popular culture and critical pedagogy

This is going to be a complicated post drawing on a wide range of resources focusing mainly on media representations, the notion of real/virtual boundaries and how these intersect with various discourses surrounding and within the practices schooling.

The first article, from today's Sunday Age, is titled "Parents told: don't blame technology", which appears as "Don't blame the internet, parents told" in the online version. The article presents three positions on the relationships between adolescent violence, the production and distribution of multimedia through the new technologies, as well as what this has to do with the relationships parents have with their children. This whole debate has been instigated by a posting on YouTube showing two girls fighting, titled "SYdEnHAM SlUT STaCEy Vs ZANA" who according to the article are from Copperfield College, Sydenham. The first position is by the Internet Society of Australia who according to the Age article suggest that "parents must keep an eye on their children's viewing and use of YouTube". The second position is by the principal of Copperfield College who (again according to the article) said "the school had taken action over the violent video and the fight, but he did not believe there should be a ban on new technology". The third position, is by Michael Carr-Gregg (his website actually claims that he's been "Described as Australia's Dr Phil", I think enough said) who says (according to the Age) that "the craze could encourage copycat behaviour" and that "He urged all schools to ban the use of camera phones". Similar to the internet society he turns our gaze towards parents and the extent to which they survey their childrens' behaviours. The Age article ends by mentioning that YouTube is "the world's third-most-viewed site", that it includes postings of "at least two videos of graffiti-spraying on Melbourne trains and public property" and then states various corporate details about it being sold to google, etc...

The second reference here is the spread of pages 10 and 11 in the News section of Saturday's Age, one day prior to the one above. Specifically, I'm referring to the three articles, side by side from left to right: (1) "Stone the Crows! Football wives learn to kick own goals"; (2) "A billboard featuring a Lolita-style girl, with spread legs and exposed breast, has been deemed acceptable. 'Corporate pedophilia' or are some seeing too much in the marketing?"; and (3) "Teacher banned for improper sex talk". The full effect (with images is below):

Source: The Age. Saturday, October 14th, 2006.

Article 1 begins with this sentence: "A catfight between the wives of two prominent Adelaide Crows players demonstrates the tricky role sports clubs must play in keeping the wives and girlfriends of elite sportsmen content". Article 2 is about the use of sexual imagery in advertising teen and tween clothing. Article 3 is about some male teacher who was found guilty of serious misconduct.

The third thing I want to share is an advertising campaign by french connection which confronted me as I was walking down the stairs of their shop on Little Collins street. Notice the imagery in their "Spring/Summer 2006 - Fashion v Style" advertising campaign which appears in these pictures I took using my mobile phone (these aren't very clear because I was trying not to be too obvious but they're clear enough to get the point):



So, what are the themes here, how do we begin to make sense of them and how on earth do we teach our students about them? From my conversations with many of you (my students that is, who are beginning teachers), I have heard some version or another of all of these themes appearing on your teaching practica (please comment or post links to your own blogs where you feel this is the case). My supervisor sent me a link to a YouTube video with bell hooks and I turn to her now for inspiration about where to go with the above.



Article 1 presents the following themes:

Responsibility
Blame
Surveillance
Control
Technophobia

How do these align with the kind of imagery that is appearing in popular culture. Although I have argued with some of you recently that sometimes it is more generative to abandon certain critical perspectives, in this instance it is necessary to adopt a critical perspective, precisely because there is a dominant system at play. The bell hooks clip above is provided by ChallengingMedia, a YouTube profile that lists various productions by the Media Education Foundation. Consider the tools provided in this clip which provide a critical perspective that can be used to analyse the examples I am using above:



Clearly, the power of popular culture is pervasive and we need to address something other than the technology itself, we need to do something other than look for a scapegoat and/or we need to stop accepting that young people are not capable of engaging in critical dialogue. Following bell hooks, we need to use the imagery of popular culture as a way of engaging with themes such as those above, remembering that without a critical perspective we may very well be reproducing the dominant discourses. How do we do this?



Without a critical reading of the representational politics at play in popular images consumed daily by young people there is little hope of unmasking how power operates through some of the themes outlined above in the french connection advertising campaign, in the media representations of young people and their families, etc... I am resisting the urge to be prescriptive about this because I'm specifically interested in your ideas about the many ways in which we can proceed and you have proceeded from here. Please respond with your thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, reflections, contributions, so that we can keep working away at these issues together.

corporate internet takeover and insane claims

It seems as though google may take over youtube and this happens just the weekend after I spent a couple of hours customizing my google page to include all the newest wonders of the world. I can now go to my google homepage, track all changes to all the blogs that interest me, view my online calendar (never used) and read the news all at once (on my way to searching something). With youtube swallowed up by google it seems like it might be getting close to the point where I might be able to do almost everything I would ever want to do on the go through my new google portal. I'm starting to not like the feel of that. It's exactly why all that microsoft crap turned me off with msn. I really, really, really hope google doesn't go downhill because I've enjoyed every minute of its existence so far. Then again, google will always remain as the greatest search engine around and I can always return to the classic, basic search box format.

I don't know if you've seen this but it's ridiculous! According to whatever the source is, 50% of the users of myspace are 35 years or older!!! What a shock that was for me.

The insane claims in the title of this post have nothing to do with the above. They actually have to do with the latest string of events in the debates regarding a national curriculum here in Australia. If you've been living under a rock, then here's the fast food version what you need to follow with links to more reliable sources than my two-minute, "I really have to get back to marking" version:

First a Labor MP says kids need to stay in school until the end of Year 12

Then a whole bunch of people slam the idea

There are talks of a national curriculum which will save money and give the federal government more power

Our federal minister claims that state education systems are being hijacked by ideologues

Our federal minister for education was planned to accuse the state education systems of following Chairman Mao in that speech but then reduced it to only attacks on "serious ideology"

and the arguments go on... I'm sure you can look up recent developments just as well as I can.
What on earth is going on here? I think we need to talk about this.

On a lighter note though, it's an interesting example to follow through with how online newspapers are actually turning into online communities. TheAge uses blogs quite a bit (as do most newspapers) and even though the majority of teachers don't even know what a blog is, the majority of online newspaper viewership clearly do.

the purposes of education

I'm going to update this post at a later time but it's going to be about the purposes of education and connecting with what's happening at the tertiary level. I'll begin with two documents which can be considered quite critically to reveal some interesting things that are happening:

The Harvard Taskforce on General Education has just released this document:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Esecfas/Gen_Ed_Prelim_Report.pdf

Now compare this to the Melbourne Model:
http://melbournemodel.unimelb.edu.au/index.html

a very different set of standards?

I was listening to a podcast from CUNY (City University of New York if you didn't know) about their new Teacher Academy (http://www.cuny.edu/teacheracademy) and thinking about how interesting their vision is. Putting aside the disciplinary foci that they have chosen there is an inspirational partnership model in place that brings together teacher education students, teachers, schools and their communities and teacher educators. I would have to do more research and would like to see it in action but it sounds like a manifestation of the vision I myself always had for teacher education where all of these groups of people are in fact working on common grounds.

In any case, the title of this post is talking about something quite different. The speaker in the podcast at some point mentioned the standards which they are using (my ears propped up and I thought... hmmm... I wonder how they compare to those of the VIT). I could be wrong about whether these are the standards that the CUNY Teacher Academy is using but take a look at the policy documents from the centre anyway:
http://newteachercenter.org/nyc_policy_paper.php
The link is from the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz who aparently have a set of standards that the CUNY Teacher Academy is using. If anyone finds them, you might let me know (I just don't have the time to go scouting right now).

In my searches I also ran into the Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence at the University of California, Berkeley:
http://crede.berkeley.edu/standards/standards.html