual muddle at its heart. A fuller critique will need to attend to Thompson’s reading of religious education’s history, particularly to her use of evidence—but that is a story for another night. Consequently, this brief critique has at its core four questions to elicit clarity where at present there is none: First, does Penny Thompson want so to revision religious education in community schools that she and other aspirants to ‘Christian confessional religious education’ may freely work to convert young people to ‘Christianity’ and to nurture them in a Christian tradition? Second, in what sense, or senses, does Thompson want readers to understand her phrase, ‘the truth of the Christian faith?’ Third, in whose confession and in which tradition does Thompson want this Christian confessional religious education to be rooted? Fourth, is Penny Thompson willing to allow Christian teachers to present alternative understandings of Christianity, critical of her (implied) view? These questions are preceded by reflection on the form of her article’s argument and on its use of ‘confess’ and its cognates.     

Intercultural learning in graduate studies at an Israeli college of education: Attitudes toward multiculturalism among Jewish and Arab students

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the factors which affect attitudes towards multiculturalism among Jewish and Arab graduate students who experience intercultural learning in an Israeli-Jewish academic college of education. In Israeli society, it is in higher education institutions where young people from different ethnic groups first encounter the ‘others’. This is due to the structure of the Israeli elementary and secondary education system, which is divided into Jewish and Arab segregated sub-systems. In contrast, the country’s higher education institutions are open to everyone. The research population was composed of first and second year graduate students, all of whom were practicing teachers or involved in other educational work. Participants completed questionnaires and a smaller sample was also interviewed. All of the students are practicing teachers or involved in other educational work. Everyone perceived the college’s socio-cultural climate as an open and multicultural one in both years of study. However, these positive feelings characterized Jewish students to a larger extent than Arab students, while the socio-cultural aspect as well as the quality of the academic experience had a positive impact on multicultural attitudes primarily among Arab students. Thus, a multicultural climate is not enough to effect a positive change in entrenched attitudes toward multiculturalism. Multicultural education policy should also be reinforced through a formal academic curriculum, so as to set an example for ongoing social change which will further encourage graduate students—majority and minority alike—to implement their multicultural positive experiences in their own schools in the future.     

TELEVISION AND THE EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG

This paper, from the 1979 Conference, ‘Television In Society’ begins by defining the educational process as one of persisting, despite initial failures, to acquire understanding or mastery, and underlining the uniqueness of each individual learner. The author reports on the results of a one‐year study of the viewing habits of pre‐school children. Little ‘rising fives’ are such heavy viewers that they must feel a sense of loss when school attendance deprives them of ‘their’ television, perhaps the most valuable ‘child‐minder’ of all. Television delights these veteran under‐five viewers and provides an aid that parents and teachers can welcome; it also seems to stimulate little or no ‘participation’ and to inhibit language skills. Older children are also voracious viewers, but the author's experience suggests that television does not of itself inhibit reading and that to blame violent behaviour on viewing of violence is humbug. In conclusion it is suggested that educators are as yet failing to recognize the paramount importance of television in children's lives: there is an urgent need for education to acknowledge this in its curricula and for children (and adults) to find out more about how television is created. The Educational Television Association could play an important role here.     

TEACHING BY MACHINERY: A REVIEW OF RESEARCH

Closed‐circuit television equipment was used to produce two versions of a programme on the Psychology of Learning for showing to student teachers. Programme A was designed in accordance with the suggestion that the more a presentation approximates to reality, the more effective it will be. Programme B was designed in accordance with the suggestion that a presentation will be more effective if the information is ‘pre‐compressed’ before transmission. Comparisons were made of the effectiveness for transmitting relevant information of each of the different techniques used to produce Programme A and Programme B and also of the total programmes. The findings indicated the ‘pre‐compression’ procedure to be more effective than the ‘realism’ procedure.     

An aristocracy of talent? Describing self and other at an early twentieth‐century high school

This paper is a reading of early twentieth‐century government high school culture as it was expressed through a twenty‐year run of one Australian high school’s student‐authored magazines. From its first issue the editors of The Parramatta High School Magazine were keen to promote its role in the making of a community. The idea that high school people belonged to a special and exclusive group was reiterated in a number of ways. Writing in the magazines described the features of a shared culture – whiteness, literacy, good taste, rational behaviour – and implicitly defined high school students as different from other categories of people, including non‐English speaking foreigners and ‘the uneducated’. Central to the process of classification and identification were statements of ‘who we are’ and ‘who we are not’ which were grounded in the language of meritocracy, and encompassed particular contemporary understandings of social class, race and gender.     

The ‘shape’ of teacher professionalism in England: Professional standards,performance management,professional development and the changes proposed in the 2010 White Paper

Teacher professionalism in England may be considered to have been shaped by the set of professional standards, and the accompanying statutory performance management system, introduced by the Labour government in 2007. More recently the coalition government's 2010 White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, announced reforms that will potentially re‐shape teacher professionalism. In this article I examine the ‘shape’ of teacher professionalism in England, as defined by the professional standards. I reveal it to be a lop‐sided shape, indicating a professionalism that focuses predominantly on teachers’ behaviour, rather than on their attitudes and their intellectuality. Presenting my conceptual analysis of professionalism, and examination of its link with professional development, I consider whether—and to what extent—teacher professionalism may in fact be shaped by government‐imposed reform. I conclude that ‘enacted’ professionalism may be quite different from ‘demanded’ professionalism, and shaping professionalism involves a complex and indecipherable process that is better understood by examining the process whereby individuals develop professionally.     

Educating human nature: ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in early Confucian moral education

This study examines early Chinese moral education—its curriculum, objectives and the philosophical assumptions underlying them—in its classical Confucian expression. It analyzes early Confucian debates on moral psychology, the Confucian moral curriculum consisting of model emulation, cultural practices and canonical instruction, and the methods and aims of Confucian statecraft. The study reveals how ancient Confucians integrated these components into a coherent discourse on moral education and its implementation for the related purposes of cultivating virtuous people and benevolent rulers. It explains why different early Confucians argued that ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ must interrelate suitably not only for people to develop morally and prosper collectively, but also to moderate the ruler’s power by subjecting it to alternative sources of authority. This examination demonstrates that, contrary to modern criticisms of traditional Confucian culture and unlike contemporary uses of moral education in China, classical Confucian moral education was understood to serve aims quite different from either bolstering an autocracy or political indoctrination.     

Changes in the Field of Education — Challenges for Public Service Broadcasters

Abstract

The article describes the commercial pressures faced by public service educational television and the results of poor public sector funding for core educational establishments. New commercial partnerships between the Private and Public sectors may well be developing and encouraging the use of new technologies in schools, but will the final cost be the end of ‘free educational television’ and the eventual end of public service television as we now know it?     

Knowledge Navigators and Lifelong Learners: Producing graduates for the information society

In recent years, there has been considerable attention, at least at the policy level, to the need for graduates to be ‘lifelong learners’. Although this concept means different things in different cultural contexts, there is more or less general agreement that graduation really only marks the beginning of the graduate's need for continuing personal and professional learning, and, moreover, that it is the responsibility of universities and other institutions of higher education to equip their graduates with the skills and attitudes to help them to continue learning throughout their lives. The emergence of an information-rich ‘knowledge society’ has made this even more of an imperative. The rapid and pervasive spread of information and communication technologies, coupled with increasing globalisation, the democratisation of knowledge production—once assumed to be largely the preserve of universities—and what has been dubbed the ‘information explosion’ collectively mean that most citizens of advanced industrialised countries are, or will soon become, ‘knowledge workers’. Accordingly, many graduates, whether they work in educational or other contexts, are likely to be involved in ‘knowledge-intensive’ activities, for which they need to be prepared. But what does this mean in practice, and what are we to do about it? In 1990, the late Dr Ernest Boyer, in his book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, proposed a fourfold division of academic work into what he labelled the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of application ; the scholarship of integration ; and, finally, the scholarship of teaching . The paper suggests that each of these four aspects of scholarship has a direct counterpart outside the university, and that, accordingly, they might be taken as a way of considering the attributes of graduates as well as of academics. The paper suggests a necessary symmetry between the teaching and other scholarly work carried out within the university and the development of such abilities and predispositions in graduates from a variety of fields who might not otherwise consider themselves to be destined for ‘scholarly’ work.     

All welcome! Everyone belongs!: Leadership from voices seldom heard

Two basic points are made in this article:

-We must make a choice whether we ‘isolate’ people from or ‘include’ people in our communities. Including people is the only viable option.

-The key to ‘including’ people is with the very people we most often label as ‘the problems’. These ‘problem people’ can help generate answers when we learn how to listen, and when we offer genuine learning opportunities and valid partnerships with those who have been ‘missed’ and discarded.

Examples from various Frontier College programs illustrate these points and elaborate the central philosophy of the College (Student Centred Individualized Learning — SCIL), which is based on the beliefs that:

-All are welcome

-All belong

-All can learn

-All have contributions to make

The programmes are focused on ‘literacy’, which is a great deal more than reading and writing — it is about what kind of society we want. Literacy is a tool for ‘inclusion’ in communities. It is hard work, and includes love and tears, grief and joy, families and friends. It is based on the Right to Learn, and builds dignity, self esteem and choices.     

ITV Programmes for Schools: any future?

The immediate circumstances of the new Broadcasting Act are discussed. The impact of this legislation on schools broadcasting is then considered in relation to the history of earlier legislation in the UK, and the early responses to the Television Act of 1954. The importance of the personnel involved in television production and their commitment to the values of public service is stressed, and placed against the gloomier forebodings of the pessimists of the past‐‐and of today. The article concludes with the assertion that it is the people in the television industry itself, and the values they hold, that will ensure the continued survival of good schools television.     

Personalisation: the emerging ‘revised’ code of education?

In England, a ‘revised’ educational code appears to be emerging. It centres upon the concept of ‘personalisation’. Its basis is less in educational theory, more in contemporary marketing theory. Personalisation can be regarded in two ways. First, it provides the rationale for a new mode of public‐service delivery, one which seeks to enable ‘users’ to co‐produce with professionals a solution to their needs. In this endeavour, it takes further that process of marketisation which had been set in train under the New Public Management. Second, it portends a new ‘grammar’ for the school, in the guise of ‘personalised learning’. At this stage, what shall count as personalisation—particularly in relation to personalised learning—remains incoherent and inchoate. For its justification as a policy, personalisation appeals to child‐centredness, to democracy and to consumerism. The analysis draws on contemporary social and marketing theory.     

An ‘infusion’ approach to critical thinking: Moore on the critical thinking debate

This paper argues that general skills and the varieties of subject‐specific discourse are both important for teaching, learning and practising critical thinking. The former is important because it outlines the principles of good reasoning simpliciter (what constitutes sound reasoning patterns, invalid inferences, and so on). The latter is important because it outlines how the general principles are used and deployed in the service of ‘academic tribes’. Because critical thinking skills are—in part, at least—general skills, they can be applied to all disciplines and subject‐matter indiscriminately. General skills can help us assess reasoning independently of the vagaries of the linguistic discourse we express arguments in. The paper looks at the debate between the ‘specifists’—those who stress the importance of critical thinking understood as a subject‐specific discourse—and the ‘generalists’—those that stress the importance of critical thinking understood independently of disciplinary context. The paper suggests that the ‘debate’ between the specifists and the generalists amounts to a fallacy of the false alternative, and presents a combinatory‐‘infusion’ approach to critical thinking.