On Behaviour Management in schools

Recently a good friend of mine asked for my opinion on behaviour management in schools.  Behaviour management is a huge problem for some schools, and in some cases it is their overwhelming main problem, especially in secondary schools, (11+ years of age).  When I wrote this response I think, for various reasons, I mainly had Primary schools (4 – 10 years) and Special Educational Needs schools in mind.  Here’s what I said;

The first thing that always springs to mind when I hear the term ‘Behaviour management’, is the sad vision of children being contained and restrained -
their movements being limited so as not to affect anyone else. The problem with
that is the root problem or cause isn’t being addressed, it is merely being
‘managed’ until the school bell goes, and same again the next day, until they
eventually leave or get kicked out.

When a child is disruptive, the onus is put on them and they are told how
irresponsible they have been, and maybe punishment handed out. Fair enough, but what is often missing is a proper conversation with them about root causes and feelings. Conversation doesn’t happen for perhaps good reason, 1) the child
won’t/can’t speak or open up, 2) takes too long, 3) seen as being soft, 4)
you’re not a therapist, and many other reasons. But still to really change disruptive behaviour those stages have to be worked through, maybe calling in support workers etc. But the battle ground will still be with the teachers on the front line, so trust has to be built up there, and not all devolved to additional
support workers at a distance.

Staff that have key responsibility for pastoral care have the tension of
idealism vs everyday school pressures & perceptions. Often when you take a
naughty child, and allow them the space to find their own voice and confidence,
allowing them to set the agenda and doing activities they enjoy, their
behaviour improves dramatically. But the whisperers will say they have been
rewarded for their bad behaviour, rather than seeing they have been working
through a process to be able to transfer that self-agenda setting back into the
main classroom, when integrated back in. Naughtiness is often a sign of
boredom, but very difficult to tell that to a teacher without looking like
you’re undermining them and really pissing them off! But the truth is it’s usually
nothing to do with the teachers personally or a comment on their teaching
ability or style, it’s the institution of school itself that repels these
children and often the idea of authority in general, and it often goes a lot
deeper than their immediate environment.

Though on the question of the teaching style and environment, on a couple of occasions I’ve had teachers ask me how bad such & such must have been that I’ve had in media projects, and I’ve had to tell them honestly that they were often the best behaved and most productive in the group. But working in the informal
education sector, or on a specific project as an external coming into a school,
is obviously very different from the constraints and bureaucracy teachers are
faced with every single day.  Teachers often don’t have the time anymore to be able to effectively channel the energy of their challenging children, and they merely get to discipline them instead.

Schools have a culture of telling children off, because adults are supposed to know best and children are meant to follow. That’s an effective strategy for the
mostly good, average and mildly naughty children, who needs to be kept within a
formal set of boundaries and be reminded of “accepted behaviour”, but that
strategy falls apart for the much more challenging children, who are incredibly
disruptive, unmanageable, wilfully rude, almost seemingly feral.

Those types of children are not only really badly behaved, they are usually
damaged – psychologically, emotionally, socially, and dare I say spiritually.  Scratch the surface of a really disruptive “bad” child, and usually they have a different set of issues they are dealing with, whether at home or in their head. Their badness is just a facade for their vulnerability. But put those children in areas of responsibility, and they will often take it seriously and do the job well, as they have been trusted with an important task.

Often the disruptive children are actually the highly intelligent, even if
they’ve NEVER proved it, as they’re using a different bit of their brain. They
don’t see the use in school lessons as according to them it has no bearing on
their real life, it’s too abstract. But give them something practical to do,
even on the same theme, and they love it. Not because they are using their
hands, but because they can see the learning applied in a real world context.
It’s no longer just playing schools, but they can imagine it in a real grown up
world, (and often disruptive kinds think they’re more grown up than they are).

With I think all of these issues, it comes back to their sense of self-identity. Being secure and confident in their own skin means they wouldn’t feel the need to show off or have to prove themselves to other people.  To be effective behaviour management policy has to be holistic, as there isn’t a set of answers or off the shelf framework that will work for all the contexts teachers need. It has to be ‘working with’ the pupils, rather than ‘doing to’.

There’s an interesting book by Tony Jeffs & Mark Smith called, ‘Informal
Education: Conversation, democracy and learning’, that is useful for dealing
with this. Even though it is about working in informal education, it is those
sensibilities that are needed when working for formal institutions with
challenging children. It talks about the importance of conversation, and the
link with self-worth to learning.

Pastoral conscious teachers will always be walking that line of some teachers
thinking they are being are too soft, and bending over backwards to help
disruptive children, but the important thing is to know your school and your
children.  You can be holistic, and still be tough when you need to be. But children can often feel like they’re living in an oppressive police state, when actually the ability to express themselves in a safe environment is really important.  Not only important, but vital.

Shawn – 13.7.11

Uni runs Graduate Certificate in Participatory Arts and Media Professional Practice

Here are details of a Graduate certificate course I helped to write at the University of the West of England, which is aimed at people working in community arts & media.

There are three modules, with a wide range of tutors each module;

- Participatory Arts: Practice & Context
Looks at the history of community arts & media, influential theories (e.g. Paulo Freire’s dialogic pedagogy), informal education theories, government influence and evaluation models.

- Participatory Arts: Methods & Approaches 
Explores the practice, techniques and experiences of facilitating sessions, the tensions between process and product in varying contexts, the principles of participant authorship and ownership, and policies when working with young people and vulnerable adults.  This module is also being run separately for artists dedicated to working in the field of Health & Social Care.

- Participatory Arts: Project Management 
This module explores current funding landscapes, methods of fundraising, writing applications, project planning, marketing, and the need for freelancers to be business savvy (even) when working in a community context.

The read the official description click this link or read below.

http://www.uwe.ac.uk/sca/courses/community_cpd.shtml

============================================ 

UWE launch a new accredited course for Participatory Arts and Media Practitioners on our Bower Ashton campus.

We have been working with the Community Arts/Media and Arts & Health sectors to develop a flexible training course leading to a NEW qualification in Participatory Arts & Media – the first of its kind in the UK!

The Graduate Certificate in Participatory Arts and Media Professional Practice is aimed at arts graduates (People not currently working in the sector/recent graduates are required to have some relevant experience prior to application) or those working in any art form with groups in education, healthcare or the community sectors.

Each twelve week course is designed to fit around the practitioners’ lives and work, participants can take three modules in any order over the three years to obtain the Certificate, or take just one or two of the modules for their own personal development.

Graduate Certificate module information

Take any of the following modules as separate continuing professional development courses (CPD) to update your skills without UWE credits. Or link three modules together (with credits), in any order over three academic years, to gain the NEW Qualification: Graduate Certificate – Participatory Arts & Media Professional Practice. 

   

Participatory Arts: Practice & Context
Dates: 28 September to 21 Dec 09
Day Schools: 28 Sep, 26 Oct, 23 Nov, 21 Dec 10am – 5pm approx.
Open for applications: 20 July 2009 – Closed 21 August 2009

Participatory Arts: Methods & Approaches**
Dates: 4 January to 29 March 2010
Day Schools: 4 Jan, 1 Feb, 1 Mar, 29 Mar 10am – 5pm approx.
Open for applications: 19 October 2009 – Closed 20 November 2009

Participatory Arts in Healthcare Settings: Methods & Approaches**
Dates: 9 October 2009 to 10 March 2010
Day Schools: 9 Oct, 27 Nov, 22 Jan, 10 Mar
Please contact School of Health & Social Care for further information
HSC.CPD@uwe.ac.uk

Participatory Arts: Project Management: Professional Practice 
Dates: 19 April 2010 to 12 July 2010
Day Schools: 19 Apr, 17 May, 14 Jun, 12 Jul 10am – 5pm approx.
Open for applications: 8 February 2010 – Closed 12 March 2010

** Students need to choose between the Facilitation modules, according to their interest

Applications will not be accepted before opening dates or after closing dates

Each module is twelve weeks long, with only one day per month spent on campus, limiting your need to travel and allowing you to choose when and how to study whilst carrying on working. The course uses a specially designed e-learning website for students to learn and interact with each other throughout their modules and after, creating a networking hub for practitioners.

Fees: £596 accredited, £485 unaccredited per module

See below for news on getting financial support.

   

download application form

Please send completed applications to: :

Continuing Professional Development
School of Creative Arts
UWE
Bower Ashton Campus
Kennel Lodge Road
Bristol BS3 2JT

0117 328 4810

sca.cpd@uwe.ac.uk

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 UPDATE from Samantha Williams, the course co-ordinator.

 

 

GREAT NEWS!

 

There is some funding available to help with the cost of taking the Graduate Certificate Participatory Arts & Media Professional Practice

 

CLICK ON THE LINK TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE FUNDING AVAILABLE

http://rbi.uwe.ac.uk/solutions/ 

 

The University of the West of England with its partners has put together a package of nearly £1m including winning almost £500,000 funding from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF) to find ways of helping businesses during the current economic downturn. The ECIF was introduced earlier this year to enable the Higher Education sector to respond rapidly to the skills development and retraining needs of employers and individuals. 

  

The ESIF money is to help individuals and businesses affected by the downturn in the economy, and help them upskill and gain further training.

  

If you are:

• an individual practitioner who is finding it hard to get work in the sector due to the downturn
• an individual who has been made redundant, or had contracts finished/reduced due to the downturn
• an arts organisation who has had to make cutbacks due to the economic downturn

  

then you will be eligible to apply for up to £400 per person towards this training course.

 

The maximum you can spend of this money towards each module is half of the actual cost (eg half of £596 = £298) with the remainder available to you until September 2010, towards modules taken in that time-frame.

 

If you would like to apply for the Participatory Arts course and think you may fit the criteria for funding, you need to make an application to the ESIF fund on the application form on the website link above, and then tell us (CPD course team sca.cpd@uwe.ac.uk)  you have made that application, when you submit your application for a module to us, so we can keep track of students applying for this funding.

 

I hope this proves useful for you and your networks

 

Kindest regards

 

Sam

 

 

Samantha Williams

Project Co-ordinator

Professional Skills Programme for Community Arts/Media & Creative Education Practitioners

(HERDA Higher Skills Project)

Faculty of Creative Arts

University of the West of England

Bower Ashton, Bristol BS3 2JT

 

 

Community Media as the constant entity in generational change in education, and elusive Clout and Capital.

Last night I went to an interesting seminar at the Watershed Media Centre called ‘Cultural Learning: Young people – schools – creative industries’.  It was all about the 8 month relationship the Watershed have built up with Fairfield High School, which has seen a teacher being based at the Watershed one day a week, film & TV professionals working in the school, and the students taking part in projects. 

One of the refreshing things about the event was that the residency (for want of a better term) didn’t seem to revolve around the need for the students to make short films, and no films were shown at the event, though the young people were there and talked about their experiences.  The residency was focused more on educational experiences for the students and also Continuing Professional Development for the teachers and encouraging whole school change to embrace media literacy across the whole curriculum.  This was a good balance and gave the students a rounded experience of media literacy, and not only the easy win of the seduction of production.  Dick Penny talked about the importance of schools to embrace the principles of media literacy and the need for young people to create media as well as deconstruct it to fully understand media, creating a Literacy in the fullest sense, and not only a sidelined media literacy.  These are ideas I share and have written about previously (see here for a 2005 article for the Westminster Media Forum).

At the event all the teachers were enthusiastic about the educational, social and cultural potential of media professionals working with school students.   Those of us who work in community media education know of the realities of this potential, as we have based our whole careers on it.  The teachers were advocating for a network to be established which encouraged the partnerships between cultural industries and schools, and of course I applaud that advocacy, as would all those of us who work in community media education, and over the past 10 years or so this argument has been made a number of times, by teachers and us alike.   One occasion the call has been heard for example, was when South West Screen in partnership with the Watershed funded the Media Education Hubs in circa 2002 (the one in Bristol ran out of funding circa 2005). 

With each new generation of teachers comes a new enthusiasm to work together, which is great, and the Watershed and community media education advocates become the constant agencies who fly the flag of media literacy, so the teachers want to talk and work with us, which is great, but what we don’t possess is any of the clout and capital to actually embed media literacy into the education system, despite the enthusiasm of the teachers. 

In 2005 my colleague Rob Mitchell from Firstborn Creatives gave a presentation titled ‘Getting the Head on board’, with primary school teacher Becky Davis from Oldbury Court School.  We had worked with the school for a whole academic year, not just making films but also working on Continuing Professional Development for the teachers and encouraging whole school change to embrace media literacy across the whole curriculum.  (Ironically, the venue where this talk was given was again at the Watershed!).

Rob & Becky’s talk centred on the cold fact that without the clout of the headteacher, any enthusiasm and good intentions of any individual teacher can count for nothing, rendering a powerful project as a one off event that fails to be built upon.   (Luckily at Oldbury Court the headteacher was fully on board.)  With headteacher’s power, soon follows capital, the other necessary ingredient needed for any network to work, or media literacy to be more than an idealistic academic theory and turn into an educational reality.  For all the best will in the world, the reality is that community media education organisations need funding to turn ideas into interventions.   Headteachers are the people to sell the idea to, and it was great to see the headteacher at Fairfield believing in the idea so much, that Anna the teacher is able to spend one day every week off-timetable to be based at the Watershed working alongside its staff.  For other teachers in other schools, this is like some kind of mythical holy grail. 

The powerful role of public funded organisations such as the Watershed is that they can act as an influential conduit to help build relationships between school management and media production & media education professionals, (and judging by the amount of times I’ve mentioned the Watershed’s events over the years in this article it is clear they have been trying to do this).  That was partly the aim of last night’s event, to get that conversation started, and those conversations definitely happened (although it was mostly educationalists and mainstream media professionals present, and unfortunately not actually others from community media education.  I’m sure they would have been invited though!). 

It would be good now for all of us advocating media literacy to work together to take those conversations to the National Association of Head Teachers, and other such head teacher networks, to now get these conversations turned into strategic systems and naturalised ways of working in their schools, in partnership with the media education sector. 

I know this is easier said than done, but I have to remain optimistic that in 10 years time we can have a seminar looking at the distance travelled since media literacy became embedded in the school system.

With that ambition, I also remain optimistic that the enthusiastic teachers of today that champion media literacy, are the headteachers of tomorrow, that by then are still championing media literacy, and leading by example.

Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?

Earlier this week, John Gibson, chair of the Independent Schools Association, told its annual conference that many children are growing up in ”prison-like environments” because they are surrounded by technology and don’t play outdoors enough.  (See the BBC story here.) 

Even though I’m an advocate of media literacy and the role of digital media in education, I agree with Gibson and recognise, as with anything, that there are appropriate levels of usage for anything, and too much time at a computer or tv screen doing anything is not good for you, educational or not.  I’m from the ’Why Don’t You?” generation and remember with fond memories the lines “Why Don’t You Just Switch Off The Television Set And Go Do Something Less Boring Instead?”. 

 

 

 

I don’t let my own children stay on the computer for more than about 20 minutes at a time, (“do as I say, not as a I do kids!!”), so absolutely, get out there, get muddy, get climbing trees, and get making dens in the bushes.  The problem with today’s environment though, is that parents are also scared that their children are going to get kidnapped, or whatever else horrific situations our imaginations can conjure.  So now not only are screens the electronic babysitters (nurture), they are also the new nature. 

 

Want to go bowling kids?  Let’s plug in the Wii.  Want to paint a picture?  Go to the Cbeebies website and use their painting programmes and so you don’t get the carpet messy.  Want to own, love and nurture a pet of your own?  Tamagochi’s are now half price in Toyz R Us!  And most of all children, do you want to meet up with your friends and chat about girls & boys & play games & just be the children that you are, then why not log onto Facebook, or one of the thousands of children’s social network sites that are child safe and protected from ‘stranger danger’?  (Judging from some of the things I’ve seen on the internet, I’d rather my children being out there in the ‘real world’ thank you very much.) 

 

 

 

A highly contradictory part of me wept every time I saw my 8 year old daughter play on her Nintendo DS since we bought it for her, as she used to spend a lot of her time doing arts & crafts activities, and now she had her nose stuck in the mini computer playing Brain Gym, figuring out timetables and anagrams and lateral thinking puzzles.  Highly contradictory, as of course I was pleased she was using her brain, and also relieved she was using a very expensive present, but I was now concerned about her eyes.  As parents, we need to have something to worry about, as the alternative is just too frightening to comprehend.

  

But that’s just the point actually, parents are also scared of the evils of the internet, so, if we believed the hype about deranged adults lurking around every physical and virtual corner, then our children would be house bound sitting on their hands.  But that is purely theoretical, as I would like to hope that humans are more sensible than that (I trust).  We know that all things need moderation.  If a child is indeed living in a web prison, then yes they need to get out more.  If they are out all of the time, then maybe they should also come in once in a while and, I don’t know, read a book perhaps.  But the idealised nature of the traditional family are perhaps long gone.  Watching Saturday evening television together as a nuclear family used to be the ideal demographic for programmes between 6.30 – 9pm on BBC1 and ITV regions, but now you get a situation where Britain’s Got Talent gets more people watching short clips on Youtube than anyone would ever sit down to watch the whole programme on tv.  The reality is that young people’s lives are busy, just like the media they consume.  A video clip, a twitter, an instant message, a text, and photo, and video call, a poke (on facebook for those who don’t know!!)  At least they’re not out having sex and doing drugs, eh?

 

We might never know how these new technologies are affecting young people’s brains and they way they think and process information.  Some say it has depleted their attention spans, and others say it has improved it.  Nothing was ever as good as in “our day”, the *80s/70s/60s/50s/40s (delete as applicable). 

 

 

I’m sure it’s a rare teenager that only sits on a computer and never reads a single sentence on the internet, never has to figure out a query/puzzle of some kind of Facebook game or quiz, never has to count how long it will take to download the 673mb dodgy movie before their mum comes home from work in 38 minutes.  (That is a complex transferable and mathematical skill!!)  Also, what teenager doesn’t hate their parents so much that they just have to get out of the house and trawl the shopping malls and hang out in the park until one minute past their curfew, or getting their ears screamed at by sirens only they can hear to move them along?   Young people are damned if they leave the house, and damned if they stay indoors.

 

I’m making light of all this slightly as, if we don’t, we start to believe the hype, and our children would grow to be as neurotic as we are.  So yes, let’s listen to what John Gibson has to say as it is important, but let’s also embrace the positive things in these new technologies as well, and most of all, with guidance and clearly setting the boundaries, trust that we have brought up our children to be sensible individuals.  Unless we put a microchip in their brains and cameras in their eyes, we can’t be with them everywhere they go in life.

 

Hmmmmm….now there’s a thought!

.

Classroom power dynamics: Analogy of the solar system

Anyone used to working with young people in teaching/facilitation type roles, will know the experience of the butterflies in the stomach that arises when faced with the challenge of trying to encourage a group to be motivated in the task at hand.   

All eyes staring at you, waiting for you to say something meaningful and worthy of their attention. 

At one and the same time you can feel two opposing forces making the butterflies hop and skip.

At one point you feel the force of being a responsible and powerful sun in the middle of the solar system, planets circulating around you dependent on you for their survival.  If you are too strong or too weak you can cause sickness, and you try to dance the fine balance of being the centre of focus whilst deflecting the rays outwards so the satellite entities that really matter become independent of you.  The sun uses it rays to enable the planets to exisit in their own identities.

And you can also feel like a more vulnerable sun, an interviewee faced with a classroom panel full of interrogators.  Rather than dependent, the panel are expectant, waiting to be impressed, challenging you to be of use to them.  Planets, that rather than pleading with the sun to make their plants grow, they look at the sun and know that the sun needs the planets in order to find meaning in its own identity.  The sun knows that if its rays no longer contains the life nurturing qualities it once had, then it no longer has a function or has any value for the plantes.

An additional, less noticed force also at play, is akin to the circular nature of the law of cause and effect.  Rather than seeing the planets as dependent, the sun knows it needs the planets to cooporate to keep the solar system intact, and the planets know they need the sun to sustain its existence in that same system.  A symbiotic relationship that is mutually beneficial for each party in that system, but which, a pessamist would say, ultimately exists only to sustain that system.  An optimist would say to look at the richness of ‘life’ on the planets and the unquestioned meaning of the sun – so the system is not a futile entity, it is meaning itself, life itself personified.

If a planet no longer have any use for the sun, the system will regulate itself to let that planet go.  When the sun knows it is no longer of any use to any of the planets, it will burn up and die, and make way for a new system to be made manifest, if there is indeed need for another system to exist.

The butterfly will fly to another sun.

 

 

(Picture credit – http://www.aerospaceguide.net/solar_system/index.html)

The Merchants of Cool (the dangers of community media in a compromising position)

Here is a clip from the documentary Dr Jared Ball mentioned in his ‘Is Hip Hop Mass Media’ lecture posted in the previous post in this blog.

This documentary realtes to some of the more challenging areas I’m going to touch on in my PhD, asking awkward questions relating to Community Media.  Many community media production companies and community media centres say that some of their funding comes from projects where young people opinions are being consulted, not necessarily for multi-national corporations such as Nike advertising agencies, but by local cultural institutions such as galleries, museums and also city councils.  The topics of these consultations are usually more social or cultural than corporate; ranging from young people attitudes towards climate change, recycling, graffiti, the appeal (or not) of a museum, solutions for social problems such as knife crime and drugs, etc. 

The consultations aren’t as embarressingly crass as the one shown in this clip, but would be creative where the young people get to make films exploring these ideas, to stimulate debate amongst other young people when they are screened.  I have been involved in many of these types of projects over the past 15 years or so.  The uncomfortable questions still remains – is this exploitation of the young people, and if not, where is the line?

My quick answer is that this is where the radar of the of the community media facilitator must come into action, as I have turned down money from projects that I have viewed as blatent exploitation and have suspected were just ‘tick-box’ exercises and or wanting cheap labour from student media crews.  Other times I have seen the educational value of taking on a project to run with young people, whilst also recognising the benefit the funder of the outcome.  Should we apologise for this, or rather run a responsible educational experience with eyes open in the capitalist funding landscape that we operate in, in the UK and USA particularly?

These are thorny issues with no quick answers.  This all needs much more unpicking.  Funded organisations with broad social aims have for decades, which many community media education organisation fall under the unbrella of, have been aware of how much the donor conditionality of the funder affects the project and its outcome.  On the sharper end of community media, such as a radio station operating in an oppressive political climate, any funding at all can comprise their position to criticise certain elements of society in their broadcasts, eventually becoming puppets of the state.  These concerns have largly ignored the other less ‘broadcast based’ areas of community media, such as film clubs and school projects, but the awkward questions need to be asked.  (For more on how these ideas relate to a school context and the Hidden Curriculum - see this previous post here.)

Here is the ‘Merchants of Cool’ clip, and when watching this, if you are a youth worker of some description, ask yourself what these activities would look like in your own working context, and  judge where the line is.  Lots of chin stroking – more to discuss.

Message to arts students (notes)

When I am not doing community media type work, my day job is teaching photography degree students. As with all teachers, you start to see patterns over the years in feelings and behaviour from which one can draw some ‘universal’ lessons and advice and guidance.

As head of 1st year, here are the notes for a presentation I plan to give to the new cohort in September, to give them a sense of expectations and conflicting feelings they may experience in the first year. Not sure it will be in this exact order. Will see how it looks & feels. Comments always welcome.

I admit in an anti-Friere approach to writing this, as there is an ‘us & them’ tendency in how this is written. Hopefully I have absolved myself somewhat in point 4. below.

I found these points quite easy to write for formal education students, as there is a structure that is set and repeated year after year, so ‘universal’ themes can be identified for advice and guidance. It would be more difficult, if not impossible, to write these for participants of Community Media education activity though, experiencing learning in the informal education sector – as hardly any two projects are the same, and the system and structures reinvent themselves with each new pot of funding.

Here goes: Message to 1st year art, media, photography & design students.

1.
We don’t remember you from your interviews. There is no legacy we are expecting you to build on. Now is the opportunity to reinvent yourself and be who you want to be, and not continue to be who everyone expects you to be.

2.
You all have a varied range of experiences and expertise, but you are all here for a reason and that is all that counts. Having an identical set of entry skills requirements would make for a dull class of students. Listen to each other, learn from each other and share with each other, but don’t fear or envy each other. You were all interviewed and you all arrived, like competitive sperm in the womb. Now it’s your gift to make the most of being here.

3.
You don’t know everything otherwise you wouldn’t be here, so try not to be too resistant and listen to advice and guidance, and don’t be afraid to take creative risks and work outside your comfort zone.

4.
Also we don’t know everything either otherwise we probably wouldn’t be here also. Teaching is also about co-learning, so be prepared to take ownership of your ideas and to engage in conversation and critical debate about your creative decision making.

5.
You have to work at finding answers, and also accept that there is not always necessarily a “right” answer to be found. Research is a necessary part of the creative process. When you are a professional you can do research in your head and it will be second nature, but now that you are in art school, we ask you to play the game and write it down. We have to grade you, so we need to base it on ‘evidence’. I won’t apologise for this as you will thank us the in 10 years time.

6.
This is not school. In the first year if you don’t turn up for sessions for the first 6 months or so then we will chase you down as we recognise living away from home for the first time can be a time of self discovery. But in the second year it is up to you to be the responsible adults that we first saw in you in your interview. If you need me to repeat this point, then is probably best you leave now and save your money.

7.
You will no longer be top of the class as your were in A-level. You will need to grow a thick skin and take on board criticism of your work. You will learn by doing, which is the only real way to learn arts practice at all.

8.
In a couple of months you may start to question yourself, your creative ability and your future. That is natural. Please talk to someone about this, one of your tutors or student support. Please remember that the creative process can be painful and scary, but in the interview we saw in you your ability to succeed. We do not set up anybody to fail.

9.
First year is largely about trying to support you to have the confidence so have the skill to achieve strong research as second nature. So in 2nd and 3rd year it doesn’t need as much effort but you are still producing strong results. Writing things down on paper is a life skills. If you are not confident at writing, now is as good a time as any to try and conquer this fear.

10.
Be personal with your work. Have an opinion. Read the newspaper. Understand what makes you tick, and don’t be embarrassed by it. This is important for both issue-based and non-issue based work. We don’t expect all your work to be political and save the world, but even if your work is about public toilets then we expect you to have an opinion about them.

11.
Don’t be the critic on your own shoulder. There will be enough people wanting to censor you when you leave this place. Be brave and be honest and make the work you want to make. Don’t make the work you think we want you to make. We have had our time to make work. Now is your time.

12.
Listen to your heart and not so much your head. Logic can really mess up a good creative project and trip you up at the last hurdle.

13.
Photography is difficult because it is so easy. Don’t take it for granted or underestimate its power. Any literate person can write ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, but that does not make them Shakespeare. Likewise photography. Don’t just see things, start to look at them also.

 

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THE CLASS: The Critical Pedagogy of Teacher/Student relationships, and systems as oppression in schools

To download this paper as a pdf click here.

 

An analysis of the film ‘The Class’, (Entre les murs) from the perspective of critical pedagogy.  I will be extending this article into a chapter for my PhD, where I will use data from interviews I conducted with participants of community media education activity to explore the notion of critical pedagogy further within this context.  But for now, I hope you find this blog article interest.

(SPOILER ALERT!  This article reveals certain aspects of the plot of the film.  You have been warned.)

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The film ‘The Class’, in a challenging way depicts a term in an urban French school, centred predominantly around the dynamics in the classroom of François Marlin the French teacher. The entire film balances on the power relations between the teacher and his students, and the tensions that surface when the power balance shifts in either direction. The line is blurred between what either side constitutes acceptable and respectful behaviour, with peer allegiances made at crucial moments when clear lines are drawn.

 

At moments there is a seemingly equal dialogue between teacher and students. Diversions in planned lessons evolve when the students start to question assumed knowledge, accepted traditions and the ‘top down’ curriculum, and these debates are met with the teacher engaging in the dialogue and recognising the validity of some of the students points, even if this is reluctant concession. The students are uninhibited to apply reason to question hierarchies of cultural authority, such as the text book correct use of language, rightly arguing that no one actually uses such antiquated speech patterns in day to day life, and challenge the teacher to justify why they are being taught it. At moments such as these the teacher goes some way to defend the curriculum and cultural tradition, before meeting them half way to generally agree with them, but stating that they have to learn it anyway. This balance of rational cultural debate and its effect on the institutional entropy of the school threads throughout the film, with stark negotiations laid bare on how systems are maintained, what happens when systems falter, and how they are attempted to be patched up and repaired in the aftermath.

 

It is the moments when reasoned debate breaks down and descends into emotional protectionism that creates a chain of events that leads to the main areas of dramatic tension in the film, which mostly centre around the strained relationship between François and Souleymane, a student with a bad reputation across the entire school. When Souleymane is teased by a female student (Esmerelda) when he refuses to do the work set by the teacher, Souleymane responds with a verbal assault that results in the teacher throwing him out of the class. This event happens not long after Souleymane had shown surprising interest in a self portrait project where he used photography after he had refused to write with stubborn reluctance. François embraced the student’s approach and pinned the work on the wall for the whole class to see. The look of embarrassed and fragile pride on Souleymane’s face was unmistakable.

 

In a subsequent staff meeting, after Souleymane was ejected from the class, François at first tries to defend the student, but in the wave of public opinion amongst his peers he descends into conceding that he believes Souleymane has reached his academic limit and suggests there is no hope for him, failing to mention the promise he had shown in the self portrait project as even a glimmer of the student’s potential and a way to harness his interest. This denunciation of Souleymane is witnessed by Esmerelda, a student representative present in the meeting. Despite being enemies with Souleymane she tells him the happenings of the meeting demonstrating a solidarity of identity across institutional and cultural lines. The pain on François’s face is clear when he seals Souleymane’s fate with permanent exclusion, but he goes with crowd opinion in spite of personal feeling.

 

When confronted by this back in the classroom by Souleymane himself, François tries to divert the argument away from his own guilt to accuse the motives of the student reps for divulging the information, resulting in him insulting them in a verbal slur arguably more shocking than Souleymane had done earlier, which led to him being ejected. Now faced with the knowledge that his teacher sees no hope in him, Souleymane’s reckless attempt at defending his own integrity and arguing against the teacher’s verbal assault on Esmerelda sees him create a situation where again there is no choice but for François to eject him again. In terms of the institutional line, this becomes the point of no return.

 

For Paulo Freire (1972) it would be too easy to suggest that Souleymane is the sole oppressed individual in this situation. The entwined state of teacher institutional compliance and lack of student power or agency is described by Freire as the oppression they both share working/studying in the education system, which he describes as a “state of oppression that gratifies the oppressors.” (page 17). According to Freire, for the teacher to discover “himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed [the student]. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is identifying; it is a radical posture.” (page 26).

 

The banter François enjoys with the class in the early lessons is just that, a mere exchange of words and ideas that have no actually bearing on the power structures in the wider system. Like Johan Huizinga’s theory of the ‘magical circle’, which he describes as the boundaries of the rules of engagement when people play (1938), the classroom discussions were within the confines of the magic circle, where the dialogue appears to be democratic, but when the circle is broken the teacher is still dominant and the students passive and the system remains, swiftly repaired with the cultural patches of expectation and hierarchy. Throughout the film the boundaries of the magic circle are being tested, pushed and expanded, but ultimately nothing changes. Souleymane is never mentioned again and the system rebuilds its’ previous patterns of narrative like a well trodden tiled kitchen floor. The pattern doesn’t quite fit and something is not quite right, but it is still fully functional as a working floor, and will always remain so.

 

The banter in the early lessons felt like a critical pedagogy where the students were questioning authority, where the teacher was slowly but surely coming on board with a “radical posture”, but that was just a smoke illusion. The weight of the institutional system remained the dominant paradigm through the existence of the ‘hidden curriculum’, described as the “set of values, attitudes [and] knowledge frames, which are embodied in the organisation and processes of schooling and which are implicitly conveyed to pupils.” (Jary 2005, page 267). The hidden curriculum is considered to be more powerful than the actual content of subjects taught in school, and “promotes social control and an acceptance of the school’s, and hence society’s, authority structure.” The national curriculum teaches students about literacy, numeracy and science, etc, but the hidden curriculum instils in students the importance of listening to elders, of obeying orders, of respecting authority, and of the values of manners and the need to work within existing systems in society.  Actions that are contrary to the dominant norms of the hidden curriculum are considered renegade, dangerous and subversive. Such behaviour must be either contained and controlled, like François, or eradicated from the (micro) system, like Souleymane.

 

As a community media facilitator working in both formal and informal education settings, for me the departure point for Souleymane’s future narrative is in relation to harnessing his interest in photography, and seeing where that can lead. The oppression in François manifested itself in him not being prepared to recognise or follow the spark of Souleymane’s interest as a possible route to the student’s future success. Education without hope is fostering a slave dependence. On Freire’s position on this, according to Kincheloe (2008);

“human beings can become so much more than they are now, Freire always maintained, in the spirit of this critical hope. Oppression, he understood, always reduces the oppressed understanding of historical time to a hopeless present. We are all oppressed from time to time by this hopeless presentism that tells us time and time again: ‘things will never change.’ Throughout history these hopeless moments have been followed by radical changes. Such a ‘long view’ is, of course, hard to discern in the black hole of despair. Freire’s historical hope was paralleled by a pedagogical hope shared between teachers and students.” (page 72)

 

Freire’s ‘critical pedagogy’, where the educational institution hierarchy is flattened to a plateau, where the teachers are ‘teacher-students’ and the students are ‘student-teachers’, and where both are made aware of their own oppression, presents an additional challenge to community media, more than merely working with a glimpse of a student’s creative potential. What must also crucially be considered is what type of community media intervention would it be?  Would it be; (1.) one that works with the existing system as a different pedagogical model to keep students such as Souleymane engaged in the school process, working within the paradigm of the hidden curriculum, or (2.), a more radical application of community media processes working in an informal setting, which is actively positioning education as a political activity, using photography and media as the tools of self-empowerment and social agency? Both these options are followed by the additional question, “Does it actually matter, as long as the student is set on a constructive path with a non-self-destructive future?”

 

I’ll leave this question hanging, just as the film left the audience, with the scene of the empty classroom. Full of possibilities, full of hope and idealism, but also full of tension and frustration. If there is anything that this film teaches me, it is that educators must hold onto the possibilities of hope and idealism, and use the tension and frustration to fuel and stimulate challenging and non-patronising learning experiences. That is one step towards the teacher-student / student-teacher relationship, where both are forced to think for themselves and question themselves, before they attempt to think for and question other people.

 

 

References

- Freire, P. (1972), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin Books, UK

- Huizinga, J. H. (1938), Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Beacon Press

- Jary, J, and Jary, D (2005), Sociology Defined and Explained, HarperCollins, Glasgow, UK

- Kincheloe, J.L, (2008), Critical pedagogy primer – Second Edition, Peter Lang Publishing, New York

 

(c) 2009 – Shawn Sobers – Firstborn Creatives / University of the West of England

Sir Ken Robinson – Do schools today kill creativity?

WiFi Radiation investigation – Response to Panorama, BBC1, 21st May 2007

Summary of programme: WiFi is bad for you. The radiation may give you cancer and is on par with mobile phone masts, but potentially more harmful due to plans to have WiFi in every school in the UK. Children’s skulls are softer and thus are more prone to serious harm. The government are ignoring research from WHO which suggests harm and are pressing ahead regardless.

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The War on drugs. War on junk food. Smoking bans. Binge drinking awareness campaigns. It seems whatever is bad for us that we choose to consume in our own bodies is being outlawed or stigmatised by government. But advances in technology that MAY also be bad for us, but are external to our bodies and that we have no control over, are being embraced, if not enforced by government.

We are discouraged to consciously consume harmful substances, but are being forced to unconsciously be exposed to potentially harmful radiation. There’s some tricky ethics at play there.

I use WiFi when I’m in the city centre, but I know for sure that the only reason I don’t have it in my house is because I was never comfortable about the levels of radiation. I didn’t ever know what the levels would be, but I knew I wasn’t comfortable with whatever they were. Of course I use a mobile, etc so am a hypocrite – but in this day and age all a city person living in the West could be described as someone just trying to juggle their lives as best they can considering the environment and fair trade and healthy eating and equality issues and work/life balance and ethical banking and free-range and all the other small print in modern living. We are all hypocrites, and it would be a hypocrite who says any different. It’s not really about our individual carbon footprints, as that is too selective. It really about our Footprint in totality, but that is too unwieldy and unpalatable to comprehend.

We love new technology because it is convenient and makes things faster. For example: MP3 players are popular because you can store your whole record collection on them and each new version of player allows you to access each track slightly easier/quicker than the previous model. Mobile phones, computers, digibox, HDTV, the list goes on. Once we’ve got them it’s damn difficult to give them up. So if mobile phones prove to be harmful. And WiFi, and bluetooth and Sky dishes and god knows what else is pumped across our airwaves. Who will be the ones to unplug, switch off and consign these “bright idea but harmful” gadgets into the locked drawers? And who will be the ones to continue using, in the same way that many still smoke, knowing it is bad for their health and others, but they like it and in it’s own way keeps them sane. If I didn’t have my mobile phone and email and the Internet I too would go slightly potty I’m sure.

Hypocrites the lot of us but what can we do?

1) Accept things as they are without questioning.

2) Embrace things (technology). All this talk is just scare mongering.

3) Pretend we’ve never heard anything and carry on regardless.

4) Move to the countryside and live like the Good Life.

5) Pray.

6) All of the above.

I don’t know where this article is going just in the same way I don’t know where I’m going.

Actually that’s a lie. No matter how much I love the Internet and other modern trappings, I now need to turn them all off and go to bed. When all said and done we are nothing but flesh and bone and are not invincible. We would do well to remember that.

See> Schools want urgent wi-fi advice

See comments and opposing opinions at Debate on Possible Health Risk from Wireless

If you missed the programme you can watch again here