Looking Your Age

I was vastly amused to hear PD James this morning on the Today programme, giving Mark Thompson a hard time about inflated executive salaries and the lack of older women on screen and on air: 08.20 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/listen_again/default.stm, (I know the Today programme is so last century and in fact most radios in our house are tuned to Radio 5 Live Sports Extra, at least during Test Matches, but I find Radio 5 too exhausting when I've just got up. Must be feeling my age.) To give him his due, young Mark (he is after all only 52 and four months) conceded that the BBC probably needs to look harder at the way it does - or does not - represent all sectors of society, but he immediately blew it by finding himself unable to find the right words to describe the social category into which PD James herself falls (she is 89 and four months). After a few excruciating seconds he managed to come out with it: "older women". Note the comparative - we can't just be "old"; "older" sounds just that bit softer and kinder, doesn't it?

As someone who is regularly subjected to the kind of amazement that people think is flattering when I tell them my age, I am depressed and angry that it should be generally accepted that age is a tragedy for women. If it's tragic for men, it certainly doesn't become so until they are well past 52. I wonder how often Mark Thompson meets people who say "goodness, Mark, I would never have imagined that you were 52! You look absolutely wonderful! I wouldn't have thought you were a day over 40!". This might be because he is, after all, a bit baldy, but he has more hair than my brother who is only 49, and on the whole, I wouldn't easily have been able to guess his age without looking it up on Wikipedia, because I have no idea what 52 looks like. He doesn't look 22 and he doesn't look 82 and that's about it. But when I was 52 people were certainly well into the "goodness I'd never have thought it!" phase and expecting me to look pleased. The sad thing is that I have to confess to a smidgen of smugness about looking less ancient that some people who are my age. But I put this down to the very fact of being born in 1942: if you grew up female in the 50s, you learned your lesson very well: old women are hideous and horrible, unless they're your nan.

I was once accosted by a woman (is it relevant that she was American?) after I'd given a presentation at a conference, who surged up to me saying "I just want to tell you I think you are SOOO brave!" Did she mean I was so brave for talking about media education to 200 primary literacy specialists? No, she reckoned I was so brave because I didn't dye my grey hair. I wonder whether she goes up to people with facial disfigurements and tell them they are so brave for not going round with their head in a paper bag. Do mixed race people get flattered for not looking too black? Even if I did feel bad about being 67 (and I really don't, well almost entirely not, ok I have noticed I might be dead in 20 years which is a bit of a downer, but apart from that, no, honestly) I would quickly get the message from all these well-meaning flatterers that being 67 is absolutely unthinkably awful and thank god I can get away with looking 52.

Although it is now illegal here to force people to retire, anyone born before 1947 will know that the minute you turn 60, the subtle pressures are on. A former colleague (of course, I can't say where) is going through just these pressures now. "When do you think you might retire?" "Maybe you'd like to consider moving to a less demanding role?" "Are you finding it all a bit of a strain?" It's the same kind of malevolent kindliness as the "you don't look your age" flattery, and it's hard to muster up a stinging rebuttal, let alone threaten court action. The best option is to negotiate a fat golden handshake and get the hell out, if that's the kind of people you're working with, though for some reason I stuck it out for another four years. By when, of course, I really did look my age.

The Twins Arrive At Last

Becoming a grandmother for the second and third time in one day is pretty exhausting - though of course nowhere near as exhausting as it's been for my daughter and her partner. It's been fascinating as well though. 30+ years ago we did what we were told. When I questioned why my husband had to be told to leave the room when I had a vaginal examination, I was accused of being a bit kinky to want him to be there while someone else put their hand - er - up there. When I had a miscarriage at 23 weeks I was scolded for making a fuss, and forbidden to see the foetus, which I was told was dead, though I knew he was alive when born. Yes, that was University College Hospital in 1972, thank you guys, hope I can track you all down one day and give you each a big fat knuckle sandwich. Today's birth of Alfred and Constance at the Homerton couldn't have been more different. Through yesterday's long wait for induced labour to start (it didn't) and today's Caesarian, all was kindness, careful explanation, considerateness, respect and lots of laughs: Angela the midwife was there all the time and was an absolute star. The babies are sleepy but they're snuggled up together in a cradle right next to their mother's bed (none of that "they're tired and you can't see them yet"). And if there are any American readers out there, please note that this was ALL FREE ON THE NHS.

Keeping an Open Mind

Why do media people hate media education so much? The latest exponent of this tendency is Tim Bell, erstwhile ad expert for the Tories, whose splenetic response to the idea that children might learn to be critical of the media appears in today's Observer.

The sociologist Steve Fuller has apparently suggested that media education could help primary school children be less susceptible to advertising (well, some debate to be had here about how susceptible they already are, and about the effectiveness of media education that only aims at this outcome, but anyway, give the guy a break, it's a reasonable enough question in these times when even the Government has commissioned a study on the impact of the commercial world on children's well being - though why they have still not published the results is a bit of a mystery - maybe they're scared of Tim Bell and his ilk).

The Observer journalist Anushka Asthana got passed on to me for a quote about media literacy in primary schools, poor woman, and got an earful about relationships between moving image and print literacy, children's early acquisition of comprehension skills, you know the sort of thing, which she rendered reasonably well given the limited space she'd been allocated. I don't know whether she took a hint from one of my comments to her about media hostility to media education, but she certainly went to the right place for an example of it.

The fascinating thing is that Bell bases his contemptuous dismissal of media education on the fact that "we need people who are educated and have open minds". So encouraging critical analysis of the media leads to closed minds, does it? Or is it just that Bell fears the effect of such analyses on the PR industry's reputation for objectivity, accuracy and balance?

Ipercoop: consumer wonderland

Having had house guests through the whole of August and September, followed by the London Film Festival and another trip to Italy, I've been distracted from blogging. Now - luckily for the tiny but discriminating minority who do visit this blog from time to time - I have been inspired by a visit to Ipercoop, a gigantic supermarket just outside Modena. In fact I hate to go there, but it is loathsome in a spectacularly fascinating way. Last Sunday morning it was all geared up for Halloween; next week no doubt they will be clearing the aisles for the Christmas Crib Industry, with job lots of wise men and shepherds, crates of plastic rocks and straw, a choice of stable sizes and optional extras like

angels, tinkling streams and seasonal music. But even without the "specials", there is always lots to gawp at for anyone like me who rarely ventures beyond Tesco Metro. Ipercoop is so gigantic that the assistants have to wear skates. There are 52 checkouts, although increasingly the customers use portable scanners to check their goods as they continue to cruise the aisles. The pet foods section is as big as the whole of our local supermarket.

You can pop a bike or a fishing rod into your trolley along with the cornflakes and bread; you can buy a washing machine, a wood-burning stove or a set of garden furniture. The only things that seem to be unavailable are actual houses.

Instead of having the own-label, bargain items tactfully spread around the store, there's a special aisle for people who are so poor or so stingy they don't mind being seen there: hence it is almost deserted.

But it's the fresh food that's really lavish. The fish department consists of a row of almost full-size lifeboats, each bearing great piles of fish, shellfish and various marine animal body parts, lovingly arranged on ice. There are vistas of vegetables, avenues of cheese, whole neighbourhoods of meat.

A visit to Ipercoop always leaves me completely shattered. By the time I get to the car park - which is about the size of Hampstead Heath - and try to remember the colour and make of car I came in, I'm ready to burst into tears. Each time I declare "never again" but somehow, every time I visit Italy, Ipercoop is where I end up.

SMALL FIRE IN ITALY: NOBODY KILLED

UK media coverage of forest fires in foreign parts has developed a fairly standard format: when the fire's out and the dramatic pictures dry up, so does the story. My adaptation (above) of Claud Cockburn's "boring headline" exemplar sums up an approach I've had little objections to - until now.

The photo on the left shows TAS picking grapes, with help from grandson Morgan, a couple of years ago at our son's little house in Liguria. The top picture shows the same scene this week after three hectares of vines and forest went up in smoke. The story you don't get from the media is what it feels like to see your land turned to desert and all your hard work come to nothing.

It seems likely that a neighbour, fed up with cutting brush in the fierce afternoon sun, may have thought he'd just try and burn off a long-neglected bramble patch. Within minutes, the fire had roared through the brambles, jumped the road, demolished eight terraces of vines and ripped through the pine forest at the top of the hill (see "before" and "after" pictures) before helicopters arrived to douse the flames. But that's not the end of the story: when I've seen those dramatic pictures showing tons of water cascading on to blazing landscapes, it's never occurred to me to think about where the water comes from. Why, the sea, of course! So the burnt land is now contaminated by salt water and can't be replanted any time soon.

We all see lots of pictures like this but it's different when you've weeded those very paths, tied back the vines that used to grow on them, picked the grapes and loaded them into the masher. And of course tended the sunburn and endured the wasp stings. It's weird to see a familiar landscape reduced to its bare bones, and I guess it's going to be interesting to see how it does recover, and how long this will take. This fire was an object lesson in hot weather garden maintenance. Ben's other more socially conscious neighbour kept the grass cut all around the building that they share, and this was the only reason that their homes did not go up in smoke as well. Which reminds me: I must go and buy a strimmer, and I think we'll give that garden bonfire a miss this year.

Informal learning, non-formal learning, etc

Well, I went to the event and it was a really good discussion, but also interesting in unexpected ways. Almost all the focus was on how informal or non-formal learning (some distinguished these; some didn't) differed from formal education, and it amounted to a blistering attack on how formal education in this country has become mechanical, risk-averse and obsessed with outcomes. There were few people there with actual current experience of secondary or primary schools and to some extent schools became the default scapegoat for educational failure. Although there were some voices pointing out that a laissez-faire approach to education has its own dangers, most seemed to argue that experiential learning in the real world, or self-directed learning on topics of personal interest was better, more effective and longer-lasting than what's on offer in schools. This got a bit unfair on schools - many are much better than this, and no-one had a ready alternative for the opportunities offered by schools to disadvantaged children.

Nevertheless, all the examples of what's good about informal learning reminded me of recent struggles I've had in persuading teachers that there's a value in listening to children, that "child-centred" doesn't mean pandering to a child's every whim but recognising where she's at now and where she might be with some nudging and encouragement.

It also reminded me of my recent discussion with George Head at Glasgow University, who suspects that media education requires a different pedagogy. I'm not convinced: I think you can teach anything badly; but I can see that the when the balance of knowledge and experience between teacher and child is different, as in media education, then a different pedagogy can emerge. But obviously this will only happen if the teacher recognises the child's baseline knowledge and knows how to build on it. This requires not only a different pedagogy - listening to the child, looking for evidence that she is already addressing issues such as genre or modality, and being able to respond to it - but also knowing media education issues well enough in order to build on the child's prior learning and take it forward. This is a big ask for non-specialist teachers. It's why teachers get anxious at the prospect that "they know more than me!" and why teachers embarking on media education with younger children can often fail to challenge them enough.

Anyway, it's clear that media education offers a particular and significant "take" on the relationship between formal and informal learning. I hope the RSA/Youth UK project will be able to explore this.

Non-formal learning - what is it and who gets it?

I've been invited to attend an RSA event about non-formal learning called "Vision not Division – Learning for all in the 21^st Century". We’ve been offered a definition of "non-formal learning" as “…a process of social learning centred on the learner that is realized through activities outside of the formal education system” (World Development Report 2007), and we've been asked to make notes beforehand on our own experiences of this sort of thing. To help us do this, we've been given these examples: "playing in a local sports team, attending a youth club, undertaking voluntary service”.

This has set me wondering. First of all, why does the World Development Report use the term ‘social’? I see no necessary link between ‘non-formal’ and ‘social’. Then the three examples we've been given seem to me to comprise a very traditional, old-fashioned view of non-formal learning as something socially/morally acceptable with an emphasis on communal values: safe, nice activities that would keep us off the streets. I've got nothing against such activities, but if we were to confine our discussions to this sort of thing we ought to narrow down the definition to read “…a process of social learning centred on the learner that is realized through organised activities outside of the formal education system”

Even so, we ought be able to acknowledge that people often make conscious and purposeful decisions to learn something when they:

• · watch a documentary on TV or at the cinema
• · buy specialist magazines
• · visit websites
• · use a library
• · visit a museum, theme park or zoo
• · use a tourist guide to go sightseeing

These activities all involve learning and are often driven by people's incessant desire to learn things or at least to acquire information and/or techniques. They may of may not be 'social', but they're certainly informal, and they are 'centred on the learner': the providers in each case probably don't use the word 'pedagogy' but that's what they're doing.

The agenda for the event looks as though it's going to ignore things like ‘the digital revolution’ and ‘the information society’, even though these dominate other kinds of discussion about 21st century society and culture. I hope we don't end up just talking about condescending, socially-controlling versions of non-formal learning and ignoring the ways in which the media and leisure industries are thriving on people’s obvious and growing interest in all kinds of non-formal learning, achieved in pleasurable, unthreatening and often entertaining ways. Watch this space!