PART I : IMAGE AND EDUCATION
CHAPTER ONE --- IMAGE AND EDUCATION : AN INTRODUCTION
Images are part of our everyday lives, and our everyday lives are lives of images. Yet, these images are neither natural nor neutral. Like knowledge and culture, images subsist in a circular relationship with power and capital and power is in part the effect of images. Images (re)produce power and power (re)produces images.
Questions posed by the authors in Image and Education :
o Whose images dominate and with what consequences?
o Who benefits as a result of these images?
o What are the connections between image and power?
o Of what importance are controlling (control over and control by ) images?
SETTING
--- Cinematic depictions of education, schooling and teaching :
Popular cultural / media produced images of various aspects of schooling have become increasingly commonplace and important relative to understanding contemporary education.
--- Media depictions of education, schooling and teaching :
News media portray “school failure” and / or “ineffectiveness” based upon the representation of standardized test scores and give images of school violence.
Both of them are the creation, propagation, reproduction, and consequences of “images”. They contribute to and reflect the influence of the popular construction of powerful pedagogical conceptions, ideologies, worldviews, and social /cultural / political / economic perspectives.
Memory, and everyday lived experiences give power to images and images, their causes and their consequences could range from negative or evil to positive and good. They could become troubling if and when they :
1. hyper-privilege the interests and statuses of particular individuals, groups and / or ideologies.
2. promote and / or (re)produce injustices, inequalities, or modes of oppression.
3. result in the perpetuation of anti-democratic modes of understanding, practice and / or policymaking.
>>> We all create unique pedagogical images as we seek to make sense of our daily lives.
>>> These images are at the same time both contextually positive and negative.
>>> These images contribute to how we ascribe meaning to teaching and schooling and they are exemplified in the works of individuals and institutions responsible for and identified with their production and their socio-political and socio-economic effects.
>>> These images influence how we comprehend schooling and affect :
a. how teachers teach and actualize curriculum.
b. how parents and community members view and conceive of education.
c. how students make sense of their learning experiences.
d. how policymakers and “educational leaders” both manufacture and evaluate policy.
PURPOSE
How might we understand the creation, maintenance, reproduction, and consequences of cultural / media produced and propagated pedagogical images?
The purpose of the two authors is to explore ways in which educators can work to understand and to help others understand the creation, meaning, and consequences of popular pedagogical images, and to identify and interrogate practical strategies and tactics with which to resist their potentially dominant / dominating influences particularly with respect to democracy, the collective good, authenticity, and anti-oppressive education.
DEFINING IMAGE
IMAGE IS A PICTURE, REPRESENTATION, OR COPY OF A THING, EVENT, OR SITUATION THAT EXISTS MATERIALLY AND / OR SPIRITUALLY IN SOME SITUATED REALITY.
Characteristics of image :
1. Intend.
The exact replica, capturing perfectly the essence. A literal duplicate or a reproduction entirely indistinguishable from the original.
The distorted image purposefully makes reality appear either better or worse than it is.
2. Accuracy.
It can be selective or “merely” representative. The ultimate meanings of images depend on the unique experiences, knowledges, cultures, ideologies, environments, and so on of the individual image-producer(s) and the members of their variously positioned audience(s).
3. Understanding.
The variety of understandings of the image-producer and those who experience the image is significant.
THEMES
The relationships between images and education have grown more complex and challenging. In our society surveillance and spectacle coexist if not converge. Within this coexistence / convergence images appear and establish their effects.
The two authors focus on :
§ Recent technological developments.
§ Standardization.
§ Globalization.
Images is an effect of power, and vice versa, such that image-power or power-image creates, reflects, and reinforces (and is created, reflected and reinforced by) certain disciplinary tendencies and repercussions, particularly in terms of democracy, oppression, authenticity, and the collective good.
CHAPTER TWO --- THE VISUAL : POPULAR CULTURE, THE MEDIA,
AND FILM
In a visual, or gaze-oriented society, the importance of images increases and intensifies. That can be interpreted as a positive or a negative development. The “Big Brother” is a reality, introduced as sci-fi and novels in the past, but it is our reality today. The viewer and the viewed, the viewer well protected by laws, the viewed well chained and exposed by the same laws.
Questions related to image itself and education posed by the authors in Image and Education :
o Do pedagogical images influence and / or reflect the workings of schools and classrooms?
o How and to what extent?
o In what ways do films, television programs, political cartoons, and so forth impact educational research, practice and policy?
o Are popular images normative, reproductive, and to what ends?
VISUAL CULTURE
Human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before from the satellite picture to medical images of the interior of the human body, to the interactive visual media and so on. We are looking at ourselves in a mirror, we are drowning in images.
Over the past few years visual culture has attained the status of a legitimate area of academic pursuit.
This section of Image and Education aims to :
Ø define visual culture :
--- It is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology (= any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision).
--- It deals with the ideas of surveillance and spectacle (the idea that we are always watching and being watched as a means of disciplinarity.
--- It recognizes that although seeing is of critical importance, is not always easy to comprehend who is watching, who is being watched, what is seen and who is seeing it.
--- It contents that the visual aspects of society, including schooling, matter and make a significant and possibly fundamental difference.
--- It insists that technologies that encourage the visual must be understood if if we are to make sense of all of contemporary, postmodern society, including schools.
--- It focuses on divergence.
--- It takes seriously the possibility that pedagogical images mean different things to different people. These differences in meaning are implicated in relations of power and have practical consequences for the practice of everyday and authentically experienced classroom and social life.
Ø explore its potential relevance via contemporary schooling and the interpretation of
pedagogical images :
--- In the (post)modern era schools and classrooms (teaching, learning, assessment, policy and so on) are visual. The relevant “actors” (teachers, students, administrators, parents) are meant to be seen.
--- Schooling as an element of society, as a component of everyday life, is visual both internally and externally.
--- The visual culture exists interactively with everyday life, and that involves both the visual and the cultural. Schooling / visual culture is multiply-disciplined, difficult, shifting, multifaceted, and so on. It produces and is produced by both surveillance and spectacle and the various disciplinary consequences this essential existence implies.
POPULAR CULTURE / CULTURAL STUDIES
There is one certainty upon which most theorists and researchers in cultural studies can agree : There is no means of defining exactly what is cultural studies !
--- Cultural studies can be defined according to six theoretical orientations as set by Casella.
· its interdisciplinary nature.
· its challenges to hierarchies in culture.
· its criticisms of ethnographic fixations on sites.
· its manners of linking cultural, historical and economic analyses.
· its emphasis on concepts.
· its distaste for behavioral models of the world.
--- Schudson asserts that social studies tend to embrace an anthropological understanding of culture as a whole way of life rather than as a set of privileged aesthetic objects. Social studies seems to promise a sociologically enriched analysis, locating cultural objects in relation to the social context in which people produce and use them.
--- Giroux believes that cultural studies can be defined through its analysis of the interrelationships between culture and power.
Popular culture is even more difficult and tricky to define :
--- culture that is widely favored or well liked by many people.
--- the culture that it is left over after we have decided what is high culture.
--- “mass culture”.
--- authentic and originates from “the people”.
--- draws on the political analysis of the Italian Marxist Gramsci on his development of the concept of hegemony. Popular culture is a site of struggle between the forces of “resistance” of subordinate groups in society, and the forces of “incorporation” of dominant groups in society.
--- postmodern culture is a culture which no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture.
Hytten distinguishes and develops four recent and evolving themes that suggest key implications for contemporary pedagogical work :
1. the popular as pedagogical
2. critical literacy
3. the role of educators and intellectuals
4. rethinking diversity as pedagog[ies] of difference.
Cultural studies / popular culture offers one way of interrogating pedagogical images in terms of production-reproduction and in terms of engaging the shifting and difficult relationships between contemporary schools and society.
MEDIA STUDIES
Media studies involves the interdisciplinary study of the media (film, TV, the World Wide Web, cartoons, and so on), from a complex and a critical set of orientations grounded in such academic areas as linguistics, sociology, cultural studies, the sciences, film studies, communications, history, philosophy, economics, and political science, etc.
The media, (the mediation of education and schooling), influence and create the reality of education and schooling, and determine the range of personal pedagogical subjectivities and understandings that are possible, legitimate, nameable, desirable, privileged, and speakable. The media in terms of propagating various “negative” images, reflect rather than create public understandings.
With respect to schooling and education, the media play a mediating role that the press and popular outlets serve to connect our understandings of classroom practice with classroom practice itself. They form an intermediate bridge between schools and society and between the micro worlds of teaching and learning and the micro worlds of context-culture, economics, politics, ideology, and so on.
FILM STUDIES
In terms of education and schooling, the importance of any individual film regarding pedagogy and or pedagogical image rests on
- its merits
- its modes of politics, representation and culture.
CONCLUSIONS
Film studies asks that we approach critically the socio-ideological implications of any specific filmic effort, that we interrogate its politics and its social, economic, and cultural underpinnings and implicit or explicit pronouncements.
To what extent pedagogical images reflect and /or influence the theory and practice of schooling?
To what degree pedagogical images mediate the relationships between schooling and the larger society?
PART II : CONTEXTS AND FOUNDATIONS
CHAPTER THREE --- SURVEILLANCE AND SPECTACLE
The pedagogical image operates within a setting of surveillance and spectacle. This setting enforces and reinforces, produces and reproduces a certain disciplinarity that challenges the democratic, collective, authentic, and anti-oppressive potentialities of education. In effect, it privileges the interests of the dominant /dominating wealthy and powerful (the privileged overwhelmingly white, male, wealthy, Christian, heterosexual, English-speaking, and so forth) over others (the majority).
For Foucault Antiquity has been a civilization of spectacle. With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity of festivals, sensual proximity. Surveillance, or supervision (along with examination and normalization-correction) was one aspect upon which Panopticism (the dominant and generally diffused disciplinary organization of modern societies) rested. The constant supervision of individuals by someone who exercises a power over them create the possibility of constituting a new type of knowledge concerning those supervised. In terms of schooling, there is a link between the control of knowledge and the implementation of gaze-based power.
For Debord the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.
Although Foucault and Debord defined spectacle in contrasting ways, we can say that their views are not incompatible but complementary.
Both
ü saw spectacle as a unique mode of social control favoring some groups and individuals over others.
ü attached spectacle to historical, political and economic circumstances.
| Foucault | Debord |
| Ø Consigned spectacle wholly to civilizations of the past. | Ø Saw spectacle as an essential property of all capitalistic, modern societies. |
| Ø Distinguished spectacle as actively seeing. | Ø Distinguished spectacle as passively seeing. |
| Ø Conceived spectacle as ancient life, as unifying, as gaze. | Ø Conceived spectacle as death, as isolating, as mediating image(s). |
| Ø Spectacle is truth. | Ø Spectacle is deception, or even the deception of deception. |
For Baudrillard today’s society (contrasted with panoptic surveillance), is one not of discipline but of deterrence, in which the gaze-founded relationship of observer is blurred, dynamic, and absolutely and purely circular if not extinguished.
In (post)modern society there is not only no longer any difference between the real and the copy, but there is as well no difference between the warden and the inmate or the observer and the observed.
The society in which contemporary schooling operates is characterized by both surveillance and spectacle. Curriculum standards and high-stakes testing work to monitor teachers, students and school. in terms of performance and achievement and enforce disciplinarity. In terms of disciplinarity, regarding both schooling and society, what exists is a regulatory and monitorial system of surveillance and spectacle that induces certain conformative and power-laden modes of both thinking and activity.
The potential pedagogical consequence is the risk of (re)inforcing a pedagogy that is anti-democratic, oppressive, anti-the collective good, and inauthentic.
v Surveillance-spectacle-based disciplinarity is a threat to democracy, democratic education, and democratic schooling. Surveillance-specacle, the disciplinary regime of the image, challenges democratic schooling and society as it is an undemocratic structure itself.
v Surveillance-spectacle-based disciplinarity is oppressive, because the interests of the most powerful minority are privileged at the expense of the least powerful majority. Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed analyzes “baking education”, and Iris Marion Young in The five Faces of Oppression identifies exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence as the five types of oppression.
v Surveillance-spectacle-based disciplinarity is anti-the collective good, because those who manage its workings benefit individually from its consequences. [Here we have to define :
o --- individual good as the state in which what is “good” is that which is perceived by a given person as what is in his/her best interests regardless of any consideration of anyone else’s best interests.
o --- common good as to what is perceived by a majority of individuals, or what is perceived by a powerful minority to be in their best interests.
o --- collective good as authentically perceived by everyone to be in the best interests of everyone].
v Surveillance-spectacle-based disciplinarity is inauthentic, because it is opposed to the goals of authentic education. Image and authenticity are incompatible. Authenticity implies a focus on the daily lives, needs, and interests of classrooms and school participants (teachers and students).
There is a big contrast between traditional education and Dewey’s genuine (or authentic) education which comes through experience that is an interaction between objective and internal conditions, or what he called a “situation”.
The Whole Schooling Consortium promotes the idea that whole schooling consists of five principles to:
1. Empower citizens in a democracy
2. Include all
3. Teach and adapt for diversity
4. Build community and support learning
5. Partner with families and the community
Two inclusive architectural types might merge as the post-Panopticon:
- “teletecture”, would describe the virtual space / building / time of connectedness/ connectivity (hyper/virtual/cyber-space), involving the means by which seer and seen could interact through and across the absence of any enclosing space or between separate enclosing spaces.
- “cosmotecture”, would describe the effort to build all under one roof an entire “universe”.
CHAPTER FOUR --- EDUCATION AS PUBLIC ISSUE : TECHNOLOGY,
GLOBALIZATION AND SBER
Public (and private) schooling has become so important nationally and has attained an enormous place in national electoral politics.
The NCLB Act is the most influential federal education legislation passed in more than a generation. Its most notorious component the increased and unprecedented commitment to standardized testing, (re)inforces the dominant / dominating position of pedagogical image. The public-private administration of schooling means an increased place for the visual as a means of control and an increased desire for the official control of the visual. Schools and schooling become watched and watching at the same time at both the micro and macro levels.
Technology changes everything, and as technology has overcome distance, economic globalization has followed.
Vertical technological change (evolutionary, revolutionary, both, or something else entirely), represents the degree to which new technology replaces, or substitutes for, older technology. Vertical substitution proceeds comparatively slowly.
Horizontal technological change (evolutionary, revolutionary, both, or something else entirely), involves the extent to which new technologies complement, or work with, older ones rather than replace them altogether. Horizontal complementarity proceeds comparatively swiftly.
The pace of technological change may be understood perhaps as a case of what is called “punctuated equilibria”, periods of apparent stability separated by periods of detectable and dramatic variation.
Industrialization brought increased technological transformation. Today’s postmodern orientation toward the horizontal and away from vertical presents a number of important and challenging implications. It suggests that a relatively long lifespan for the dominant contemporary disciplinary regime. Surveillance-spectacle is here to stay. This dominant contemporary disciplinary regime of surveillance-spectacle-image will be strengthened.
Globalization depicts the increasing interconnectedness and independence of the world’s disparate peoples and nation-states. Driven by the economic opportunities associated with new modes of transportation and telecommunications, and by the possibilities of new market enabled profitization, globalization supports and is supported by surveillance-spectacle-image, and sets up the present disciplinary status of both the visual and the visualizable.
Economically and politically powerful Americans have claimed a direct correspondence between national and international educational “success” or “failure” and national and international economic “success” or “failure”. In order for US corporations to win at the “game” of international economic competition, US schools must win at the game of international pedagogic competition. For this they believe that schools have to become more businesslike, market driven, management oriented, “homogeneous” and so on. But this increased scrutiny and control implies a greater level of surveillance and spectacle.
Ø Why do those who have power in our modern capitalist society want children to learn what they learn and in the way(s) they learn?
Ø Starting from their own needs and interests, what would children like to learn and how would they like to learn it?
SBER is one part of a larger and evolving social / political / cultural / economic, pro-standardization coalition or alliance, and has evolved into a predominant mode of contemporary school reform.
SBER advocates believe that
1. students do not “know” enough, and teachers do not “teach” enough
2. a systematic and structural approach to subject matter / content scope and sequence is necessary, accompanied by a “rigorous” and comparison-oriented program of assessment or testing so that teachers, students, schools, states and so on can somehow be held “accountable”.
SBER is criticized in four categories. :
- philosophical, because it is incompatible with the appropriate goals of public education
- pedagogical, because represents ineffective or poor pedagogy
- personal, because it has negative emotional, physical, and psychological consequences on teachers and students
- political, because is related to social and economic injustice, racism, sexism, and classism.
SBER contextualizes the mechanisms and statuses of surveillance-spectacle and image.
We can conclude that what is “known” about schools and societies depends upon manipulations of and manipulating the visual image.
CHAPTER FIVE --- CRITICAL FRAMEWORKS
Educators have already taken up many of the challenges posed by both surveillance-spectacle and the newer modes of inquiry and have made contributions to educational theory and to understanding the shifting impacts and technologies of representation.
Five “classical” theorists have written specifically and intensively on the concept of image and its numerous and complicated meanings.
v 1. Mikhail Bakhtin.
Understanding image involves exploring the processes by which a given imaginary work succeeds in “assimilating” or “appropriating” various and “isolated aspects of time and space”. Chronotope is a word showing the connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature and other artistic works. Time and space vary in qualities. Different social activities and representations of those activities presume different kinds of time and space.
Bakhtin’s chronotope provides a mechanism by which to interrogate, critique, and investigate contemporary pedagogical images. His work demands that we take seriously the implications of the merged sense of time and space (re)presented by a specific pedagogical image.
v 2. Barthes.
All messages offer a linguistic (or “textual”) message and a symbolic (or “iconic”) message. Barthes makes possible a specific and critical analysis of the image (in our case the pedagogical image)grounded in its linguistic and iconic messages, both literal and symbolic, both denoted and connoted. In terms of education this means facing a series of questions relating to image itself and the creation and function of image-based meaning.
v 3. Daniel Boorstin.
Boorstin believes that the contemporary
v 4. Jean Baudrillard.
His critique rests first on the recognition that today the image-reality relationship has changed away from one of representation and toward one of complete and ideal disconnect, of the annihilation of any referential link between the original and the copy.
For the pedagogical image, for schooling and education, theorists and researchers should (re)consider the relationships between signifier and signified, image and reality.
v 5. Marshall McLuhan.
“The medium is the message”. He redefined the “medium” as an extension of ourselves and our human senses. He redefined the “message” (of any medium or technology) as the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs or the physic and social consequences of the designs or patterns of some medium as the amplify or accelerate existing processes. The medium then is the message, and the message is the medium.
The idea of the medium being the message and the message being the medium enables the approach to investigating pedagogical images. It asks the scholars re-aim their focus. The point of inquiry shifts from the contents to the various media as extensions of the human senses and to their consequences writ socially and psychologically and culturally.
CHAPTER SIX --- PEDAGOGICAL IMAGE AND EVERYDAY LIFE
We create, maintain, propagate, and transform image(s), and at the same time we are created, maintained, propagated, and transformed by images, all within the environs and performances of the everyday. In order to understand the impact and significance of social and pedagogical image, we must be able to understand the impact and significance of everyday life. There is an everyday life of schooling and a schooling of everyday life.
v Philip Jackson.
The scholars of education must take the “trivial” events of schooling at least as seriously as they take the “most important” ones. He characterized classroom life around three facts :
a. children are in school for a very long time
b. school settings are highly uniform
c. students are and must be in school whether they want to be or not.
From kindergarten onward the student begin to learn the elements and mechanisms of power, and who holds it and why. Regarding pedagogical image what is important is that teachers and children form a captive audience conditioned to the stipulations of disciplinarity and conformity. Classroom and school communities are easily manipulated, used to following orders, seeking praise, obeying rules, and being compensated as successful for doing so.
v Raoul Vaneigem.
It is the dominant perspective of power that undergirds all alienation in terms of “modern’ everyday life. Power ailienates, oppresses and exploits by demolishing any opportunity for participation communication, and self-realization. In order to combat alienation, oppression, and exploitation he explores the possibilities of self-realization (creation), communication (love), and participation (playing).
In respect to image and education, we should consider schooling and its various representations according to their complicity in reinforcing the effects and techniques of power and their limitations on the actualizations of creativity, love, and playfulness.
v Fredy Perlman
Within a capitalist system, and through their daily activities, modern men and women reproduce capitalism and the conditions of their own oppression.
To make use of his work within the context of image, education, and everyday life, it helps first to locate schooling as a social institution.
a. a product is produced, distributed, consumed, bought, and sold,
b. the major actors in the process of schooling represent distinctive social classes, the capitalist class and the working class.
Perlman believes that since schooling is a part of everyday life, and everyday life is part of schooling, education is reproductive and it doesn’t work to transform or improve society. It works to maintain, rationalize and mystify society, and to present society and schooling as right, natural, and neutral.
v Michel de Certeau.
He depicted and differentiated “strategies” and “tactics”, a dual means by which to make sense of the workings of experience, including the character of image and how best to combat its negative effects.
His strategy-tactic distinction proves useful for critical empiricism (what to look for), critical interpretation (how to make sense of), and critical resistance (how to respond).
v Bruce Brown.
Brown calls for a new critical theory and a reconstruction practice that combines the insights of (neo)Marxism and psychoanalysis. A theory that takes seriously both the political and the personal, the psychological along with the economic, the structural, and the social. He attempts to discern how capitalist forms and mechanisms become internalized by individuals, such that their oppression is political, economic and psychological. He proposes a “permanent cultural revolution” that would seek to make sense of and overthrow both manifestations of oppression. Critical understanding and revolutionary praxis must incorporate at the same time both the individual and the group.
In terms of schooling and pedagogical image he suggests an alternative way of theory and practice, and indicates a critical praxis according to which both modes of oppression might be fought.
v Henri Lefebvre.
Marxism, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life. Lefebvre identifies alienation as the key characteristic underlying the oppressiveness of everyday life. He presents the modern regime of image as an industry of falseness and as evidence of the disconnectedness between men and women and the world of their everyday lived experiences.
With respect to image and education, he provides a means by which to understand and to act against image’s potentially negative effects.
PART III : TEACHING IN THE FACE OF THE NEW
DISCIPLINARITY
CHAPTER SEVEN --- IMAGE AND TEACHING RESISTANCE
The field of critical pedagogy has
--- provided relevant techniques and strategies and can claim today a long and admirable tradition of pursuing within both schools and society a commitment to social justice, diversity, democracy, and opportunity
--- fought the social, pedagogical, cultural, religious, economic and political forces of privilege, social reproduction, and conformity
--- espoused countermeasures to the racist, sexist and classist aspects of contemporary schooling while simultaneously supporting schooling’s more liberatory and emancipatory elements
--- advocates for a radical democratic schooling, one in which such pedagogical practices as authentic instruction, authentic assessment, transformative pedagogy, culturally relevant teaching and learning, multicultural education, whole language, multilingual education, and democratic education can both claim space, and make a serious and broad-based difference.
There are a number of practical in society and classroom methods of critical “resistance”:
ü Critical media literacy involves assisting students to understand the roles the media play in terms of creating individual and group subjectivities and how to counteract the manipulative tendencies of the media as they work to control, dictate, monopolize, determine, and perpetuate hierarchies of social, cultural, economic, political, ideological, and pedagogical power.
ü La perruque (that represents what might be the most subversive mode of resistance relative to the disciplinarity of pedagogical image), sees schooling not simply as a managed or enculturating time, unquestioned labor-work, controlled by and supportive of authorities, but as “our time”. The rationale for enacting la perruque must be consistent with promoting democracy, collectivity, and authenticityand opposed to oppression. It must be about capabilities and solidarity, empower teachers and students to chase their interests, desires, skills, and abilities while simultaneously encouraging them to connect and form communities with one another, within and across classrooms and within and across schools.
ü Foucault didn’t locate his theoretical enterprise on the side of resistance by undertaking to formulate a strategy of resistance, but with respect to pedagogical image, and within the convergence of surveillance and spectacle and the statuses of standardization, globalization, and technological change, his view allows for a number of tangible techniques, including those of boycott, refusal, organizing, political action, letter-writing campaigns, and so on. Resistance must be continuous, flexible, and democratic, and seek to expose the links between power and knowledge and the disciplinary characteristics of the dominant regime.
ü Dérive (a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society is a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances) applied to schooling and image help teachers and students to explore the vast geographies of their total worlds, drifting along the interiors and exteriors of the physical, the spiritual, the technological, the academic, and the social / personal, all as a means of resistance, while detournement (the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu), involves a quotation or a re-use, that adapts the original element to a new context such that a given image either may be reemployed in such a way as to modify its meaning or the effect may be to reinforce the real meaning of the element by changing its form. Dérive and detournement take srious the lived experiences, the everyday lives, of teachers and students, their surroundings, interests, desires, concerns, cultures and beliefs. They champion the collective good and work as anti-oppressive tools of empowerment.
CHAPTER EIGHT --- APPLICATIONS : POPULAR FILM AND NCLB / SBER
During the 1980s and 1990s efforts at school reform took a decidedly new turn characterized by three distinct features :
“Federalization” began with the creation of the US Department of Education.
The “new” school reform involved standards-based educational reform and rested on the creation and implementation of “high standards” regarding curriculum, instructional method, assessment, and teacher education. The national government took on greater responsibility for SBER’s evolution, execution, enforcement, and effectiveness. Its hallmark was the enactment of mandated, high stakes, standardized testing.
“Accountability” provided a mechanism (standardized test scores) by which states could punish or reward schools for their performance against the mandated curriculum standards. Failing schools would lose money or face state takeover, and their students might fail to graduate. Successful schools would gain resources and be held up a smodels.
NCLB is the most recent school policy legislation.
During the 1980s and 1990s education-centered films became a successful and acclaimed growth industry. The authors of Image and Education chose to study Dead Poets’ Society and Dangerous Minds because of the films’
- ostensibly marked differences in setting, theme, plot, and character
- implied radicalness
- comparative critical praise
Both films were studied and analyzed for :
Ø the specific images they portray relative to the good teacher, the good student and the good school
Ø the treatment of race, ethnicity, gender, language, and class
Ø the critical frameworks and theoretical perspectives included in Image and Education
Ø the potential consequences of pedagogical image, specifically anti-democratic, anti-collectivity, disciplinarity, oppression, and inauthenticity.
Ø the implications relative to resistance, in terms both of how resistance is represented within the texts themselves, and how each might be appropriated for a resistance-based pedagogy in the classroom.
The two authors studied and analyzed NCLB under the microscope of the same five principals and themes.
Their conclusions, agony, and questions are for the reader the beginning of her/his quest…_
