Margaret Meek, How Texts Teach What Readers Learn - a slim pamphlet (just 32 pages) but full of insight into the assumptions about reading which we take for granted (such as, that a book may be written for certain people but read by others, that the "voice" may or may not be that of the author let alone the person reading it aloud, that the book may refer to things which bear a closer or more distant relationship to the reader's lived experience) but which children learning to read have to figure out, because these things are usually not taught explicitly. (For an example of the discussion the pamphlet inspires see here.) Overall, it's a plea that school reading should not be limited to functional reading, but what it prompted in me was the realisation that reading of academic or historical texts is "difficult" in a similar way, and that this is something which students have to learn. At my university, the team devoted to English for academic purposes are working on interesting ways to teach academic reading as an explicit skill, in the recognition that this is something which many people, perhaps most, do not do naturally or spontaneously. I'm watching with interest....
The Educators - excellent series on BBC Radio 4, each episode being an interview with someone whose ideas are currently shaking up educational thinking: provocative and inspirational. So far I've heard the interviews with Ken Robinson (on making creativity as important as literacy in school education), John Harrie (whose verdict after a massive review of educational research literature is that what makes a difference in teaching isn't any particular method or approach but the extent of the teacher's experience), Daisy Christodoulou (who argues discovery learning doesn't help learners who lack the basic knowledge or social capital to make use of it), Tony Little (on priorities in school education) and Paul Howard-Jones (on how games in the classroom seem to be more effective, or more motivational, when there's an element of chance in them - flying in the face of rationalist educational theory). Still to come on my playlist are the interviews with Sugata Mitra, Jo Boaler and Salman Khan (of the Khan Academy).
The Sixteen, 'Voice of the Turtledove' tour - another great concert by the vocal wonder-group, returning to their musical heartland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Bought the album straight away.
Wedgwood Museum - now happily saved for the nation, though when we planned our visit we thought it might be a literal case of "last chance to see". So much gorgeousness, with room after room of the finest craft: stunning from both the technical and design point of view; too much to take in all at once, so we're going to come back after next April, when their new galleries and facilities are open.
The West Wing - watching again from the start on box set. The political setting has dated, of course, but it was only ever partly about that. I now see it as being mainly about the struggle to do the right thing in large, complex public organisations, and abo;ut how and why things do and don't happen in them. My wife and I both felt like seeing it again anyway, but I'm watching it now partly in preparation for a management development programme. It feels more relevant than most textbooks.
What We Did on Ou Holiday - beautiful, funny, startling and moving new film, with David Tennant and Rosamund Pike as the divorcing parents of three precociously-tongued children (after the manner of Outnumbered, being produced by the same team), and a splendid performance by Billy Connolly as the children's grandfather. Cunningly constructed so that you start off sympathising with the parents in dealing with the children's weirdness, but then - in the critical middle section where they go to the beach with their grandfather, who is old and dying and doesn't care about pretending any more - you come to assume the children's point of view, and you realise that it's the growns-ups who are behaving strangely.
St Albans Cathedral - the longest nave in Europe, apparently, but more impressive to me were the organ-tuning going on during our visit (long notes, sustained until adjustment is complete, proceeding slowly upwards across a period of hours) and the tomb of St Alban. He was the first English martyr, killed for refusing to renounce the Christianity to which he had just converted - and we couldn't help but think of the hundreds being similarly martyred in our own time. An Arab family (parents and three children) came to kneel at the tomb while we were there; relatives or at least compatriots of such? Medieval times have never seemed so close.
Verulamium Museum - very child-friendly, and definitely somewhere to take our granddaughter when she does the Romans at school. Museums in general, I've been glad to discover, are much better than in my own childhood on making visible the inference process by which you get from the grotty old fragments in front of you to the reconstructed splendour of the past life, which is actually what is interesting.
Private Lives of Print: The Use and Abuse of Books 1450-1550 - exhibition at Cambridge University Library. Definitely worth the visit; it's open to the public, free admission, Monday to Saturday till 11 April 2015. There were two big insights for me. First, while I knew that manuscript production continued for a long time (centuries, they said) after the invention of printing (there was a huge industry there which wasn't about to go away) I didn't realise what an influence it had on early book production. Customers wanted their printed books to look just as splendid as their manuscripts, which meant parchment pages and manual illuminations, drawn and coloured in spaces deliberately left blank during printing. (The printer just had to hope the illuminator knew what letter they were supposed to be illuminating; the exhibition includes one example where they got it wrong.) The second insight was that production design norms and conventions had to be established for printed pages, just as in our own time we've had to establish norms and conventions for web page production and design; in the case of printing, these were copied partly from manuscripts and partly from earlier printed books, which in many cases were the source from which the text was copied, the page breaks of the source printing being marked subtly in the text of the copied version. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a typo in a Guttenberg Bible.
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