Nothing particularly interesting

Thiong’o, N. wa. (1992). Decolonising the mind: the politics of language in African literature . London: James Currey.

I was recently asked to give recommendations to someone who wanted some grounding in educational theory.  I gave the fairly standard response – all the big names.  After which I was mortified to realise just how stupendously white and male my recommendations were.

Here we are again with another assessment to post.  So far I have not had any bad feedback on the various draft things I have been planning to inflict on my students - which either means that they are not so bad after all, or that people are simply too polite to say anything. This one is for a final year module on Cultural Studies.  The aim of the module is to encourage students to apply the methods of textual and critical analysis used in the study of literature, to a broader range of 'texts' drawn from culture and society. This element of the assessment is an assessed discussion.  It has always seemed to me that a discussion is a more effective way of measuring a students' capacity to synthesise and evaluate ideas than a mere presentation.  It demands that students engage with a less fixed or planned set of ideas, and means that there is a focus placed on the interactive skills which students are encouraged to practice during normal seminar discussions. Here ...

A comment was made to me recently that I had been keeping 'rather quiet' of late.  It was nice of anybody to notice of course - and I muttered some drivel about marking, and assessment boards, and preparing a new module, and that sort of thing.  All of which is true.  However, the comment made was not a general one about the fact that I have not been irritating everyone with countless tweets quite so much, but was more specifically about the fact that they had not seen me rant and rave wildly about politicians.  More specifically, about the Conservative government.  More specifically, about Michael Gove. It is not that I have become a convert to any of these things, but there are two reasons why I have been consciously trying to reign in my impatience for Conservatives policies and ideologies, and my tendency to twitch violently at the very mention of Gove. Reason 1: Misery and Pessimism The first is that the whole business has simply got me down....

I have been reading a lot about Shaun Tan in recent weeks.  His illustrated books are extraordinary things, and well worth a look.  Equally interesting though, is what Tan himself says about them - particularly in relation to his recurring themes of migration, displacement and belonging. In this keynote speech from the 2012 IBBY cogress (a full transcript of which is available on Tan's own website ), Shaun Tan explains about the themes of migration, identity and belonging in his books - and in particular in his book The Arrival. Tan highlights the relavance of stories of migration by suggesting that children develop a sense of their own identities by being able to measure it against 'otherness'. " Culture, nature, family, belief, work, play, language " Tan says, " are flexible realities, something we realise especially when we travel overseas, and discover that the commonplace is exotic and the exotic is commonplace, depending on what side of the tour-b...

This morning's interesting read comes again from Pat Thomson's excellent blog , in which today she comments on several articles that have focused on the dress sense of academics.  These articles, she points out, lean on "some rather hoary old stereotypes" which assume that academics simply don't live in the real world.  In contrast, Thomson argues, academic can indeed be real people too and perhaps it is the Harvey Nick's catalogue cronies who actually have the problem. Don't know why, but I have a mental image of this idea being converted into a successful film - doubtless directed by Chris Columbus - in which a a beleagured academic sporting sandles and a bow tie is harried through a train station by bronzed TOWIE-types, until the emotional climax where the academic (doubtless played by Bill Nighy ) is cornered and bellows 'I am not an ivory-tower anachronism!  I am a human being!' Actually the reasons why this strikes home a little for me a...

Throug hout the twentieth cent u ry, we can see a consistent degradation America’s own view of itself, through the work of the playwrights studied. Its dreams and idealisms have, for these playwrights, fallen down around them. The Depression destroyed the dreams of economic security and the confidence in capitalism. The McCarthy trials destroyed faith in American democracy, and its position as a ‘land of the free’ was challenged by those who pointed out the vast inequalities sustained by so-called American ideals.  Playwright’s responded to these various set-backs in a variety of ways. Some like Clifford Odets wrote plays designed to act as clarion calls: calls for social reform, as idealistic and as optimistic as those of the Founding Fathers. Others, like Tennessee Williams, responded with despondency, presenting a world of decayed values in which the individual soul was irretrievably lost amid the confused jockeying of societies...

The notion of the American Dream has now established itself fully into the mythological life not only of America, but of many nations around the world – including (arguably) our own. The term ‘American Dream’ was not a commonly used one until 1931, when the popular historian James Truslow Adams attempted to use it as the title for his short history of America. His publishers were not happy with the title, preferring the eventually chosen one of The Epic of America . Adams used the term ‘American Dream’ more than 30 times throughout his book though, and in the years to follow – during which the popularity of The Epic of America became immense - the term became commonplace. Now, Jim Cullen writes that the: American Dream” has long since moved beyond the relatively musty domain of print culture into the incandescent glow of the mass media, where it is enshrined as our national motto. Jubilant athletes declaim it following championship ga...