Started David Didau’s Making Meaning in English
Sunny outside. Will sit in the garden and read this for a bit.
Read MoreFebruary, 2021
Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964)
Between 1964 and 1972, Robert Aickman sought to define the canon of supernatural stories and collected them in a series published by Fontana. The introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964) has a bleak, nihilistic tone. Aickman sets the contemporary view of the ghost story in a post-rationalist world when humanity not only denies its spiritual being but also seeks to physically destroy itself. He mentions that behavioural psychology rejects the unconscious, culture is in a process of disintegration and commodification, religion’s attention is the corporeal and that love itself has become “rationalised and domesticated”. The…
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Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action
Been reading the new In Action publication this afternoon, essays by teachers at Huntington School presenting Cognitive Apprenticeship approaches, essentially teaching methods that make the learning process explicit or visible.
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“Capital Punishment” by Danielle Jones (TES, 20210226)
“Cultural poverty is not the pressing priority,” Danielle Jones argues in a TES article. It’s economic disadvantage. Jones refers to Bourdieu and briefly draws a connection between wealthy families and possession of cultural capital. She believes that OFSTED’s interest in cultural capital has an “unarticulated assumption, therefore, is that economic and social capital plays a lesser part – or can be less pivotal – in this life success.” Her argument seems to be that it is possible to separate different forms of capital (social, economic and cultural) and questions how equitable our education system actually is when the wealthiest benefit…
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The Fascist Painting: What is Cultural Capital? by Phil Beadle (2020)
“How many rich kids are there in your Year 10 bottom set?” asks Phil Beadle at one point in The Fascist Painting. He doesn’t need to present a reciprocal question about Eton or other public school. For teachers aware of the social inequities of the school system in the UK, Beadle’s explosive argument about the purposes of state education, drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as well as his own experiences as a classroom teacher is incredibly insightful and refreshing. In places it’s challenging – especially when Beadle explains Kantian aesthetics or bluntly dismisses the positive influence of sport…
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Johnson’s Kulturkampf
Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu’s How Myths of Britishness Are Turning Totalitarian shows how culture is currently weaponised in the UK to enable a right-wing government that engenders a condition of disillusionment and delusion leading to the sort if paranoia seen in the US. Jukes and Matharu view this as calculated. “The War on Woke won’t improve Britain’s pandemic response or ameliorate its recession, heal its social divisions or growing poverty, nor solve its rupture from its major trading partners in Europe. It will just make things worse. But, as the delusions of exceptionalism fail (which they are bound to…
Read MoreLife and Legacy of Stan Lee
Intelligent article about life and legacy of Marvel editor, Stan Lee by Prof Stephanie Burt in The New Yorker. “If Lee’s life deteriorated into fraud and feud, his legacy has come to seem only more enduring. The cast of characters that Lee and a clique of almost entirely white guys created has gained cultural and commercial superpower, animating stories and authors and fans in ways that they could never have foreseen.” Who Really Created the Marvel Universe? in The New Yorker
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