Cary - her blog

Another bit of folk wisdom

2012-01-07T15:41:00.006Z

I remember being told years ago that dropping an aspirin in a flower vase prolonged the life of the flowers, but always assumed it was one of those old bits of folk wisdom we didn't need to bother with any more. I have however dutifully poured into flower vases the contents of the little sachets you get with flowers from Tesco, labelled "lily food", "carnation food" etc, and wearily thrown the same flowers away after two weeks at the most.

But on the evening of December 2nd TAS and I came across these pussy willow twigs lying on the pavement near our house, brought them home and stuck them in a jar. Here they are on 7th January, still sparkling white and fluffy. But the remarkable bit is that on December 21st I wanted to brighten up the display a bit to decorate our Solstice Dinner that evening, so popped into Tesco, only to find that all they had left (apart from hideous Xmas bunches) were these rather manky carnations. Got them anyway, added some to the willow twigs and put the rest in another vase somewhere else. The latter got thrown out several days ago (so lasted maybe 10 days in all) but the ones sharing their now rather brown and scuzzy water with the willow twigs are still in full and perfect bloom.

Then it dawned on me: willow leaves and bark, as Wikipedia tells us, "contain salicin, a substance that chemically resembles aspirin" - so the old folk remedy is absolutely true! I shall now try chewing willow stems before my next long-haul flight.

145 pounds at last!

2011-11-26T15:31:00.004Z

In February this year I had a meeting with Roma, one of the impressively slender instructors at the gym in Highbury, to review my exercise programme. She said she thought I was doing stuff rather aimlessly at the gym and I needed A Goal. My impulse was to shrug this aside: I've stopped doing Goals since I left the BFI and feel much better for it. But she insisted, so I said rather off-handedly that what I'd really like to do some time when I felt up to it would be to lose a stone (14 pounds). I'd always thought this rather vaguely - I knew I was a bit overweight and it was annoying how tight some of my clothes were, but I just figured you get fatter when you're older and that's that. But Roma seized on this and said "Yes that's a great Goal to have: what date shall we set for you to reach it?" Thinking fast, I looked well ahead and suggested my birthday, 29th May. So then Roma weighed me in at 81kg (178 pounds or 12 stone 7) and I was locked into the process.

No diets for me: I'd done several and I know they're all rubbish as far as serious long-term weight loss is concerned. If I was to lose weight permanently I'd have to get used to eating what I would be eating for the rest of my life, so there'd be no point in trying something outlandish. I also knew - or thought I did - that with a bit of self-awareness about alcohol, nibbles before dinner, snacks in the morning and afternoon, smaller helpings and no second helpings, I'd lose weight and all I needed to do was keep going. So I lost maybe four or five pounds in the first month, but then it all slowed down and got boring.

This was, of course, Roma's big moment. She ordered me to write down everything I ate for a week, count the calories, and report back to her. Tsk! So boring and old-fashioned, calorie counting. But I only had to count a few items before I realised I was simply eating as much or more calories as I burned. With my regular diet in front of me, I was able to decide which bits to cut: half my Birchermuesli in the mornings, and as much fat as possible ie no marge on bread and no cheese - so, effectively, hardly any bread either - and, very sadly, no more little morning treat of a gloop of cream in my coffee.

Keeping up the gym, swimming, twin care and allotment work took care of the energy expenditure, and having resigned as the Chair of the MEA my time in front of the computer diminished considerably. Crucially, TAS joined in and we began to lose weight together. I lost a stone by the agreed date, but then thought, why stop now? Why not another stone? This was not an eating disorder: I felt thinner than I looked, rather than looking thinner than I felt. Now and then I'd pick up a six-kilo weight and think: I'm not carrying that around any more! I didn't actually look that much thinner: it was only by September when I had lost another half stone that people started to comment on how much better I looked (or put it another way, remind me what a fat pig I'd looked a few months earlier, I guess). And it was later still that I started to notice it: I could feel bones I'd forgotten I had, and some of my clothes suddenly became unbearably huge. I've had to buy new bras and alter all my trousers, and I can put on socks and tie my shoelaces without groaning.

Now when I try to pick up a 15-kilo weight at the gym - I don't actually USE a 15-kilo weight because I can barely get it off the ground - I think: was I actually carrying all that around, and wondering why I got sore feet and problems with my knees and felt puffed out running upstairs? What was I thinking of? How did I manage to go on considering myself "a bit overweight"? Why didn't anybody - not even the doctor - tell me I was fat? The reason of course is that I wasn't THAT fat: a size 16 is not much to worry about compared to the really vast people you see every day - so my mere 32 pounds of extra flab didn't put me on anybody's Urgent list.

TAS has lost about the same amount, and we're more or less grinding to a halt on the serious weight loss idea. Our current weights seem about right: they're about the same as they were when we first met, 40 years ago. We have to keep an eye on it though: we weigh ourselves every morning (that being the most comfortingly lightweight moment of the day) and notice when too many of those little indulgences have made their presence felt. Two days in the Netherlands notched up four pounds on the scales and last night's little binge at the IoE graduate reception accounted for a pound and a half.

But the interesting thing is how quickly the weight goes again as soon as we get back to eating what we can now truthfully say is "normally". Of course, "my weight" is a flexible concept: everyone seems to gain 3 or 4 pounds during the day, and loses it again by the following morning. Eating early in the evening will make for a lower weight in the morning. So ideally (after Christmas, maybe) it would be good to lose maybe 2 or 3 more pounds so I'd know I'd always be less than ten and a half stone. But it's no big deal: essentially we've pretty much got to the stage where we both know what we can and can't eat if we want to maintain it, and more to the point, know that it's not hard for us to do that. What's probably going to be harder now is to stop ourselves becoming body fascists and casting disdainful glances at everyone who's bigger than us. Is that another things the ads don't tell you: the thinner you get, the nastier you are?

How Arthur and Marilyn changed my life

2011-11-19T11:20:00.009Z

It may seen superfluous to add to the more than 53 million Google items about Marilyn Monroe but I think (needless to say) that I have a slightly different take. In 1956 I lived with my father, stepmother and brother in a tied cottage on the estate of the Earl of Drogheda (sounds grand, but the press called the House a "country cottage") where my father was head gardener (see my blog about him in October last year) and my stepmother helped out when things were busy (this is what posh history TV dramas always get wrong, because of course it would mess up the casting: country houses always corralled in any amount of help for cooking and cleaning from their dependent local economy whenever there were weekend parties).

When Marilyn and Arthur Miller were in England for their honeymoon and for her to play in The Prince and the Showgirl they stayed in Parkside House - on the edge of Windsor Great Park near Englefield Green - as described, rather fancifully, in Colin Clark's My Week with Marilyn. Laurence Olivier, who co-starred, was the go-between who set up the "country cottage" idyll so it fell to my father to pace the lawns with Olivier and work out (a) who Marilyn was - my father was a bit hazy on that - and (b) plan things for their stay. Secrecy was vital. My brother and I weren't told till much nearer the time, though we knew there would be someone important coming to stay at the House. I think I figured it would be a national leader - Tito I think was one idea I had - and I was a bit disappointed that it turned out to be a vulgar Hollywood star. We were on strict instructions not to tell anyone until after they had actually arrived. The estate was not that secure: we did at least shut the gates but anyone could get through the little wooden ones into our garden and thence to the House via the vegetable garden.

The first thing that impressed me most was the press pack. Exactly like a pack of dogs slavering over a bitch, they hung around the gates incessantly and broke in when they could. Two of them cornered me in the orchard and tried to be smarmy; it was when they called me "little girl" (I was 14) that I told them they were on private property and should leave. We were all amazed by their behaviour (of course it was nothing to what would happen now). It was one of the papers who bought bikes for Marilyn and Arthur following a chance remark that they'd like to go cycling. There is apparently an extant photo of Marilyn cycling but it must have been set up specially - she never left the estate except in a car. My memories of those gentlement of the press has stayed with me during a professional life in media education.

I did see Arthur Miller bowling along the main road on his new bike in Englefield Green once when I was in the ironmonger's. But my closer encounter with him (needless to say I was totally ignorant of his work, thanks to the so-called English teachers in my highly-sought-after girls' grammar school) was when he knocked at the cottage door one afternoon when everyone else was out, and asked to use the phone. What was amazing about this was that it was the first occasion an adult had been polite and respectful to me. He humbly explained that he needed to call his wife at Pinewood and the House phone appeared to be out of order. He hoped it wouldn't be too much trouble to use ours and he was sorry for the inconvenience. I was flabbergasted: what had I done to deserve such decency? I guess this has stayed there in the back of my head all the time I've been developing arguments about the assumptions adults make about what children can understand and deserve.

My stepmother Ruth helped in the kitchen: she remembers Marilyn coming into the kitchen - right through the green baize door! incredible! - on the first evening and asking shyly for candles for the dining table. Ruth also did the laundry and ironing, so of course we peeked in their wardrobes (that's what the help always do). I remember being disappointed by Marilyn's failure to follow the advice I knew by heart: blondes should wear pale blue; redheads green, etc. Everything in there was either black or beige, apart from the amazing red sheath dress she wore at some public event, complete with little lead weights in the ruffles. I thought her colour choices were sad; much later, I realised it was Fashion. I do now wear black a lot, but never beige. Again, it was Arthur Miller's wardrobe that really influenced my later purchases: I finally managed to afford a black cashmere sweater just like his and wore it for years.

I did see Marilyn herself for about 30 seconds. Ruth said I could come to the House when Marilyn and Arthur were leaving, if I stood outside the door and just watched. I remember peeking round the door to see Marilyn in a black "tent" coat, high black heels and her hair pinned up neatly in a bun, kissing the staff goodbye (yes, kissing the staff! - as an extra skivvy, I don't think Ruth got in on that). Then she came out of the front door, saw me standing there in my school uniform, sweaty and muddy from the hockey field, and stopped, confused for a moment and embarrassedly half-smiling, before turning away to get in the car. I felt ashamed: I felt I was behaving just like the press pack.

techno-hell

2011-11-12T09:40:00.009Z

I always used to be contemptuous of hardware developers' endless quest for a black box that would do absolutely everything. Now I've acquired an iPhone (only to ensure that for PhD purposes I have a voice recorder and video camera always to hand, honestly) I am reluctantly coming round to the view that at least that makes three fewer machines to go wrong.

I thought that starting a PhD would involve long quiet hours in a library leafing through the tomes I'd always meant to read. My first proper talk with John, my main supervisor (we've known each other for years but now he has the unfortunate task of keeping me on the straight and narrow) revealed some of the things I was about to encounter such as EndNote and DropBox (was it The Guardian's makeover as the Guardian or was it EastEnders that started all this?) and propelled me towards getting the iPhone and a Mac laptop.

Still reeling from paying out my first year's fees and what seemed like incredible quantities of other stuff including a far higher incidence of ready meals given our once-again frantic lifestyle, I opted for a second-hand MacBook. Now it seems that every single attempt I make to get anywhere near my PhD work is frustrated by the learning curve I now face. It's not just steep, it's curling over my head like those nightmare enormous waves that loom up just when you thought you'd had a lucky escape from what you temporarily thought was the biggest wave you'd ever seen. Struggling through giant databases with names like ERIC and PsychInfo, each with subtly different interfaces, endlessly forgetting where I last saved what I laughably call "my research", constantly clicking CANCEL when I meant to click GO on the sadistically counter-intuitive university portal login, floundering in deep water with my surfboard out of reach, I stagger home only to discover that my MacBook doesn't recognise my iPhone, iTunes has decided that the only music I will ever need is Carmina Burana, and to top it all the damned DVD player won't work.

I realise that the reason for this last is that some long-vanished Virgin engineer (imagine describing that job to people at parties) has connected it up the wrong way and that we are now condemned to scrabbling through mountains of paper to find what our parents' generation always referred to (but why?) as "the book of words" for the DVD player, and to shuffling about on our knees in the squirming pile of dusty cables behind the ever-temperamental flat screen TV (yeah great, when it agrees to switch on, like about 50% of the time).

Sometimes I like to fantasise about rewriting my favourite SF novels (Ian M. Banks, if you want to know) with some creative touches of life on Earth now: drones fly smack into walls; somebody connects up the wrong power cables down in the bowels of the GSV, etc. Of course Banks' riposte would be that all these machines can mend themselves without disrupting the flow of the story. The only SF parody on the lines I'm thinking is Woody Allen's jibe at "goddam cheap Japanese flying packs" in Sleeper though I daresay there are lots more.

More often though I am liable to break down and cry. I sat stony-faced through War Horse but a software malfunction can have me weeping buckets. I think that today I'll give up on trying to get my invaluable, unrepeatable research videos into my laptop and leaf quietly through Vygotsky instead. He may have been persecuted by Stalin but at least he didn't have to defer to Steve Jobs.

Why a PhD? Why now?

2011-08-17T16:40:00.003+01:00

For years I have been bullshitting about what kids learn about moving image media before they start school. For example:

"Given that children start to engage with and enjoy moving-image media in their second year of life – often in contexts with little or no adult mediation – then it seems probable that from an early stage they manage to acquire some understanding of the distinctive codes and conventions employed in these media, and start to develop strategies for making sense of all kinds of text (both print and non-print). "

I've used versions of this paragraph in various presentations for at least 10 years as a way of arguing that literacy teaching in schools needs to change. It's not entirely pulled out of thin air: I've gained in confidence in making this claim the more I meet teachers who are flabbergasted by the level of understanding demonstrated by children when they talk about film (as opposed to when they talk about books - if they do).

But I've always felt that I ought to stop and take the time to research this properly. When I started work at the BFI in 1979, I was registered for a PhD at the Institute of Education, for which I was going to explore a similar topic. But it soon became obvious that working at the BFI was not going to be a full-time job: it was going to be a lot more than a full-time job. 27 years later - white-haired, overweight and exhausted - I finally escaped from the BFI only to land in the frying-pan of two years' unpaid work, chairing the Media Education Association.

Now at last I feel properly ready for new things. When I first started to ponder the idea of starting a PhD, I thought that surely this topic must already have been researched and written about. But the more I looked, the more confident I became that no, probably it hasn't, or at least not in the way I intend to approach it. Then in January this year while on holiday with the family I observed my twin 14-month-old grandchildren suddenly terrorised by episodes of In the Night Garden - episodes that they knew well and had seen many times before. I was fascinated. Was this an example of a half-developed sense of narrative - the ability to perceive disruption without the capacity to anticipate resolution? I wanted to know more.

Seven months later (during which time I've also, completely coincidentally, lost 12 kilos) here I am, about to embark on formal research, with the twins as the focus of an ethnographic study that I hope will help me develop these ideas more coherently. I've tidied my office, spruced up my website, found two supervisors, filmed 2 hours of twins' TV-watching and started a reading list. Several good friends have tried to put me off this project: "why don't you just write a book?" they ask. My argument is that "just writing" is precisely what I have been doing for years. I am sick of grinding out rhetoric: I want to assemble evidence. Watch this space.

A Philosophical Interlude

2011-06-24T14:57:00.007+01:00

Yesterday I attended a "round table" (aka 9 rapid-fire talks) on Philosophy for Children, run at LSE by the Forum for European Philosophy. I didn't learn a lot about what Philosophy for Children actually involves in the classroom; in fact I was struck by how closely the advocates for this movement reproduce the language that seems to be used by pretty much anybody advocating a new approach or topic in education: adopt X, they say, and children will acquire "improved reasoning skills, increased self-confidence and improved emotional intelligence" and will support primary teaching aimed at "empowerment, autonomy and dialogue."

Indeed, most of the learning outcomes given in The Philosophy Shop's White Paper almost exactly mirror the outcomes claimed by media educators in primary schools (see for example Bearne and Bazalgette (2010) Beyond Words, UKLA). This is not to sneer at the Philosophy for Children movement, which seems jolly good to me. In fact I was gratified by the extent to which the speakers last night almost all laid more emphasis on the need for different pedagogies, different attitudes to children and their capabilities, more and better teacher training and indeed a whole new approach to education, than they did on making the case for "subject philosophy" to be added to the ever-lengthening wish list of stuff to be crammed into the curriculum. "Gratified", because this reflects the same argument that I have been making since writing my entry for the Manifesto for Media Education which concluded thus:

Lack of attention to media education is a symptom of a much larger malaise in our education system: its failure to take account of children’s and young people’s lives as they are lived now, and may be in the future. Media education won’t save the world, as Julian Sefton-Green said (to the great irritation of many of our comrades) at the 2004 Media Education in Europe Conference. But a radically reformed education system just might.

I wanted to ask all the speakers last night whether they would agree that there might be more to be gained through a broader alliance for progressive reform in education, than through narrow sectoral advocacy, but by the last session it became clear to me that they were all effectively arguing this anyway, though I fear they didn't recognise this. The only ones with immediate advantages to gain from Philosophy for Children (P4C) having a larger public profile will be the providers Sapere and The Philosophy Shop. I'm sure that children can enjoy P4C (with the possible exception of the girl studiously adjusting her trainer laces in the film Peter Worley showed us) but on the whole, children in UK schools - that's all of them, not the independent schools from which most of the examples seemed to come - need a lot more besides.

Easily the most impressive speakers last night (to look at as well as to listen to) were the three philosophers, Katerina Deligiorgi, Angela Hobbs and Vivienne Orchard. They were incisive, articulate, informative and fascinating, and I was too daunted to think of a question; given time, I'd probably have thought of several dozen. In contrast, there was a question I was burning to ask in the last session, but thought of it too late. Phillip Blond welcomed the proposed simplification of the curriculum, so long as "we don't allow any dross to creep in"; John White deplored the fact that in a marketised education sector, schools are at the mercy of unscrupulous salespeople for their resources and training. If they're both right (and I wouldn't argue much with either of them) then I think Jonathan Douglas, who did at least attempt to include remarks on policy, which was what this session was meant to be about, while expressing a somewhat Panglossian optimism about Michael Gove's forthcoming reforms, needs to tell us: who'll identify the dross and how will we keep it out?

Despite a rather downbeat and hesitant style of delivery, only John White's presentation seemed to me in the end to be right on the button. He rightly criticised the earlier speakers' over-emphasis on pedagogy, lack of attention to learning progression and failure to identify clarity and distinctiveness of purpose. Not dissimilar to the kinds of critique I've been offering to media educators for I hate to think how long. The event as a whole left me feeling daunted at the idea of trying to build cross-disciplinary alliances in the name of radical educational reform. I'll just go and get on with my PhD, then.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

2011-06-22T19:15:00.009+01:00

If I haven't blogged much for the last two years, it'll be because my first preoccupation has been chairing the Media Education Association. Tomorrow I resign as Chair and start getting my life back - at least until it all gets swallowed up again by the PhD I'm planning to do (more about his later - I hope). Meanwhile I've been enjoying myself today sorting out the 103 pictures I took when TAS and I were in Belgium from Sunday to Tuesday. This was a long-planned trip on his part to see his grandfather's grave, but along the way it accumulated loads of research on WW1 and the Ypres Salient in particular.

In various visits to Belgium - mainly Brussels, but also more recently Antwerp - I've tried to understand what the differences are between the French and Flemish communities, and never got very far: people in European cities have more in common with other people in European cities than can ever reveal their roots. But once we were in West Flanders I was into the kind of country I recognise: cabbages, potatoes, leeks and strawberries coming along nicely in the fields and not yet completely ousted by eurosubsidy maize; big fat working horses (I recall Henry VIII and his "Flanders mare") and white cattle meditating in big meadows; long empty station platforms and quiet cobbled streets. It's deeply rural, relaxed and cosy, despite the thriving industrial estates that pop up here and there, and there's nothing to tell you what it was like 90 years ago. Only a queasy sense of dread generated by what I'm reading: Forgotten Voices by Max Arthur (Ebury Press 2002) makes it seem not quite like train journeys from London to Devon or Shropshire or Sussex. So that's why the city folk in Brussels smile a little when they talk about Westhoek, and why I think Hmm, I wouldn't mind coming back here to see more, learn about a place that English wool merchants once knew better than they knew London.

But at the same time I wanted to get the bus to Passendale, or go and stand on the Mesen Ridge: not so much to wallow in the glutinous swamp of remembrance that's churned out for the coach tours and the packed ranks of school parties at the Menen Gate, but trying to wrestle with the vertiginous recognition of non-remembrance and the gulf between Now and Then. The thing about coming to places like this is precisely that we can't remember: how could we? Even those who survived could mostly say nothing about it. I kept thinking of Walter Benjamin's amazing image of the Angel of History: "His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." ('Theses on the philosophy of history', Illuminations, Schoken Books 1969, pp257-8, with thanks to Brian Winston for the reference in his Media Technology and Society, Routledge 1998). So we communed with the dead in the rain at Dadizele (see the link above), noted their ages, and collected their epitaphs. And then we went home.

O'Reilly's partial win

2011-01-12T13:43:00.011Z

The judges' ruling in O'Reilly's case is a perfect example of the glacial pace of change in social attitudes. So they "do not accept that this particular decision [by the BBC to sack O'Reilly because of her age] involved combined age and sex discrimination" although they have agreed that it did involve age discrimination and victimisation. Is it a professional requirement for judges, as well as Justice, to be blind? This would explain their failure to note the disparities of age between male and female presenters on TV, admirably spelt out by Kira Cochrane in today's Guardian. I'm sorry to note though that every single one of the older female presenters illustrated on the second page of her article (mostly from the US) do not have grey hair. Are they all naturally dark-haired or blonde? And is O'Reilly really naturally dark-haired? I'll know things are really changing when I see a grey-haired female presenter on prime time TV.

But Cochrane's focus on the media ignores the discrimination that most of us older women face frequently. I last discussed this (in relation to the BBC, as it happens) on 31st December 2009 (see my blog for that date, "Looking your Age") and nothing much has changed since then, though it'll be interesting to see whether the BBC now finally bites the bullet and applies equal opportunities in its employment of male and female presenters.

But it's not just looks. Whether or not I actually am habitually aggressive and nasty to people (I don't think so: I'd prefer "assertive") I do know that the men (not that many, thank goodness) who have shown unprovoked aggressiveness and nastiness to me and others - and I'm talking about professional contexts here, not the street - have not been constantly nagged and ticked off by their bosses for inappropriate behaviour. You can be "assertive and outspoken" if you're, say, Pete Buckingham or Alastair Campbell, but women who would like to be genuinely assertive and outspoken risk being termed aggressive and shrewish.

The Morning After

2010-11-21T12:55:00.003Z

It's the day after the Media Literacy Conference ended and I thought I'd try not to think about it but that turned out to be impossible. Sitting up in bed at 9.00am and having the long-planned-for cup of tea and a nice long read (first time since January, maybe?), the text just flowed under my eyes while I thought "...shall I read the evaluation forms?...shall I have a look at the #2010MLC tweets?...shall I reply to emails?...no, that way madness lies. But I have, and it does.

At least my "To Do" page in my daybook has more crossings-out that it's ever had - even if there'll be a new page to write tomorrow with a ton of new things to do. I've already written down Certificates of Attendance, airport shuttles, water, evaluation form as a Word attachment - and that's just from the 12 evaluations so far received. Then reading through several hundred tweets, relieved to find that the majority are positive or at least engaged. Friends and colleagues were all hugely positive yesterday, and indeed the day before, but I'll admit that one thing about Twitter is you do get instant reactions from people you don't know, and that's really fascinating. Yes, the usual stuff about why aren't there any kids here, why aren't there more teachers here, why so much "academic theorising", but sadly no one asking why was the programme almost entirely organised by one unpaid person? No, I may be exhausted but I'm not bitter - just hopeful that now we've created a much bigger online community, people will be mucking in from now on with constructive ideas about how to make next year's better.

I'd already agreed with our admin team that we must offer a really tempting standard fee for UK teachers, but even so there are still huge barriers to getting teachers to attend. Those specialist Media Studies teachers who can get permission and funding to attend anything at all (a small minority!) have already spent that, either on Awarding Body INSETs or on the BFI Conference. Anyone else faces the problem of media education not being a statutory part of the curriculum and all the rest of the usual prejudices, and in any case who's going to pay for supply cover? What if we had a special "teachers' day" on the Saturday? Teachers just aren't getting the continuing professional development they need. And I think the conference (and the Media Education Association) HAVE to be for the widest possible range of media educators. Media teachers who've only worked with older students should read NYPotamitis' tweets about Angela Colvert's workshop on Alternate Reality Games for primary kids. As he points out, what is going on in some primary schools should be a model for those teaching much older students.

So those (a tiny minority, I'm pleased to see) who think that the conference is too large-scale and up market should think about how otherwise we can raise the profile of media education and media literacy - because raising its profile is going to be the important door-opener that will enable teachers to justify attending this and other CPD. We have to try and reach the opinion-formers and the policy-makers - so what a delight that three prominent people completely outside our field (and by the way Peter Bazalgette is only my distant cousin) were keen to come and speak at our final session!

Getting students at conferences is another minority but vocal plaint: I want to hear what age students this means, what they'd do when they got there, and why they wouldn't be bored. We tried to get a posse of young journalists but we couldn't afford the train fares, overnight costs (not just for them for their chaperones and group leaders too): I thought the BBC would love to sponsor that but they wouldn't. It would be so great if someone would offer to take on the challenge of working out a way to bring groups of all ages to next year's event, what their roles would be, and who'd pay for it. I have buttock-clenchingly embarrassing memories of occasions when groups of kids have been put on conference platforms as juries or as generational representatives: there are a lot of spectacularly bad ways of doing this and I don't think there are any cheap options, but it should be possible to find good ways of doing it and to make them appeal to sponsors.

We argued and worried before the event about whether we could really bring off the attempt to merge classroom practice and academic enquiry. I think we did pretty well. If I have a complaint about the research panels it's that there's too much descriptive regurgitation of empirical data and not anywhere near enough real theorising. Why is it that some teachers think theorising has to be boring and pointless? We all do it all the time. Any theories about why the Gunners went down to Spurs yesterday after being 2 up at half time? I look forward to the next issue of The Gooner to read the theories on this one. The challenge about theory is how to teach it in an exciting way. Final debate next time then: "iTheory: How to Teach Theory in the New Media Age"?

Enough already. TAS's plan is that we catch up with Let the Right One In on DVD this afternoon with tea and buns in front of a roaring fire and then go off for dinner with my brother Ed and his family tonight. Will that stop me lying awake tonight thinking "if only I'd...."? I doubt it.

Thinking of Leaving Us?

2010-10-27T18:56:00.004+01:00

Actors looking for handy sidelines in voice work should try the Virgin Media helpline. That's where you can hear the magic combination of "slightly sexy" and "reassuringly businesslike" - not too posh, no identifiable region - that is the voice any corporation must employ if they have frenzied customers reaching the final stages of exasperation and despair. Which Virgin Media certainly does. We've just spent two days without broadband: fine if you're on a beach somewhere and you can gloat about all the sad people sending you plaintive messages; not fine if you are juggling four jobs at once and trying to keep at least one step ahead of the deadline police.

Sadly, it was only on the morning of the third day that I began to understand Virgin's cunning ploy for diverting its frustrated clientele. When you ring the Virgin number, Ms Jolly Helpful's bright-eyed, bushy-tailed voice welcomes you to Virgin Media and says "we now have three options for you" as though that was just what you'd been hoping to hear. If you've got a fault with your broadband obviously you don't go for (1) paying your bill or (2) changing your service, changing your address or "thinking of leaving us". You go for (3) talking about your installation, or reporting a fault. Then you get two options: was that "installation" you wanted, or "a fault"? A fault, of course. Ms JH's voice gets a tad more husky but a tad more urgent, too. "Right, let's get you some help!" But not quite yet: there are four more options to choose from. TV? No. Phone? No. Dial-up? No. Broadband? At last! There is an ominous pause: the time it takes to connect you to Bangalore, where an extremely polite but minimally-trained person will tell you what you already guessed: that there is a problem with the system and the engineers are working on it as hard as they can right now. So basically the message is: don't call back: we're not going to tell you anything anyway.

Why did it not occur to me for two whole days that, while this was exactly the route that Virgin wanted me to follow, there was another route I could have taken, had I not been fooled by the plaintive tone that entered Ms Jolly's voice when she mentioned the unthinkable option: "if you're thinking of leaving us". Because, I suppose, I have slipped imperceptibly some time in the last decade from being a founder member of the Rock 'n' Roll Generation to becoming a late arrival in the Slow On the Uptake Generation (also known as The Elderly - for the first time in my life I have joined the same demographic as my parents).

Obviously, I now realise, if you ring up Virgin Media and tell them you are thinking of leaving them, you are put through in a trice to a sensible chap (you can tell this right away by his Geordie accent) who has been extremely well trained to (a) listen carefully to what the customer has to say, (b) agree with them completely and (c) sell them a product. Simon (he even had a name) was almost as dismayed by the size of our phone bill as we are, and in five minutes had persuaded us to move to a different, cheaper package that would save us loads of money and to which he could switch us over immediately. To my stumbling enquiry as to whether I could see something in writing first he explained that no, sadly, this was an offer that was only available through the Complaints Department - a department which, as it happens, cannot communicate on paper.

So that's where I'd got to! The Complaints Department! How odd that Ms Helpful never mentioned it. What's more, Simon could offer us yet another deal (merely requiring a 12-month contract) which would save us yet more loads of money on calls to mobiles and 0845 numbers. I said I'd think about it if he could just get our broadband working again, whereupon I was switched to another nice man called Mike who talked me through a few moves to "recalibrate our computer" and hey presto, here I am blogging about it all only 10 hours and 78 e-mails later.

By a strange coincidence, I then went to the gym where who should I see on Sky Sunrise but Neil Berkett (neil.berkett@virginmedia.co.uk), the current ruler of this empire, celebrating Virgin Media's 6% increase in profits and their roll-out of their new 100mb broadband service, currently being installed in selected parts of North London (that explains a lot. And this is of course what news mainly does these days, recycles corporate press releases). I'm not surprised Virgin are doing well: who cares about the actual service if you can be cheered up by Ms Jolly Helpful, and, if you are cunning enough to press the right button, to have the lovely but well-hidden Simon and Mike promise you loads of money?

I think I'll just hang in there a bit though before I become a complete Virgin groupie. What I'm waiting for is that Mr Berkett to realise that the real future for Virgin Media should be a mutual one. How much more willingly would I sign up to that 12-month contract if I knew that Simon and Mike were getting their own slice of that 6%?

Deryck Bazalgette

2010-10-17T12:34:00.009+01:00

I haven't posted any blogs for a long time because, apart from organising the Media Literacy Conference and the new Media Education Association website, and helping to look after twin grandchildren, my father was becoming increasingly frail over the summer, went into hospital in July, and died there on 28th August. Here's the obituary my brother Ed and I have written with some help from TAS; we hope a short version will appear some time in the Guardian's Other Lives, but this is the full version.

Deryck Bazalgette, who died in Launceston on 28th August aged 97, was a great grandson of the Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. He was also one of the 1930s generation who made a decisive break with the middle- and upper-class assumptions and attitudes of Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

His life story took some unexpected turns. After spending an impoverished childhood on the prairies of western Canada, he was pitched as a teenager into the traditional culture of an English public school where as a “colonial” he inevitably felt himself to be very much an outsider. Although he then embarked on a conventional career in the London Stock Exchange and even joined the Territorial Army, it was perhaps this outsider experience that eventually prompted a decision to refuse military conscription and even joining the Fire Service. This resolve was driven by his Christian beliefs but also by his anger at the treatment meted out to his father, who had served with the Canadian Army in the trenches but had been disabled by faulty inoculations and had had to wait many years in poverty for a pension.

Along with his first wife, the writer Margaret Bonham, Deryck became involved in the work of the Peace Pledge Union and bought himself out of the TA.

When war broke out he refused to fight and was eventually categorized as a grade 2 Conscientious Objector. He established a commune for other pacifists in Ashburton, Devon, with the help of the Society of Friends. Working in market gardens on a basic agricultural wage, he was just able to support his family, which now included two children, Cary and Charles.

Deryck’s war thus contrasted sharply with that of his younger brother Will. Despite the brothers’ close and sympathetic relationship, Will’s response to the Nazi threat was to join the RAF, rising to the rank of Squadron Leader before he was killed on August 4^th 1944 returning from a Pathfinder bombing raid on a V1 rocket site. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

After the war Deryck and Margaret divorced, but he was awarded custody of the children. By now he saw horticulture as the way of life he wanted to pursue.

While following a course at Seal Hayne Agricultural College near Newton Abbot, he developed a market garden at Ware Cross near Kingsteignton in partnership with Terence Heelas, selling flowers and other products in Newton Abbot market. In 1951 another change of direction took him to Surrey with his second wife Ruth Andrews, to manage Parkside, the Earl of Drogheda’s estate near Englefield Green. One of the more unexpected experiences here was dealing with the arrival of Marilyn Monroe (of whom Deryck had never heard until then) on her honeymoon with Arthur Miller. The estate was besieged by the press and Ruth was co-opted to help out with household duties: both of them were fascinated by their sudden introduction to theMonroe phenomenon and to the celebrity culture of the 1950s.

However, the day-to-day Parkside job was more “hands-on” gardening and poultry farming, and the family lived in a small tied cottage. After six years the family moved to Worplesdon near Guildford and Deryck took up a post at Jackman’s nursery in Woking where his expertise in plants and shrubs helped the firm become one of the most respected and successful in Southern England. The culmination of his years there was an authoritative and lovingly prepared plant catalogue. But lifestyles were changing and gardening was becoming both more democratic and more commercial: Jackman’s was sold to become one of the first of Britain’s new “garden centres”.

With another son and daughter to care for – his and Ruth’s children Sarah and Edward – Deryck finally went back to work in the City, this time for Cable and Wireless, before he and Ruth decided to move back to Devon for their retirement. More family duties ensued when in 1996 they took over the care of their 10-year-old grandson Max after Sarah’s tragic early death. But they also managed to create a beautiful and unusual garden on a particularly unpromising hillside, and became active and much-loved members of the village community in Lifton.

Deryck was a man who could never accept convenience or convention in exchange for what he thought to be right, however hard such a choice might be. One attempt at dissuading him from becoming a conscientious objector had been a suggestion that he should join the artillery, because then he would not be able to see who he was killing. Rejecting the moral emptiness of this argument was characteristic: he was always alert to speciousness and hypocrisy.

He is survived by his wife Ruth, his children Cary, Charles and Edward, grandchildren Bennett, Phoebe, Max, Joe and Louis, and great-grandchildren Morgan, Alfie and Connie.

Bureaucracy old and new

2010-05-14T19:20:00.005+01:00

I've spent much of today with colleagues discussing projects funded by the UK Film Council's awkwardly-titled offshoot, "Film: 21st Century Literacy" (let's give it a postcode-style acronym: F21CL). It's not my place to reveal what these projects are about, or to anticipate how F21CL will report on them. But it was a welcome reminder of the many kinds of quietly creative ingenuity and sheer dogged perseverance that go on driving film education at grass roots level. Everybody doing this kind of work knows perfectly well that education is a conservative field, that change is slow, hard to accomplish and difficult to sustain, but they keep at it.

So a much less welcome feature of the meeting was the reminder it also provided: that the funding and policy regimes under which such efforts are made do not have the freedom to adopt the time-frames and evaluative frameworks that such processes of change deserve. Political meddling in education and culture have almost normalised the idea of the "quick fix" and the "big idea". Achievement is measured numerically, not qualitatively, even when the numbers don't make sense. When I was at the BFI I never succeeded in getting my managers to understand that merely adding the numbers of children attending 90-minute cinema screenings together with the numbers of teachers enrolling on year-long MA courses was not providing data that could explain to taxpayers how and why their money was being spent. Instead (because I'm not averse to number-crunching: I just like the numbers to mean something) I wanted to introduce the idea of "learner hours". So 60 children attending 10 screenings each 90 minutes long would amount to 900 learner hours, and 20 teachers undertaking a 60-hour course would amount to 1200 hours. I hope I've got the sums right: anyway, the principle was to try and represent the "reach" of our activities more fairly. But this was always too difficult for our managers and funders to comprehend, so I went on being castigated for wasting public money on training 20 teachers when we could be showing a film to 60 kids. Such is the life of the cultural bureaucrat.

But I digress: I'm happy to say that the kinds of reporting that these projects will be asked to do is a lot more sensible. Nevertheless it is still driven by pressures from outside the world of education: pressures that want to use words like "delivery" and "impact" instead of "teaching" and "learning"; pressures that demand "headline results" before any proper reflection and analysis has been completed. After the end of the meeting one of our F21CL colleagues was describing his experience of trying to learn Arabic in 12 weeks. Like all of us when we talk about our own learning, he didn't mention "delivery" or "impact". He said how hard it was but also how fascinating, and how by the end he really couldn't speak or write very much Arabic: to do that you'd need a lot longer than 12 weeks. How can we get our new political leaders to stop and think about their own learning experiences, rather than about their schooling, before they start making demands for a new set of "results"?

Mas de Chile

2010-03-05T12:31:00.002Z

I've had more news from Roberto which contrasts with the apocalyptic scenario emerging from regions further south - a reminder of how huge Chile is and how its long thin configuration means that it crosses dramatically different geographical zones. Roberto's son Gonzalo managed to get out of Talca (which is pretty close to the epicentre) by getting a taxi to take him the 100km to Curico. He then had no problems getting transport towards Santiago, either with vehicles or the state of the roads, although it took longer than usual (5 hours for 400km).

In Talca as elsewhere there are stark contrasts in the damage done to buildings: some are intact while others nearby are flattened. On the roads, the widely publicised account of how the damaged bridges are restricting the rescue efforts has to be set against the fact that all the bigger bridges are 'double' bridges: that is to say, completes separate bridges for northbound and southbound traffic. So in many cases, it's possible for both traffic streams to share one bridge - slower, but not impossible.

Back in Valparaiso, Roberto says that the only delay getting back into the university buildings was due to the need to have surveyors check for structural damage. After that, they could return to their offices: books had fallen to the floor and computers had shifted around but there was no real damage. Fewer than 1% of his colleagues on the staff have had their homes damaged and none reported physical injuries. The university has sent a truckload of healthcare and construction professionals to the south, with a load of clothing and food, to help with the rescue of earthquake victims. In the Valparaiso region all the electricity and water systems have been restored, but in Talca and Concepcion, unsurprisingly, they are still disconnected.

The contrasts between Roberto's messages and those that emerged from Haiti ought to focus our minds on why Haitians suffered - and are still suffering - so appallingly. It would seem that the US's continuing "investment" in Haiti over the years had nothing to do with ensuring the well being of its population and everything to do with ruthless exploitation. Chile has had its share of US interference in the past, but has been able to maintain enough autonomy to ensure that it can survive and deal with this sort of catastrophe.

News from Chile

2010-03-01T16:27:00.004Z

I was once in a very small earthquake. Staying with friends in Alaska, I was in the bath at the time, and the earthquake was more or less over before I realised what was happening. The first thing I'd noticed was a huge banging noise, which turned out to be caused by some of the trees which grew very close to this new, wooden house (built on stilts driven into gravel, precisely to protect the building against earthquakes). As both house and trees vibrated in the quake, they hammered against one another in a much louder, faster and more relentless rhythm than any human could achieve. Then I felt the shaking right underneath me, saw ripples spreading in the bathwater, and remembered that Alaska, like the rest of Pacific Rim, is subject to frequent earthquakes. In reflecting on my own feelings about this fairly minor incident, what interested me was the realisation that any sense of danger (and you DO feel rather vulnerable in a bathroom, as Hitchcock knew) was as nothing compared to the shock and horror one feels when the ground itself suddenly acquires an apparent power of agency. That the very earth could without warning start smashing trees into the wall of the house in a massive, seemingly deliberate percussion, was about as scary as your favourite armchair suddenly turning round and telling you to fuck off, or a dish really jumping up and running off with a spoon. Later I was gratified to discover that Darwin's reaction to the Chilean earthquake of 1835 was rather similar:

"An earthquake like this at once destroys the oldest associations; the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, moves beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid; one second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never create." (quoted today by John van Wyhe at cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/01/vanwyhe.quake.chile.darwin.)

All this has been called to mind by my friend Roberto in Valparaiso, whose email sent on Saturday has only just reached me and which I have been translating from the Spanish as best I can (it's nearly 20 years since I was last in Chile and I've forgotten most of the little Spanish I knew).

He and his wife and daughter were woken up at 3.30 that morning by "an infernal noise": books were shuffling off the shelves, lamps and vases crashing to the floor, but it was "the feeling that the vibration under you feet would never end" that was really terrible. Their house however withstood the shock. They huddled together on the first floor landing before escaping to their patio where they have a "refuge" especially for such events, and where they could get some news on a battery radio. Roberto's mobile could get a signal long enough for him to contact his son Gonzalo in Talca (even closer to the epicentre than Concepcion): he was all right, but soon the mobile networks were saturated and further communication was impossible.

Roberto was able to check that the nearby building where his 86-year-old mother lives alone on the 9th floor was still there and the structure was safe; then all they could do was wait for the dawn. At around 4.00 in the afternoon the electricity and TV were restored, and they could start to get a real sense of what had happened. First thing - in typical Chilean fashion - was to go to the corner shop for bread. Already many people were panic-buying, driven by fear rather than any evidence that it might be necessary. Valparaiso is a long way from the epicentre, and the shocks there were, we are told in today's paper, merely "strong".

Some Chileans wearily anticipate that foreigners will imagine their situation to be the same as that in Haiti. Not only is Chile much better prepared for earthquakes and much better organised than Haiti, the problems are also different. As we have heard here on the news, Roberto mentions the the bridges: Chile is a long narrow country between the Andes and the sea, so is crossed by hundreds of rivers: even though only 1% of the bridges have been destroyed, he says, this has a disproportionate effect on communications and thus on rescue. He also claims that people in tsunami danger zones had moved out in time; however, it seems from the news here that many remoter places have indeed suffered badly from the tsunami that followed the earthquake.

After sending his email Roberto was about to go to the centre of Valparaiso to see for himself what had happened, and he promises more news later. I'll be ready with my dictionary.

Learning starts here!

2010-02-12T17:58:00.004Z

It is both thrilling and heart-rending to witness babies starting to encounter the world and trying to make sense of it. At nine weeks these twins can focus on near and not-so-near objects, follow movement, favour faces as the most interesting things to look at, and they can smile. When an object appears in front of them they clench their fists and flip their arms, unable yet to reach or grasp but rehearsing the muscles that will later seize on things in the world.

Here the twins have just seen their grandmother climb on a chair and point a camera at them, which is pretty interesting, but in a moment he will revert to gazing at a huge brightly painted parrot which beats its wings slowly above him, while she will turn to peer again into the mirror on the wall beside her where two more babies lie cycling their legs and waving their arms. She doesn't look at these movements though: she gazes at the face she can see, close to hers. "Knowing it's her face" is not a concept available to her; but it is a face and, like hers, it smiles. The smiles generate excited responses: faster breathing, even more frantic paddling of limbs, a succession of experimental mouth shapes.

But he lies back with his arms spread out, his face still and his mouth closed in a pensive line, staring at the bird that hovers above him. His expression is tranquil but his eyes are awestruck: it's tempting to imagine that he is composing a poem or trying to work out the bird's flight trajectory.

Thus identities develop. He becomes the big placid boy; she becomes the little excitable girl. It's impossible not to respond to these offers of distinctive traits and potential difference, and instinctively to reinforce them, to ascribe feelings and motives, to offer gender roles, and to imagine futures.

Later they have a restless night, driving their mother crazy with their random sleeping patterns and snuffly wakefulness. Do they dream about faces and birds?

Looking Your Age

2009-12-31T09:52:00.006Z

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

2009-12-11T19:36:00.005Z

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

2009-11-22T17:09:00.006Z

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

2009-10-31T16:25:00.015Z

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

2009-07-27T11:37:00.020+01:00

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

2009-06-16T09:11:00.002+01:00

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?

2009-06-10T17:29:00.007+01:00

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!

Ironic TV

2009-05-11T17:51:00.007+01:00

There is no shortage of patronising TV these days. I've wiped from my memory files most of the endless sequences of fussy editing, naff drama reconstructions, silly effects and hammed-up commentaries I've drowsed through before summoning up enough energy to reach for the remote control. What a pleasure then to turn to Oxford Film and TV's lovingly crafted hatchet job on English Heritage, a series that expects its audience to be at least as intelligent as the filmmakers themselves.

The company has a track record in exposing corporate complacency in the arts and the media, which makes it all the more remarkable that English Heritage were dumb enough to let them in the door. Anyone looking for a model of media illiteracy should check out EH's CEO, Simon Thurley, on their website: "Conventional wisdom says that having a TV crew following you around while you work isn’t a very good idea," he says. "But in the end I agreed to the project because I think English Heritage will benefit from revealing itself more."

At the beginning of Friday's programme (The Queen, Her Lover and His Castle) we hear Thurley's eager prattling about "...the ultimate point of anything to do with heritage is it will improve the quality of people's lives". But we hear this in voice-over as a taxi whisks Thurley away from a photo call: what we see is a measured, ironic pan revealing a Deloitte strapline, "Clear Business Direction", emblazoned on the taxi doors. Right away, you know you are going to see some posh nitwits eagerly snatching at the rope with which to hang themselves.

Those of us who have worked in the publicly funded arts sector watch with horrified recognition as Thurley's steely-eyed wife Dr Anna Keay (no conflict of interest there, then) asserts her determination to spend £1.5 million of public money on an Elizabethan garden squeezed in between the backside of Kenilworth Castle and a busy main road. "I suspect sums of money of the scale of what we'll be spending at Kenilworth are spent all over the public sector every day on things that will have far less impact on people's life and happiness than Kenilworth Garden" she snaps. You can almost hear director Patrick Forbes licking his lips here as he inserts a clip from the BBC's 1971 Elizabeth R and lets it run for three ponderously naff seconds before Samuel West's narration resumes with "The omens...are not good."

If I'd ever delivered a project a year late and 35% over budget I'd never have heard the last of it, however good my excuses (and there are plenty on EH's own website). I suppose it just goes to show what you can get away with if you own enough castles.

I suppose it's my fault then?

2009-04-14T18:23:00.004+01:00

It's a hard life being an EastEnders fan. There are too many occasions on which one has to endure watching Charlie Brooks flick her tongue to the corner of her mouth, roll her eyes and attempt to look evil, or listening to Adam Woodyatt squeak his way through yet another completely implausible emotional switchback.

John Altman is another tongue-flicker; I daresay not many people have spotted the similarities between nasty Nick Cotton and former Education Secretary of State Kenneth Baker, but they both use exactly the same little snake-like flick of the tongue in and out, and to pretty much the same effect: "Do not trust a word I say!" I am wearily awaiting the return of yet another dastardly Nick plot to destroy Dot's faith in the powers of redemption: how much more interesting it would have been - for Altman as well as for us, I'd have thought - if Nick really had come back as a reformed character and had to struggle to convince us all.

The surest indicator of an EastEnders scriptwriter scraping the bottom of the barrel is when they resort to moving a scene on by having a character retort "I suppose it's my fault then?" - always guaranteed to generate shrieks of horror and disbelief in our house. However, I am happy to report that I haven't heard it for a while. In fact, since we finally got Danielle's risibly contrived death out of the way, the last two episodes have been on top form. What do I mean by this? Well, there are several strong but psychologically plausible stories on the go, interwoven and thematically related, but otherwise not dependent on each other and, crucially some of the best performers getting their teeth into cliche-free scripts: Tanya and Max circling warily around each other again; the Fox family and Lucas perplexed by Patrick's intransigence; Stacey sulking on the sofa; Rick and Tiffany edging towards a false revelation. None of these problems is simple or has an obvious outcome; in each case the behaviour is subtle and complex with many different possible motivations: it keeps us fascinated even when hardly anything is happening.

Monday's episode, directed by Clive Arnold, was a little gem, despite featuring the tediously gullible Dot Cotton and Charlie Slater. Instead of the grindingly obvious set-piece weddings, dinners and funerals that EastEnders seems to pride itself on, we had almost everyone slopping about aimlessly on a damp Bank Holiday Monday, wondering what to do, and it was riveting. It reminded me of Arsenal's recent apparent return to form: you remember that they really do have a lot of brilliant players after all - and we weren't even seeing Nitin Ganatra or Kara Tointon, two other endlessly watchable talents.

Of course it won't last. My nightmare EastEnders episode would feature Janine, Ian, Pat, Peggy, Billy and Mo all shrieking "I suppose it's my fault then?" at each other, interspersed with shots of Ronnie, Roxy and Jack glaring inscrutably from behind curtains at first floor windows or from behind half-open doors. There'd also be candles guttering to extinction on a guestless dinner table; a lavish bouquet, a revealing postcard and a fried breakfast all crammed into various rubbish bins, and at least one scene would take place at that ridiculous allotment. If I could just get that Diederick Santer on my sofa, we'd get it sorted out in no time, I know we would.

Is Obama Media Literate?

2009-04-01T19:14:00.003+01:00

After a late night watching a fantastic production of the Wizard of Oz in Potter's Bar (I've been to Isafjordur, Talkeetna, Helsinki, Bergen and even Sheffield, but this felt further north than any of them) I was so late to the gym this morning I only just got there in time for the Sky News intro to the Brown-Obama press conference. The guys were sort of pottering about in a Downing St room, making like just an ordinary social call that just happened to be picked up by half a dozen news cameras, so it was an excellent opportunity to examine how they tackled the 'just act natural' challenge.

Brown sort of shuffled about and smiled (a less frightening sight than when I first saw him in the flesh, striding through the NFT shoulder to elbow with Wilf Stevenson in 1993, but still deeply unnerving) and was presumably saying things to Obama like "yes we did have to get new curtains and carpets in here; you wouldn't believe the state the last people left it in". What fascinated me though was how Obama seeemed to be silently upstaging him all the time just by body language. He constantly used an 'ushering' kind of gesture that suggested it was his house, not Brown's, and made Brown look as though he was following Obama around. The nicest touch though (used on the BBC's 10 o' clock news tonight) was as they walked past the cameras to leave the room. As they drew level with the cameras, Obama casually put his arm round Brown's shoulders, so that the last image we got was a rear view of the two of them with Obama's arm lying proprietorially across Brown's bowed, weary-looking back. It wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been done at that precise moment.

It was almost as much fun as watching my daughter play a Munchkin, a Poppy, a Winkie, a JitterBug and a resident of the Emerald City. But not quite.

Delivery

2009-03-23T17:31:00.002Z

Why has this word achieved such tenacious success in education? Otherwise intelligent and sensible teachers tell me with a straight face that they have developed a scheme of work on such-and-such and plan to 'deliver it' next term, or whenever. When challenged they usually say yes, it is a bit of a silly word, but it's become such standard usage now that they don't notice it. I used to forbid the word in my department at the BFI, except when applied to milk or stationery. I suppose it's a bit like 'workshop' - an almost equally ridiculous term when you think about what usually goes on in them. I use it often myself, despite Alexei Sayle's observation that 'anyone who uses the term "workshop" for anything other than light engineering is a prat'.

I suppose both words are part of the new no-nonsense vocabulary of Eduspeak: part of a culture in which everything is planned and foreseen, learning outcomes are reduced to simple propositions that you can look up online, and kids sit in rows facing the front, once again. 'Delivery' sounds so purposeful and unproblematic. But my husband TAS points out to me that, for something to be delivered, someone has to be at home to receive it. It is actually a transaction, not the simple one-way transmission that Eduspeak seems to assume.

Maybe it's not such an appropriate word after all. How about 'teaching'? No, of course not - it'll never catch on.

Did Anybody Learn Anything?

2009-03-20T17:52:00.004Z

There's a book to be written (or maybe it already has been) about the new tough language of education. Gone are the days when we could take pride in the fact that we didn't really know what we were doing: now we've got to 'deliver' the curriculum and measure the 'impacts'. Teachers don't teach poems any more, they 'use' them. I'm liaising with a teacher at the moment who's got to bring five kids to an event at the end of April: we must have exchanged at least four e-mails so far just about the risk analysis she's required to do. The kids have to travel by Tube, get out of the Tube station and cross one main road - at traffic lights - before walking another 100 yards to the venue. This will be on a Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm. I will keep my fingers tightly crossed and hope they don't encounter an escaped axe murderer or an unexpected tidal surge in the Thames. You never know.

Meanwhile, I was chuffed to receive an e-mail completely out of the blue from someone I taught in the early 70s:

"I have fond memories of the lessons you gave" he writes. "I was a scruffy little waif who attended your classes with excitement not knowing what you were going to surprise me with next.

"I remember you making a film with the class, I recall having to jump over the school gates into the playground four or more times due to your demanding directorship, the rest of the epic shooting is I am afraid vague."

No other 'impact' can compare with receiving a message like that after nearly 40 years. It's a good reminder that, whatever the targets and league tables say, we should never forget that we don't know, and most of the time will never find out, what difference we may be making to kids' lives, and we should be humble enough to admit it.

Of course, if I'd done a risk analysis before making the film, there wouldn't have been any jumping over the school gates, and if I'd put my lesson objectives on the board at the start of the lesson as everyone is supposed to do now, no one would have been excited about what I was going to surprise them with next.

I do hope that some of the poor sods whose talents and commitment are ground down by having to churn out the latest initiatives will get messages in 2046 from men and women whose names they've forgotten, saying "thank you for the everlasting impression you made upon me". It's a long wait, but you do find out in the end that it was all worth while.

Who cares about films for kids?

2009-02-26T18:35:00.004Z

I thought these two pictures might make an interesting pair. They were taken this evening in my local library (that's in well-to-do, culturally aware Islington). The picture above shows the shelves of 'children's films' - which are kept downstairs in the adult library (now why is that?) and the one on the right is one of the many displays in the children's library upstairs. There's not much effort to display the children's films in an interesting way, or to pick out ones that kids might not know but might be interested in, or to add in films not explicitly made for children but that children might enjoy. In the book section, lots of effort goes into displaying material that's culturally and stylistically diverse. The whole impression of these covers is calmer, I think, and maybe more enticing. The films can rely on merchandising to attract attention: they just have to be recognisable brands, not intriguing stories. The children's film section sticks out a mile in the adult library because of the garish colours of the DVDs. The children's library is more tranquil - especially because there are hardly any children in it! The four who were there were not messing up the nice book displays: they were all on the Playstations in the corner. But my question remains: why does so much care and attention go into trying to attract kids to books that they might not otherwise read, and none to attracting them to films they might not otherwise see?

Headbanging Research

2009-02-19T18:31:00.007Z

I'm supposed to be getting on with some proper work - a commissioned study of the research evidence about impacts of media education - but took time out today to go to an RSA lunchtime lecture by Richard Layard, co-author of the report A Good Childhood (see my previous two blogs, and yes, I know this makes me look obsessed, but it is leading somewhere, I think). There's a weird disparity in this report between its good sense about poverty and school league tables, and its seemingly wilful irresponsibility in selecting dubious evidence to support its virulent attacks on the media - mainly TV, which is a quaintly old-fashioned target these days but there you go, it's a quaintly old-fashioned report in some ways (not all of them bad ways, either).

I forked out my £9.99 contribution to the coffers of the C of E and bought the report (as instructed by the Children's Society's Supporter Action Officer, one Raymond Williams (no! not that one!) with whom I have been corresponding recently, and for whom I am apparently designated a Supporter, though on what grounds I know not). An inspection of the index quickly revealed TV as the most-mentioned medium in the report, with references to advertising, materialism and, ownership (that means kids with TVs in their bedrooms, not global institutions, do try to keep up), 'reality television', time spent watching, and violence. You get the picture. Despite Raymond's protests that the report "is in no way denouncing all media for children" it's hard not to get the impression that TV comes off pretty badly - and apart from three references to video games, there are no other references to ANY media for children: no books, no theatre, no music, no art, no films - it would seem that none of these have a part to play in "a good childhood".

But what really fascinated me was the extensive space given to Juliet Schor's "major study" of the effects of consumerism (although the notes do not say so, I assume this means Born to Buy, Scribner 2004) which apparently states that "a child who moves up one percentile point in the ladder of media use will move up 0.12 points in the ladder of mental ill health". Imagine the kind of research that must have been done to prove that! I must hurry up and read it before my position on the ladder of media use tips me over into paranoid schizophrenia - or maybe I'm already there? Hmm, scary stuff!

Lord Layard admitted under questioning that maybe this research was not entirely reliable (and he's an economist, so must know a thing or two himself about consumerism and mental health) but he was at least able to assure me that the case is now closed on the effects research about TV and violence. There is now absolutely no doubt at all, he says, that "exposure to violent images encourages aggressive behaviour". He admits that all the research they looked at on this came from the US, but airily dismissed my protest that this meant it came from a country with a very different TV culture, not to mention rather different laws on gun control and a far higher level of violence than the UK - saying that "all countries are the same really". He must have been to different bits of Asia and Latin America than me, then. But there's an even more peculiar comment in the notes to this allegation, which first cite Andrea Millwood Hargarve's and Sonia Livingstone's review of the evidence on Harm and Offence (Intellect Press 2006), the Lancet paper from 2005 and his own book on Happiness (Penguin 2005) and then add: "all methods have their problems but the cumulative evidence is clear".

Well that's a relief then! We needn't worry about research which is consistently at fault methodologically, and which despite enormous expenditure over many years has always failed to come up with convincing causal links between violent TV and violent behaviour (and indeed to explain why the rest of us TV watchers are not also out there killing people) because the sheer cumulative "lesson" of all that effort means the "violent TV makes you violent" thesis must have been right all along really. No wonder economists are not having a very good press these days if that's the kind of scientific enquiry they feel able to accept!

Now I'm not even a scientist or even a proper academic researcher, so call me naive if you must, but if I was faced with a load of research that kept turning up inconclusve evidence, I'd be tempted to wonder whether it might be asking the wrong sort of questions. I'd wonder whether "violence" mightn't be a rather fuzzy and subjective category to try and single out as a source of causal effects. Given that this is all about violence in the context of narratives, I'd be interested (if I really did want to study media effects) in looking at people's responses to the different functions of violence within narratives: for example, does the story present it as the problem, or as the solution to the problem? I started to try and suggest this to the noble Lord, but I could see his eyes glaze over and a polite but rigid smile start to be deployed, so I slipped quietly away. After all, I'm not an economist, nor a developmental psychologist like his co-author Judy Dunn, so what do I know?

Pondering on all this later, I thought I could see parallels with some of the research I'm reviewing at the moment. Looking for evidence about learning outcomes in relation to moving image media, I've found quite a lot of interesting and suggestive fragments buried in the vast tonnage of research that's going on in relation to ICT and "digital technologies". Many good folk are looking for evidence about how digital technologies are affecting children's learning. Some of it's perfectly sensible and interesting stuff, but every now and then you get references to "digital video" that wonderingly note the remarkable effectiveness of this particular technology in securing learner interest and motivation, and speculate wildly about why this might be. Here I tend to put my old git hat on and say "well, kids do like watching films, and making them too". But the digital technology researchers are paid to research digital technology, not the texts that digital technologies can carry or help you to create. So they have to find a technological answer, not a cultural or textual one. Like the tv violence effects researchers, they'll go on banging their heads against the wall, behind which lies real life, and its histories.

The really interesting questions though (and about time too, I hear you cry) are: whose interests are served by continuing to fund futile research? Why does Lord Layard so passionately want to believe that the TV violence effects debate is settled and done with? Why does so much more money go into research on children and technologies, and so little into children's cultural experiences?

More on Catholics and Media Literacy

2009-02-04T13:40:00.003Z

I didn't expect to be promoting the thoughts of Pope Benedict but a Jesuit friend (yes, that is possible!) has sent me the following, which seems reasonably helpful to me, at least by comparison with Pope B's thoughts on contraception and homosexuality:

"The relationship of children, media, and education can be considered from two perspectives: the formation of children by the media; and the formation of children to respond appropriately to the media.

A kind of reciprocity emerges which points to the responsibilities of the media as an industry and to the need for active and critical participation of readers, viewers and listeners.
Within this framework, training in the proper use of the media is essential for the cultural, moral and spiritual development of children.

Media education should be positive. Children exposed to what is aesthetically and morally excellent are helped to develop appreciation, prudence and the skills of discernment."

Pope Benedict XVI - World Communications Day, May 2007

Here we go again!

2009-02-03T19:05:00.009Z

When I first looked at the recommendations of the Good Childhood report from the Church of England Children's Society I found a lot to agree with. Abolish SATs and league tables, extend parental leave, raise teachers' salaries - what good people these must be!

Then I come across this claptrap in their report on Lifestyle (see http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/all_about_us/how_we_do_it/the_good_childhood_inquiry/report_summaries/14751.html):

"The more a child is exposed to TV and the internet the more materialistic they become, the worse they relate to their parents and the worse their mental health. The way firms are promoting sugary, salty high-fat foods to children is leading to rising levels of obesity. If current trends continue, by 2023 there will be a 54% rise in Type II diabetes and by 2051 life expectancy will fall five years. The most dangerous aspect of media content is the lurch to more and more violence, which we know can breed violent behaviours and increased mental illness. The biggest problem though is alcohol, with a quarter of 16-19 year olds now engaging in hazardous drinking."

Where to begin? Is there any point in stating yet again that none of these claims for media effects has ever been proven? No, because clearly for these folk they're just a matter of faith, and you can't argue with faith, can you? But why not be honest and up front about this faith, instead of pretending it's proper research evidence? I thought the Church wasn't too keen on concealing the truth?

It's interesting that the Catholic Church has been much more savvy about its approach to media and to education about the media (and by the way I am not a Catholic, though I am now glad that my grandson - seen in the pic above ruining his life by watching TV, according to the C of E faction - if he had to be baptised at all, has been baptised a Catholic). "Through proper education, these instruments of modern life [ie the media] can help men and women become more, not less, human" - said the Secretariat for Education in the Jesuit Curia in 1987. Sounds a bit more mature, doesn't it?

What does "media literacy" mean?

2009-02-01T11:56:00.003Z

Looking at the latest edition of Ofcom's Media Literacy Bulletin (available at)http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/medlitpub/bulletins/issue17.pdf you'd be forgiven for thinking that media literacy is mainly about protecting yourself from risk. Interesting and important though much of this news is, it is very much at odds with the Charter for Media Literacy (http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/) and with established practice in schools (in so far as there is any). I note that the new Media Education Research Journal (whose call for papers is at http://www.cemp.ac.uk/merj/) invites papers on the relationship between media education and media literacy.

It's always seemed perfectly logical to me that media education is a process and media literacy is an outcome, but what seems to be developing now is a dangerous and unnecessary split between the protectionist/technicist positions that identify with "media literacy", and the media educators. The situation is further complicated by the fact that most languages don't have a good translation for "literacy": they'll tend to use a word like "alfabetisacion" which connotes basic decoding skills of rather than the "three Cs" of cultural awareness, critical skills and creative abilities, as endorsed in the Charter. It's encouraging that both the French and the Arabic-speaking nations have given up on translating "media literacy" - for them it makes better sense to dicsuss media education, which is after all the practice we're all interested in.

The European Commission's Communication on Media Literacy in the Digital Environment (see
http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/media_literacy/docs/com/en.pdf) does at least include versions of the "three Cs", but then, the Brits have never been known for their European communal spirit. For example, for some bizarre reason the UK's "Media Literacy Task Force" has insisted on setting up its own website for the Charter for Meda Literacy, despite using a Charter that is identical wth the European one (see http://www.medialiteracy.org.uk/). So now there are two databases for supporters of the Charter: a European one with versions of the Charter in nine languages, and several hundred signatories (unfortunately they are not numbered) and a UK one with 145 signatories (plus some foreigners, who are not listed). How sad!

Vom Kino Lernen

2009-01-19T19:48:00.005Z

This was the title of the 14th International Bremen Film Conference, which I attended on Friday and Saturday. I went because I was invited to give a talk about studying film as part of literacy, and also to present a screening of 10 of the short films published by the BFI in their "shorts" series of DVDs for film study in primary and lower secondary schools (for details of these see http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/). I've hardly ever been to Germany: I was in Munich once for the Prix Jeunesse, and in the winter of 1971 (I think) I drove across Germany in a blizzard to deliver items to the Czech group that later became Charter 77. More of that some other time.

The event organisers were considerate enough to get English translations done so that I and the only other Anglophone speaker could follow the other presentations: something I can't imagine a lot of conference organisers going for! The sessions all ran pretty much to schedule, there was a bar close to the conference room, with pizzas and snacks available all the time, and a comfy green room for speakers with coffee, tea and soup. What's more, in every conversation I had with more than one German person, they took care to talk English even to each other, as well as to me. That's taking politeness a good deal further than most people do (including me, I'm afraid).

Even so, linguistic divides and shortage of time at events like these mean that it's never possible to have all the conversations one would like. I particularly wanted to continue discussion with Marc Reis from the University of Vienna about why he thinks the meanings of animation films are always fixed and limited (for which reason, he said, why did we want children to study work like El Caminante or The Monk and the Fish when they could study South Park or The Simpsons, given that they are "at least closer to real life"). It was also a real shame that I couldn't ask Alain Bergala from Femis and the Sorbonne to explain just what he meant by saying that in the opening shot of Alicia Duffy's The Most Beautiful Man in the World "the camera is paedophile". After all, as someone who can say that a film is good simply because he says it is, his opinions must be worth while.

Most of the discussions were pontification-free, however, and I did get a lot of good, searching, hard questions about the work I'd described, which is always the best part of going to new places and meeting thoughtful people. It was also a real treat to hear Nathalie Bourgeois from the Cinematheque Francaise talk about their film workshops and to see Jeunes Lumieres, her compilation of 60 one-minute films by children, which I'd heard about but never seen till now. Although I'd differ from her in wanting to show children complete short films rather than clips, and to use DVDs in the classroom for close analysis rather than rely on the memory of a cinema viewing, I thought her account of starting critical work wth editing exercises, her arguments for broadening children's access to historical and world cinema, and her insistence on listening to children's responses and centering pedagogy upon these, were all spot on. I hope we'll be able to continue our dialogue online.

Some photos of my trip to Bremen are available online at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/staplegette/Bremen09#.

Who cares about what children watch?

2009-01-11T18:30:00.005Z

Following my previous post, here are some further comments on One Minute Wonders by my nephew, who's 11 years old, and who watched the first 15 minutes of Episode 1.

"It was really boring, because it didn't have anything interesting or funny about it. I would watch it but only if there was nothing else on, when there were ad breaks in other things. I thought it was for 8 year olds. The screen layout was a bit lame because it wasn't a full screen. The robot doing random things down the bottom was weird. There was a dinosaur crushing buildings and I didn't get what that was meant to be. The clips were all right; I learnt that Japanese people sleep a lot, not much else. The TV programmes I do like are like Scrubs and The Simpsons, Top Gear, Family Guy and Plus One."

Looking at One Minute Wonders and thinking about it, and hearing from boys who'd watched it, has reminded me once again about the low cultural status of children's TV. There's no shortage of pontification about other aspects of children's lives - their diet, their schooling, their access to exercise and fresh air - but the main focus of public debate about children and TV is risk, rather than value. Despite the fact that (according to Ofcom) children say TV is their favourite form of entertainment, children's TV is rarely, if ever, subjected to serious review. Adults who don't live with children (that's most of us) have no idea what's available for them to watch, and I suspect that most couldn't care less. The last time I tried to set up a public debate about the quality of children's media (Watch This! - a BFI/Barbican event in 2005 - see http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/conferences/watchthis/) most of the discussion was hi-jacked by arguments about certification and whether or not UK under-12s should have been allowed to watch Billy Elliott (that's on film - of course anyone can watch it when it's on stage). Although an interesting issue, that's hardly the central question about what children ought to be able to see.

One-minute what?

2009-01-09T19:02:00.003Z

I recently met some of the people involved in producing a new children's series for CBBC, One Minute Wonders. They were nice people, the idea sounded intriguing, and as a member of Save Kids' TV I'm very much aware of how few commissions there now are for new children's TV in the UK. So earlier this week I settled down to watch the first episode with husband Terry (aged 69), son Ben (aged 34) and grandson Morgan (aged 7). I sadly have to report that it was hugely disappointing. Terry left the room after 15 minutes, Morgan had fallen asleep a few minutes later, but Ben and I sat on, transfixed, unable to believe that it could go on being this bad.

I even re-watched it just now on i-player to check whether I had the same reactions second time around. I did.

The programme is framed in a grungy animated "laboratory" setting and presented by a one-eyed alien called Blink. David Schneider as the voice of Blink is shrill to the point of desperation, betraying the unmistakeable tones of an adult who hopes that a torrent of hyperbole will be enough to mask a condescending attitude to children. Allegedly Blink offers a chance to go on "a whirlwind trip to see all the amazing things that happen every 60 seconds on the Earth": in fact, what you get is a rag bag of mediocre archive clips, hopefully pumped up by expressions like "incredible" and "mindboggling" or, on the slightest pretext, a "funny" accent (this episode had Mummerset, American, Japanese, Spanish - twice - and German).

But the feebleness of the presentation pales into insignificance beside the fundamental incoherence of the whole programme. Nothing is actually shown as taking place in one minute: instead you simply get a series of lame factoids like Japanese people fall asleep in public a lot, tortoises stretch their necks out when annoyed, the world record for eating sprouts is 43. Nothing is motivated, much is illogical, and nothing is funny: an item about how fast your sister [sic] can skip on earth transmogrifies for some reason into how high she could skip on the moon; we're told that The Pen [sic] was invented in 1938 by a man called Biro; robots supposedly "cloning" themselves is illustrated by film of robots assembling themselves (not the same thing!). Even more inconsequential is the humming bird that we never hear humming, and the sudden appearance of a question about who's the highest-paid actress in the world. Full-frontal shots of all kinds of people picking their noses and eating their findings contrast oddly with a coy avoidance of the word "fart" when the effects of sprout-eating are mentioned. Am I missing something here? Is it all really rather witty and ironic? Judge for yourself at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/cbbc/episode/b00gwqf7/One_Minute_Wonders_Episode_1/ and let me know.

Israeli Attack on Gaza

2009-01-03T22:41:00.003Z

I was on this march today with many thousands of other people disgusted and horrified at the endless violence being endured by the people of Gaza. The march was calm and good-natured and hugely diverse: there were mums and dads with babies in pushchairs, people praying wherever there was a bit of grass or open ground to put down prayer mats, different groups mingling and shuffling along together, as always happens on a big march. So it's interesting - although entirely predictable, of course - that the 9.50 pm news on BBC1 focused primarily on "violence" at the Israeli embassy later in the evening (were any babies killed? I don't think so) and not on this immense public condemnation of the current attacks and of other governments' support for them. I took this weird picture with my new mobile (first time I've had a mobile that includes a camera) and in the sunshine was unable to see the strange alignment I'd created.

Phew! That's done then

2009-01-01T15:17:00.000Z

It now looks as though in 2009, one way or another, the expansion of world cinema titles available for children in the UK, for which I've been campaigning for several years, may start to happen. I've got a stack of old files where the titles "great films for kids", "reel worlds" (a school in the Highlands got a magnum of champagne for thinking up that one), "film world" and "window on the world" have all had their little time in the sun and then got packed away, superseded by some other plan. The "Watch This!" project that I set up with the BFI and the Barbican was part of the same campaign, and last month I appeared at the NFT with Mark Cousins to help him pitch the argument for children being able to see stuff that's a bit more challenging than the latest Madagascar.

All these initiatives were aimed at the same goal: breaking down the UK's ingrained prejudices against the idea that children (that's people under 12) might be interested in films from other cultures and languages, and can if necessary read subtitles, just like Dutch or Danish children. I still believe that it's essential to find a way of importing films on a proper commercial basis, that from the outset they are available to families in local shops and rental outlets; and that the only way to do this is going to be some sort of subsidy to distributors.

However, there now seem to be other players in the field who may be able to make this happen (can't say who just yet, but things look promising). So it makes sense to pull the "Window on the World" page off my website (http://www.carybazalgette.net/) and to start up this blog. I've been meaning to do this for a while but every time I meddle with my website I have to re-learn Dreamweaver. Although this usually means re-discovering how easy it is, it's still something I keep putting off. But New Year's Day seemed like a good time to have a go. And phew! it worked.

One of the things I'll be doing is tracking progress on the "world cinema for kids" saga, but I'll also follow whatever other trails catch my interest.