I have started thinking about this topic as Jabiz is exploring the topic on his new ‘Intrepid Classroom’. See the blog here, and the Ning here. Check out the conversations that have been happening there, it will be worth your while. Music and politics is a topic I’ve always been engaged in, in fact, my music listening is political. I don’t see much of a distinction or difference.
So I thought I’d take you through a couple of musicopolitical connections that I have been pondering lately. First of all, the title of this post comes from the Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcrisy song of the same name. The Disposable Heroes are a previous incarnation of Michael Franti and some members of Spearhead. If you haven’t yet discovered their music, you need to do so here.
Today in class, we continued our work on political cartoons. The students are really into it, and I’ve spent more time on the topic than I originally intended. We started off by talking about stereotypes, and how these are used in caricature. Some of the stereotypes that they came up with included bogans, emos, yobboes, migrants and blondes. This is pretty easy for secondary students to do, their social lives are sometimes dictated by stereotypes. We then talked about the features of politicians that are exaggerated for caricature, including Kevin Rudd’s spectacles, Julia Gillard’s nose, John Howard’s eyebrows, and of course, Peter Garrett’s head.
Some of the cartoons that we were looking at today were satirising the Australian Labor MP Peter Garrett, previously the lead singer of the Australian band Midnight Oil. Many claim that by becoming involved in party politics he sold out on his old ideals (Many Oils lyrics were about indigenous rights, uranium mining, environmentalism, etc). Very interesting discussions here - is music politically involved? Is it party-political?
Some of the students needed Peter Garrett put in context - they knew him as a Labor MP, but hadn’t heard Midnight Oil’s music, and weren’t aware of his role immediately before entering politics as President of the Australian Conservation Foundation. So, recognising the teachable moment, I fired up my laptop and portable speakers, and we listened to ‘Beds Are Burning’ and ‘Power and the Passion’.
Still on the theme of music and politics, Number 2 on our ARIA charts last week was a remix of Paul Kelly & Kev Carmody’s song ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’, performed by the Get Up Mob, re-released to acknowledge the Australian government’s apology to the Stolen Generation of indigenous peoples. It gives me shivers.
I think that now, as I am about to move with this class from political cartoons and persuasive language into a unit on poetry, I can see a convergence emerging. Other political artists that I enjoy include Ani DiFranco, John Butler Trio, Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. ‘Do yourself a favour’ and check them out. One of my students also mentioned Green Day as political. Note that note all of those artists’ lyrics are ’student appropriate’.Happy listening!
Last week, my year 8 students spent some time learning about political cartoons, as part of our unit of work on persuasive language and techniques. This is a group of fantastic thinkers, many of them with a wicked sense of humour. They have really enjoyed learning how to read critically and form their own perspective and interpretation.
By far, however, the task they enjoyed most was the opportunity to create their own political cartoons. To start off with, we brainstormed some of the issues that we have been looking at recently, or issues that they were interested in. Some of these included:
China, Tibet and the Olympics
Childhood obesity and food advertising
Changes to AFL rules
Whaling
Rights for same-sex couples and their children
Political correctness in childrens’ television programs
I was really impressed with the range of topics that they generated, and as I walked around the room while they were working, I could see that the cartoons they were producing were far exceeding my expectations. Not only in the quality of their drawing, but also the evident understandings that they had about caricature, satire, parody, perspective, juxtaposition, and many of the other concepts that we had discussed.
One student drew a cartoon entitled ‘Childrens’ TV Overboard’, featuring a slowly sinking Tellytubbie, a great pun and showing excellent understanding of the topics that we had discussed in class (including refugee issues); another, entitled ‘Kevin Rudd’s Working Families’, was composed of two panels. The top one showed a row of very suburban houses, with the bottom panel showing a ‘zoomed in’ view inside the homes: a mother channel surfing, a teenager playing Grand Theft Auto on the computer, and dad lying in the hammock in the backyard with a can of beer. I love their thinking!
I’m now looking at suggesting to some students that they might like to ‘publish’ their cartoons, either by hand or by computer. The National Museum of Australia runs an annual competition for primary and secondary students, which I’ll encourage my students to submit an entry for. The NMA website also contains the recently published Reading Between the Lines unit of work, and an Australia Day Flash Interactive activity.
I was going to be sensible and avoid overcommitment, but I kept finding posts in my reader from some of my favouritebloggers involved in the 31 Day Comment Challenge, and I wanted to join the fun. I would like to get more comments on my posts, and I’m aware that I need to focus on two things in order for this to happen:
Make time to reflect and write more often on my own blog
Comment on others’ blogs and contribute more effectively to the community.
The Challenge comes with a daily task, posted on Michelle Martin’s blog The Bamboo Project. I’ll be doing the first three today as I was a little slow getting started:
Day 1: Do a Comment Self-Audit:
How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
Because I read blog posts in my Flock Reader, I’ll only comment if I click through to a blog. I don’t usually comment on reflective posts, unless I really have something to contribute. So I tend to comment in order to thank the writer for a resource that they have posted which I intend to use. That probably only happens 1-2 times a week, currently.
Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
I do now (see Day 3 challenge). I look forward to being able to follow the conversations I am involved in more effectively. Sometimes I would comment on a blog and completely forget that I had done so, making it impossible to complete the conversation.
Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?
I tend to comment on the same blogs, and these are generally people that I have built rapport with through other networks such as Diigo, Twitter or Facebook, or with whom I have a real life connection to. Going the extra step and commenting on a ’stranger’s’ blog is often a little daunting.
I have plenty of areas to improve upon, and will be keeping Gina Tripani’s advice in mind.
Day 3: Sign up for a comment tracking service:
I was going to give this one a miss, because at first I thought that getting CoComment to work on Flock was going to be a hassle, but Sue Waters provided some really clear instructions on her blog, and I’m all signed up there as nrwatkins.
Want to get involved?
The best place to start is the Comment Challenge Wiki. Join the fun! It may seem like a lot of effort to get started and get involved, but it’s worth it!
I’m a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, by Living Social, which is a Facebook (and stand alone) application that allows users to search for and display books they are reading in real life.
Moreover, it allows for categorisation of books into ‘Already Read’, ‘Reading Now’ and ‘Want to Read’. The marketing part of the application also allows users to select whether they ‘Own’ or ‘Want to Own’ each listed book. Users can rate books, write reviews, and view other users that also have that book listed.
It has also come in handy for ‘recommending’ to my husband which books I might like to receive for my birthday - he just logged into my Facebook and selected a couple from my ‘Want to Read’ list. How romantic.
The only issue I had with Visual Bookshelf was that it was not embeddable…until now. Check out my new page on this blog for My Bookshelf. The widget doesn’t embed in the sidebar very well, so I’ve just given it its own page. That keeps my home page uncluttered too.
I know many others are using Shelfari, which has similar features, but as I’ve gone to the effort of listing and reviewing over 400 books, I’m not quite ready to jump into Shelfari as well! Perhaps if they add an ‘import’ feature I’ll be more receptive.
The VCE English Ning is primarily focusing on the Identity and Belonging Context, but I might ask Pennie if it may be used for networking in relation to other Contexts, and/or Outcomes 1 & 3.
A Ning is a customisable social network, and allows users to interact on topics of their own creation.
A conceptual framework is required for students to place their initial explorations of study within a Context. Studying in this manner is new to students as well as us as teachers, and it helps to remember that in guiding students through their initial inquiries into the context.
Exploration of The Imaginative Landscape can begin quite simply:
Students may be asked to collect images and quotes that express key understandings of landscape; in completing this task, our students were asked to collect these independently and share them with the class. These were collated so that all students had a range of quotations/images to draw upon.
Students may define key terms ‘imaginative’ and ‘landscape’; and form understandings of what they mean together;
Students may be asked to create shorter pieces of writing or reflection upon internal/emotional landscapes (a good idea to see their writing early in the piece)
Students may be introduced to short stories or poems which convey a sense of the Imaginative Landscape. For this task we used ‘Australia’ and ‘Poland’ by Ania Walwicz; and ‘Municipal Gum’ and ‘We are Going’ by Oodgeroo Noonuccal. The poems use a range of techniques, including personification of the landscape, and the author imaginatively situating herself as part of the landscape.
Students may conduct independent research on a landscape artist. For this task, students prepared an oral presentation in pairs, responding to these key questions:
The artist’s most famous work/s
The ideas/ideology represented through their work
How their ideas are represented symbolically through their work
How this vision relates to the idea of The Imaginative Landscape.
Some of the artists that students researched included Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Boyd, The Papunya Tula Movement, and Salvador Dali.
These are just some basic ideas to get started with, and are based on written resources that I have drawn upon for my class, including the VATE Inside Contexts CDROM, The Insight English for Year 12 textbook, and others.
It’s important that students devise a means of collecting their reflections early on, whether it be in a journal, an updated mind map/electronic mind map, or simply a list of generated ideas and statements.
Next, Exploring the Imaginative Landscape through Fly Away Peter.
For the commencement of the new 2008 VCE study design in Victoria, my school chose to begin with Outcome 2: Creating and Presenting. For this Outcome, students are required to read and respond in writing to a given theme, or ‘Context’. It is the element of the new study design that has drawn the most discussion, as it is the most dissimilar aspect between old and new.
Given that I grew up in NSW and studied for the HSC in year 12 there, and that this is my second year teaching/1st year teaching year 12, I have the (dis?)advantage of not having a great working knowledge of the old study design to draw comparisons.
I really enjoyed the concept of studying texts ‘in context’, and using this as the basis for student writing. It seemed to be a lovely way of setting up a thematic inquiry, supplementing this with ideas drawn from the text, and then capitalising on this in student-directed responses.
Given that our school started the year with Outcome 2, there may be other schools that are just commencing or are soon to commence their work on this Outcome with students. I’ll do my best to collate some thoughts, interpretations and resources on The Imaginative Landscape here over the next few days, based on our inquiries using Fly Away Peter, by David Malouf.
I’d love to hear from other Victorian teachers working with the new Study Design, regardless of the particular context that your school is studying.
It’s been almost a year since I undertook any significant blogging activity. That was at my old Blogger site, which I’ve now disabled. I have imported a couple of old posts from there as a bit of background, but not all.
I want to make a fresh start here at Edublogs, and this platform is a clear choice as I have decided that honing my focus is an important part of being a valuable contributor to the blogging community. I’ve been improving my networks with Twitter and Diigo (nrwatkins), and reading a vast array of others’ blogs through my Flock browser, and this has reinforced the impetus to put my voice out there once again.
This time around I hope to focus specifically on classroom pedagogy, personal professional development and networking, English teaching and leadership, reflecting on literature and integration of ICT in the curriculum. Still seems like a lot!
Thanks for listening, and there will be more to come.
Miss, are you going to play Rage Against the Machine again?*
*Context: I was setting up speakers with my laptop to play some podcasts of famousspeeches to my Year 11 class in relation to our study of Of Mice and Men. Earlier in the week I had used a DVD videorecording RATM version of The Ghost of Tom Joad to lead us into a discussion about poverty in America and the larger narrative of foregone conclusions.
It seems that particular student must have enjoyed my musical choice. It’s a pity that song is probably the only Rage Against the Machine song suitable for a school context. But as my co-ordinator said when I asked for approval to use it:
No, this is not a post about my latest approch to classroom management, but rather an old idea that was reignited by Dave’s comment, regarding using a flyswat as a classroom ‘prop’ and talking stick during Socratic Cirle discussions (thanks for the info, by the way, Dave)
It got me thinking about flyswats coming up in a discussion I had a while ago, and my consequent *crazy idea* that flyswats could be used as a ‘classroom prop’ in many contexts.
Now that I’ve probably lost all the non-education readers, I’ll elaborate.
The idea was to set up any right answer/wrong answer scenario by doing up slides in PowerPoint, and displaying these with a normal projector. Then students would be divided into groups/teams, and two team members would stand at the front of the room. I then ask/display a question before clicking through the PowerPoint display to project 4 possible answers to that question. Students each hold a flyswat and compete to ’swat’ the correct answer first when it is displayed on the board/wall.
Confused? Well it is difficult to explain. But, for example, you could do it with spelling - just do slides with 4 alternate spellings of the word, and have two students up the front who ‘compete’ to swat the correct (projected) answer first. They could be in teams with audience participation/coaching.
This could be modified for different content simply by changing what is on the slides:
Key dates/years in historical events (When did WW1 start? a) 1913; b) 1914; c) 1653; d) 1918)
Mathematical equations (1+1= a) 2; b)1; c) 42; d)12)
Chemical symbols (I do not have the ability to provide any examples, but you get the gist)
Novel character’s names…
What do I think is good about this activity?
Competitiveness - always gets kids engaged
A ‘test’ that they work towards in their initial inquiry - focusues learning (and allows for me to record formative assessment when they complete the ’swatting’ exercise)
A physical prop - kids love this stuff!
Teamwork
Confidence-building
So whaddya reckon - am I off my rocker? Sure, it could get messy (how to explain to my welfare co-ordinator why two students accidentally ’swatted’ each other…), but I think it could work with the right class. And I would have fun, which is the main thing!
education as a cradling of the soul as much as a feeding of the mind (Aitken in Kane, P. The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 2004).
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