The Film as a source of History

In order to gain clarity about historical facts the historian requires as wide and as varied a range of informative documents as possible. These documentary sources include all texts, objects or facts, from which knowledge of the past can be gained; texts such as annals, chronicles, letters, reports, certificates; things like relics, buildings, ruins, primers, stone axes; and facts or conditions still in existence based on historical premises.     

TALKING ABOUT OUR TROUBLES: USING VIDEO-BASED DIALOGUE TO BUILD PRESERVICE TEACHERS' PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE

This study investigates the preservice teacher learning in the context of conversations about their field-based challenges. First, a review of the literature explores studies that highlight the role of evidence-based conversation as a mechanism to approach the inevitable problems faced by teachers in the classroom. The subsequent case study provides an analysis of how a group of preservice teachers approached a colleague's challenge through a structured conversation and used digital videotapes and artifacts to add specificity to their analysis. The study's implications suggest how constructive and critical conversations between prospective teachers can play an important role in their professional development.     

Renovation of Teacher Training by the New Media

For the past fifteen years, new techniques and methods, most particularly audio-visual ones, have made it possible to foresee a profound renewal in the training and retraining of teachers. To name some, the use of tape recorders, and then closed-circuit television, the production of anthologies on films, radio and television programmes, which make up an integral part of a system of training at a distance. In industrialised countries, these methods are very unequally used; in some of them, they do not even have as yet a system of retraining at a distance. Also conditions vary greatly according to the training institutes. Some only use the most traditional methods more or less perfected; others, well equipped with projectors of all sorts, laboratories and closed-circuit television, try to introduce really new methods and mediafor teaching. And lastly, some new procedures have hardly gone outside the research centres.     

Book review

The following books are reviewed.

Value and validity in action research: a guidebook for reflective practitioners EILEEN M. SCHWALBACH (2003) London: Scarecrow Press 121 pp., ISBN 1 57886 017 2 (pb), £10.22

Supporting Teachers, Supporting Pupils D.F. WILSON, 2004 London: RoutledgeFalmer 184 pp., ISBN 0 415 33522 1 (hb), £65, 0 415 33523 X (pb), £22.50