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Senior Curriculum Leadership 1: The indirect manifestation of knowledge: (B) final performance as deceiver and guide
April 12, 2018 January 10, 2019 / Christine Counsell	/ 7 Comments
This blog series on senior curriculum leadership asks how a non-specialist SLT can take assurance from a middle (subject) leader. You can read an introduction to the series here. The series as a whole suggests nine categories for questions which are often missing in leadership and management conversations. I offer these categories as a tentative structure for a knowledge base needed by senior leadership teams if they are to understand and interrogate both curriculum and all that curriculum affects.
SCL 1: The indirect manifestation of knowledge: (B) final performance as deceiver and guide
Continuing my theme of curriculum as narrative, I now return to a point made at the start of my last post: the indirect ways in which knowledge manifests itself within the final performance, and the resulting need to ensure that the full curricular journey is doing its work for all pupils.
A curriculum exists to change the pupil, to give the pupil new power. One acid test for a curriculum is whether it enables even lower-attaining or disadvantaged pupils to clamber in to the discourse and practices of educated people, so that they gain the powers of the powerful.
While GCSE or any 16+ qualification is always going to be a flawed proxy for that, it's worth remembering that being a proxy is supposed to be its job. A public examination such as GCSE is just a sample of the full domain represented by the curriculum. Teach narrowly to the surface features of its test and you not only miss the point of the curriculum, you limit success for many by not letting the wider domain do its work. (See Daniel Koretz on distinguishing 'domain' and 'test' or this blog by Daisy Christodoulou for an excellent summary of Koretz's account and the serious damage done by teaching to the test.)
Teaching to the test can mean different things across subjects. At its most extreme, it could mean teaching the specification content for five years. Or it could just mean not taking seriously any content taught beyond the specification. Most commonly, it means structuring learning around the surface features of the test, rather than the layers of knowledge or the smaller component skills that sit underneath successful performance. Each of these happens. Each is a failure to treat curriculum as narrative, a failure to grasp the indirect manifestation of knowledge at the finishing point.
In this blog post by David Thomas, now Principal of Jane Austen College, we hear what can go wrong when indirectness of various kinds is not understood. A combination of exams being increasingly high-stakes and skills-based in structure has led schools to distort learning. Obsession with skill-based assessment objectives and markschemes has twin casualties: (a) joyless learning; (b) it doesn't work. Instead of the excitement of opening up 'new worlds of history and literature', pupils are pushed through 'yet more rounds of dry and soulless skills practice'. David draws our attention to the way in which many skill accomplishments required in exams – such as inference or problem-solving – can only be taught indirectly: through component parts such as layers of knowledge, rules of grammar or fluency in mathematical procedures:
"These components look very different to the skill being sought – just as doing drills in football practice looks very different to playing a football match, and playing scales on a violin looks very different to giving a recital."
What David's blog makes clear is that attending to the long-term and indirect is not some luxury; it is urgently necessary. We have to break out of the short-termist, vicious circle of substituting exam questions for curriculum and a disproportionate focus on Years 6 and 11.
It's odd that inertia still grips us in fixing this short-termism. And it is inertia. For here am I, yet another person, saying this same thing. It's even odder given that principles of indirectness are so well established in cognitive psychology. If you're not familiar with this, hear how Bjork explains why performance shouldn't be confused with learning or consider the role of deliberate practice in securing expertise as explained by K. Anders Ericsson
Is the reason for this inertia the accountabilities framework? Perhaps. But it doesn't entirely explain it. After all, we have warrant for knowing that more attention to the long-term and indirect would make outcomes better. I suspect it also has something to do with the fact that we don't really know how to talk about curriculum at whole-school level. First, we don't have the analytic vocabulary of indirectness – of the kind suggested in my post on curriculum as narrative – and second, we are not in the habit of analysing the long-term effects of knowledge because of ingrained assumptions that progress must look like a markscheme, progress must look like a skill ladder, progress must be about skills because skills are the language of the final performance. We have to know (goes the logic) how well pupils are doing so we'd better calibrate progress in final outcome terms.
That there is reluctance to embrace the power of curriculum generally and knowledge in particular is readily shown by what happened in England when National Curriculum Level Descriptions were abolished. Many forgot – or perhaps never realised – what was the root problem with Level Descriptions. They merrily re-invented and worsened the root problem by using GCSE grades at Key Stage 3.
But the curriculum itself is the progression model. Its mastery is progress. That is what it is for. When it comes to progress, the burden of proof is on the curriculum. And that includes knowledge itself for it is not just a setting in which to practise skills; it is a curricular property with an agency all of its own.
A fruitful starting point for thinking about this is to ask how prior knowledge changes pupils.
To do this we need to take seriously the possibility that a curriculum can turn (say) a disadvantaged, vocab-poor Year 5 into a pupil who, carries such reference points in poetry that they are ready to notice what is new and startling in (say) Romantic poetry before they hit Year 10.
A failure to do this sees pupils encountering Romantic poetry in some hollowed out way. It sees pupils bumping into their first Romantic poet by means of a feature-spotting exercise in skills-based assessment language. It sees them doing so without rich familiarity with a range of Romantic poetry, let alone with poetic or other movements that preceded or influenced Romanticism. It sees them tackling only the Romantic poets on the GCSE spec; often, only the Romantic poems on the GCSE spec.
Letting a skills-based final assessment supplant a curriculum is like trying to read the last chapter of a novel without reading the novel. It's like listening to the last cadence of the song and trying to analyse in a purely technical way without letting the whole of the song's melodic and harmonic journey do its work. Play the last cadence all you like; its implied harmonies cannot be heard.
So how can curricular thinking steer us into asking better questions about the change that knowledge brings about in pupils? One productive trick is to think freshly about the final accomplishment itself, but in terms other than those normally used to assess it.
A thought-provoking exploration of this can be found in a small MEd research study carried out by history teacher Kate Hammond.*
Hammond was puzzled. She noticed a distinction between writing by Year 11 pupils who she knew would sail into A grades and writing by pupils whose practice answers were A grade perfect but whose performance in the exam room she instinctively knew would be fragile even though all data suggested otherwise.
Hammond knew that there was no point in looking for any markscheme language to capture this distinction between A grade non-fragile and A grade fragile. It was mark-scheme blind. Drilled in the analytic moves required for top marks, these fragile A graders made links, marshalled evidence, compared factors, weighed claims, pulled every lever and pushed every button with the weary predictability that the exam required but there was a something not quite right, something which …. well what? An immaturity in their writing? An inauthenticity? An insecurity?
Hammond's conscious lack of language drove her research. Naming it was the problem, and naming it became her MEd project. She decided to characterise the non-fragile performers. What new language could be found to describe their fine accomplishment? She thus embarked on an exercise in curricular theorising.
Hammond went painstakingly through A grade work trying out a new language to capture the highest quality, using nothing more than the pupils' work and her own instincts about good history from reading historical scholarship.
For example, she noticed how word choice gave an analytic precision arising from acute sensitivity to period features. Thus a non-fragile A grade would choose to write 'the public' when judging a factor that led to the rise of the Nazis. Look at what the word 'public' is doing in this tight sentence handling a density of ideas:
So the Nazis could be argued to be relying on the Depression and the apparent lack of leadership caused by it to be noticed by the public and to retain their attention from that point.
Fragile performers, in similar efforts to weigh up the relative importance of a factor, reached for a word such as 'the people'. It appears interchangeable. It wouldn't lop off any marks. But it's not as good.
Choosing 'the public' gives this analytic claim more power. A 'public' has agency. It can be appealed to. There are mechanisms by which a 'public' can respond. To grasp such a thing as a 'public' in early twentieth-century Germany and to know that it wouldn't be quite the right word in another context is to know multiple things that sit behind that word. That knowledge seeps through and does indirect work.
Hunting for a way to express this, Hammond eventually described this as 'the knowledge that flavours the claim'. Deft choice and deployment of other abstract nouns in the sentence similarly give analytic nuance within elegant concision.
Already I hear the objection, 'but if they don't need it explicitly for GCSE marks, why on earth does it matter?'
To ask this is to widely miss the point. First, it is helping with GCSE performance, but indirectly.
Remember these are the secure As, not the fragile As. Hammond points to a ready analytic facility that is furnished by such knowledge, a facility that appeared to make a difference in the ease, speed and assurance with which one can arrange material and express judgement. Somehow, these pupils just 'knew how the past worked'. No insecurity was betrayed by clunkiness.
Second, and most importantly, what was Hammond really doing in this research? She was simply asking, what are such students like? What characterises the wider, inner knowledge base they appear to have at their fingertips whose outward manifestation is vocab precision? Who are these students who by the end of Year 9 are just going to fly?
Crucially, what do they have which curriculum itself could and should cultivate, much earlier?
As Hammond worked on her data, she began to infer and then classify the layers of prior knowledge that seemed to sit behind such dextrous integration of abstract terms. She began to conclude that some pupils appeared to have formed extensive, secure schemata from studying a wide range of history, not just this early twentieth-century topic but other twentieth-century topics, wider European history and other periods and cultures at Key Stage 3 or earlier. She began to show how particular scales of wider knowledge were surfacing, indirectly and subtly in pupils' choice and arrangement of words.
Hammond therefore began to think about really long-term preparation for GCSE success and for many more pupils, but definitely not in terms of yet more replication of final skills, definitely not in terms of practising those weird proxy genres invented by examiners (a 6-mark 'evaluate' question, a 4-mark 'describe' question) that some schools seem to think should be practised from Year 7.
She now thought in terms of what they learned in Years 7 to 9, in content areas far beyond the specification. There, she suggested, must lie the seeds of significant transformation, the kind that would change the child's reference points fundamentally, in broad, varied content which had shaped their historical seeing, their ability to interpret or deploy a word appositely. This was the knowledge that was manifesting itself indirectly in her highest-attaining pupils.
Readers will now spy a large elephant in the room. What of pupils living in homes where abstract academic vocabulary is the language of the dinner table? Surely these pupils may have gained these tools for precise thought, or at least had them accelerated, by their broader exposure to the lingua franca of the educated community. So perhaps it wasn't the curriculum alone that achieved this.
But that is precisely the point. It shows the critical importance of the curriculum for those pupils without such backgrounds. What should curriculum in its provision of that specialised abstract language that gives power to an educated community, be providing? We can generate extras and interventions for 'pupil premium' pupils, but schools have very limited time. Meanwhile, their core business is the curriculum, the life of the mind, that lives in every classroom all day long. Key Stage 3 is a store for furnishing the memory with literary worlds, sound worlds, cultural, geographical and historical worlds until such vocabulary is so second nature that pupils can 'move about' within it.
I deliberately labour this because explaining the Hammond work rather too quickly some years ago, one puzzled teacher remarked, 'but surely if they need a word like "the public" for the GCSE, the answer is just to hammer home that expression in Years 10 and 11?'
This taught me just how far we are from understanding curriculum as narrative. It's about as daft as saying, 'let's get them to "practise" flavouring their claims with knowledge'.
It's all about noticing. If one has encountered the expression 'the public' before, in varied contexts, that changes the way we hear or read it. We both notice it, in the sense that it is instantly comprehensible or instantly interesting, and we don't notice it, in that we don't need to stop and use up any working memory trying to process it. Curriculum works because, like narrative, it manipulates our noticing.
Key Stage 3 history would be doing its work well if it were inconceivable that a pupil could begin Year 10 without a memory furnished with many historical stories in which 'the public', 'public opinion' or 'the attention of the public' figured, and without their ears tuned to hearing these expressions used in scholarly ways.
So a central curricular question to ask is this. When pupils first hear/read such words in the context of studying Nazi Germany in Year 10, what do they actually hear? A definition given by the teacher? The words finding a home only in this story? A couple of dimly remembered examples only?
Or will the whole prior curriculum give life to those words in a micro-second? Will those words break forth from prior knowledge as if from a centre and related to a whole, through which, alone, they can have meaning? Words only work by carrying with them the unsaid.
Hammond's work is small-scale and tentative – she makes no big claims. The significance of her work is in theoretical generalisation not statistical generalisation. She merely offers an emerging heuristic for future research.
The significance lies in her determination to avoid using 'markscheme-ese' in an effort to capture the hidden qualities, cultivated much earlier, that underlie securely strong performance. This is what the indirect working of the curriculum is all about.
But so much for working backwards from a 16+ exam. It's a sign of the times that I felt the need to go there early, so as to show the value of curriculum in the context of collective worry about outcomes. But it rather undermines my whole point about curriculum being prior to assessment! What about planning forwards? In my next post, I'll invert the Hammond challenge. Using an example of Key Stage 3 planning, I'll consider what a senior leadership team needs to ask in order to understand its power for long-term change in pupils, in ways sensitive to the subject.
*The Hammond article is behind a paywall. This is why I have attempted to explain it thoroughly. Alternatively, grab a history teacher and ask them to access it through Historical Association membership: Hammond, K. (2014) 'The knowledge that flavours a claim: towards building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales', Teaching History, 157
Senior Curriculum Leadership 1: The indirect manifestation of knowledge: (A) curriculum as narrative
April 7, 2018 October 31, 2018 / Christine Counsell	/ 31 Comments
This blog series on senior curriculum leadership addresses the challenge of how a non-specialist SLT is to take assurance from a middle (subject) leader. You can read an introduction to the series here. The series as a whole suggests nine categories for questions which are often missing in leadership and management conversations. I offer these categories as a tentative structure for a knowledge base needed by senior leadership teams if they are to understand and interrogate both curriculum and all that curriculum affects.
SCL 1: The indirect manifestation of knowledge: (A) curriculum as narrative
'Curriculum' derives from the Latin 'currere' meaning a race or a course on which a race is run. The Latin verb 'currere' means to 'run' or 'proceed'. The word is replete with a sense of movement.
I like this idea of a race course or running track for three reasons:
First, it underlines the importance of the journey: to take a short-cut would be to miss the point. The specified ground must be conquered or the race can be neither run nor won. All the running matters. If we tell the runners to practise only the final sprint, we not only miss the point of the whole race, we miss opportunity for many more runners to finish and finish well.
Second, it reminds us that curriculum is not a mere aggregate of things. Its temporal character is a key property. Curriculum is content structured over time.
Third, it points to the curriculum as continuous. Not just a sequence or a chronology, it's much more like a narrative. Curriculum is content structured as narrative over time.
Once we start thinking about content structured as a narrative we really get somewhere.
A narrative (think novel, film, symphony, song …) is full of internal dynamics and relationships that operate across varying stretches of time. Those dynamics and relationships realise the function of every bit of content.
And every bit of content has a function. That little event early in the novel does a neat job not only in making the early story work, but also of furnishing the reader's memory so that, much later, it resonates in a satisfying resolution or newly puzzling twist. That early theme in the symphony will furnish our melodic or harmonic memories so that later returns or variations can disturb or delight. A narrative works on its reader or listener through constant interplay of familiar and strange, and things can only be familiar or strange by virtue of earlier reference points, ones that stay with us.
Of course, all I'm talking about here are schemata. Cognitive psychology has long established that we only have a tiny window of attention through which to attend to new material, but armed with multiple sub-surface associations, from prior knowledge, we rapidly assimilate and interpret the new. A narrative is just an intensification of this process.
For narrative is structured in a particular way to make sure things do stay with us: a narrative may have episodes but its meaning-making structure (the reader's interpretive process) is not episodic; it's continuous. We don't – we simply can't – lose the effect of the earlier episodes. This is because narrative (I mean a good one) has the effect of keeping multiple strands all spinning at once. Thus earlier stages stay warm in memory so that they form part of the backcloth through which we interpret every new element. A narrative is constantly unifying, pulling things together so that they function.
But narrative is weird. Although that early detail has altered our seeing or hearing, when it finally comes into its own, we often can't see it. We barely notice we have it. The narrative has rendered it so secure in memory that lots of memory space is freed up for speedy grasp of plot twists or the poignancy of a written texture, one packed with meaning by virtue of the earlier stages. Now layered in long-term memory, they are lightly but surely evoked.
This is a narrative's magic. (Keep thinking novel, film, opera…) Each little bit never gives you the totality, yet somehow each little bit evokes a totality.
Now, this works backwards, in the ways I've outlined above but it also works forwards. A narrative manipulates reader expectation, but not too much. Narrative works through gaps or spaces that set the mind whirring about what is not yet known, and what sits outside the text altogether. Without them, there would be neither anything to compel one to read on, nor any sense of arrival that makes the prior journey make sense.
In other words, those internal relationships, operating across time, make the effects of knowledge gained highly indirect. A narrative works through the indirect manifestations of knowledge.
To put it another way, knowledge is fertile, generative and highly transferable. Our knowledge is carried by the narrative and performs functions that we cannot always see.
This is just how curriculum works – or is supposed to work. And this narrative behaviour of curriculum starts to give us a language for interrogating the curricular workings of subjects not our own, sufficient at least to avoid some of the worst pitfalls of generic assumptions. In looking at any piece of content you need to be able to see it within its curricular relationships. Otherwise, any view on time spent on X, or method used to teach X, or measure that X is secure… is ripped right out of context. For X gains its meaning by association with everything around it, both other strands happening concurrently, and other or similar knowledge learned before or later.
The object being taught is everything. We may not understand that object fully, but it is possible to understand something of its curricular context in its temporal dimensions. It is possible to ask, what is this bit of content doing?
Where to start? Well, a little bit of curricular language goes a long way. Here are two simple, practical ways to begin to think about this (i) 'proximal' and 'ultimate'; (i) 'core' and 'hinterland'.
Proximal and ultimate functions
Each bit of a curriculum is always doing a job in making the next stage possible (a proximal function) but it is also doing an enduring job (an ultimate function) which might come into its own later, sometimes much later. Each of these are jobs a pupil couldn't hope to see but which an observer needs to be aware of if they're to get inside any teacher's decision both about why that content is positioned there and about such matters as emphasis and explicitness, timing and practice, within teaching.
When one of our science Subject Specialist Leaders, Lucy Austin, was first building our trust's primary biology curriculum, I thought, "Prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells in Year 4? Sounds a bit detailed for 8-year-olds!"
I was wrong. After a conversation with Lucy, I understood it in within a bigger, temporal picture.
I already knew why pupils being secure in terms such as 'cell', 'membrane' and 'nucleus' was vital for certain 'ultimate' reasons outside of science: for pupils to read fiction and non-fiction fluently by Year 6, they need to be richly familiar with all kinds of specialist vocabulary that gets used as metaphor in non-science contexts.
What I had not grasped is that you will end up with poor generalisations about cells if you gloss over the distinctions between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Poor generalisations lead to bad science in the form of misconceptions which have to be unpicked later. 'Let's get it right first off', said Lucy, 'and riches will result in what pupils can then understand, notice and assimilate'. She was right and we've spent an illuminating term watching Year 4 doing everything from practising these terms to fluency – inclusive, enjoyable, moving – to making models and paintings of eukaryotes and prokaryotes.
An example of a proximal reason for focusing on eukaryotes is the need for pupils to move on to understand respiration. They don't learn about respiration properly at this point, but are briefly introduced to it as they encounter the various organelles including mitochondria. At this stage, 'mitochondria' and 'respiration' are just words, pictures, tantalising ideas, early scene setting. Grounded in visual memory through drawing and model-making and in verbal memory through secure recall, they are like clues at an early stage in a novel, it's now there, ready, waiting, in memory, for a 'wow, here it is again!' moment when respiration can be taught properly, very soon.
Core and hinterland
This pair of powerful words has proved the most important thing to help me think about subject difference within curricula.
The trick here is to handle paradox. Even though clearly, as the word suggests, 'hinterland' is just supporter or feeder of a core, when it comes to curriculum, the hinterland is as important as what is deemed core.
The core is like a residue – the things that stay, the things that can be captured as proposition. Often, such things need to be committed to memory. But if, in certain subjects, for the purposes of teaching, we reduce it to those propositions, we may make it harder to teach, and at worst, we kill it. A good example is reading a work of literature in English. We can summarise plot, characters and stylistic features in a revision or teachers' guide, and those summaries may well represent the residue that we want secure in pupils' long-term memories. These are proxies for the way the full novel stays with us, enriching our literary reference points and colouring our language use for ever. But they are not the primary means by which we imbibe & retain those reference points. That requires reading, bathing in the text, delighting in the text, alone and with others.
The act of reading the full novel is like the hinterland. However much pupils might be advised to study or create distillations, commentaries and plot summaries, however much these become decent proxies for (and aids towards) the sort of thing that stays in our heads after we've read the novel, to bypass reading the novel altogether would be vandalism.
In some subjects, we do well to remember that what has been identified as core knowledge, what must be recalled, is just a proxy. This is why it's madness to be running around checking for oral retrieval drill without attention both to the nature of what is being learned and to its status within the overall curriculum narrative. Application of retrieval practice needs to be thought about in curricular terms. There's no way the entire novel stays in long-term memory: memorising a poem is a great idea; memorising every word of the novel generally isn't; you just read it. If a teacher chooses for a class to spend some time just reading, and discussing/thinking about the reading, then ask not whether reading or discussing are good or bad things; ask, rather, what is their interplay with what precedes and follows? A curricular lens makes us look for interplay, not incidence, over time.
Teaching literature is 100 times more complex than this, but this one distinction is a wake-up call to the application of generic 'how?' of 'good teaching' without attention to the 'what?'
Now let's take a quick detour via RE before returning to Year 4 biology.
Our RE lesson is sitting within a half-term's journey that involves a clear purpose to ensure pupils are secure in the meaning of 'worship', 'devotion' and 'temple' and that they learn several New Testament stories as part of their ongoing study of Christianity, which is to be followed by Islam the following year.
The pupils are being led up to the beautiful story of Simeon in the temple, the moment when Mary and Joseph present Jesus. According to the story, Simeon holds forth with an exultant devotional hymn of worship that has come to have lasting meaning in the Christian tradition – the Nunc Dimittis. How do Year 4 make meaning out of this, sufficient to retain it so that this example of 'worship' and 'devotion' and this particular instance of a 'temple' becomes fertile in future study of this religion and others?
They do so through a beautiful hinterland. Pupils have listened to (and/or read, watched, acted) the story of Mary and Joseph going on a long, long journey, with a young baby. According to Jewish custom, Mary and Joseph must go to the Temple with their firstborn and make a sacrifice. They take two pigeons as their offering. Finally, exhausted, they reach the Temple. They unpack their belongings (don't forget the pigeons). A huge amount of the lesson is on this lead-up, the children become invested in the exhaustion and expectation of Mary and Joseph as they learn all about what this journey would have been like and what it was for.
Cut to the Temple. There a man is waiting. What is he waiting for? The pupils hear (or read) the backstory on Simeon: how all of his life, Simeon had hoped to see the Messiah, how the Jews believed that God would send a special person to lead the Jewish people, how the Jews believed this leader would be the Messiah, how long ago (the Jews believed) God made a promise to Simeon, saying, 'one day, you will see the Messiah!', how Simeon had waited years and years… We reach our core only in the final 15 minutes of the lesson, when Simeon's song of worship carries so much meaning about religious devotion and worship. We have arrived it through two stories that now converge. Those stories were curricular hinterland. Cut them and the core is not fed.
To return to cells, this is how Year 4 pupils first bump into prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells (together with pictures of the cells of course):
"In the cell on the left, the nucleus is uncontained. Scientists used Latin to name these two types of cells. The cells on the left are called prokaryotic cells (without a membrane-bound nucleus). The cells on the right are called eukaryotic cells (with a membrane-bound nucleus)."
Our Year 4 pupils don't arrive at that cold. What was so special about Lucy's writing of our biology curriculum, was the fact that this little bit of content came after an extended hinterland that served a proximal function. Pupils are drawn in through the story of a seventeenth-century Dutch scientist:
"Anton van Leeuwenhoek (Lay-van-hook) sat by his study window, in the autumn of 1673, to open a letter.
The letter had come from England. It was from The Royal Society. Leeuwenhoek had been eagerly waiting this response. Earlier in the year, Leeuwenhoek had sent The Royal Society drawings of creatures that he had seen using his microscope.
Leeuwenhoek had begun to give up hope …."
The lead-up to cells is mingled with the fascinating story of microscopes and particular scientists' struggles with them, so that by the time we reach that dense paragraph and the photos of cells it describes, almost everything in it has been encountered before – scientists finding things, scientists naming things, scientists using Latin and Greek, the word 'cell' (we know that Leeuwenhoek took it from monks' cells), the idea of a membrane … the only new things are the words 'prokaryotic' and 'eukaryotic'. They are core and, nestled within the hinterland, they are fed.
The term 'hinterland' is as fertile in curricular thinking as its literal meaning. It's not clutter. This is nothing to do with fun stuff to make things more interesting or engaging, nothing to do with extraneous activities to 'engage' (which are so often redundant when the content itself is engaging and its mastery rewarding).
Of course, the distinction doesn't work in all subjects all the time. For in some subjects, reduction to the pure propositions is vital and the last thing one wants is contextual stuff. Even context can be clutter. But that is the very reason why we need the word 'hinterland'. It helps us distinguish between a vital property that makes curriculum work as narrative and merely 'engaging activities' which can distract and make pupils think about (and therefore remember) all the wrong things. It allows teachers to have this kind of conversation:
"Isn't that a distraction?"
"No, it's hinterland. This is why…".
To summarise, the term 'coverage', normally associated with curricula, has limited use. When trying to interrogate others' curricular decisions or to establish their implications for teaching, stop talking about coverage. Talk the language of narrative; let curriculum do its work across time.
This also avoids the sillier, purely generic debates about whether knowledge or skill is more important when (a) it is their relationship and interplay that matters, and (b) that interplay takes place differently across subjects. But more on that later.
In my next post, I'll develop another implication of the indirect manifestation of knowledge hinted at the start of this post: the fact that the final accomplishment or performance is not the same as the means of its nurture. This takes us to the heart of the reason why curriculum has been neglected: not just because it has been supplanted by assessment, but because its relationship with assessment has become distorted.
In search of senior curriculum leadership : Introduction – a dangerous absence
March 27, 2018 December 7, 2018 / Christine Counsell	/ 13 Comments
This is an introduction to a series of posts exploring future possibilities for senior curriculum leadership in schools.
What does it mean to be in a whole-school leadership team and to be leading on curriculum? We still lack a properly developed model of what is senior curriculum leadership. Time was when a senior leader in charge of curriculum did timetabling and examination options, perhaps handled staffing and other resourcing attached to subjects. Most of this had little to do with curriculum, but when I first went into teaching, this is what the 'curriculum deputy' traditionally did. More recently, curriculum has often disappeared altogether. Senior roles typically comprise head of teaching and learning, assessment, data, achievement…. Where is curriculum?
Curriculum is fundamental to schools. It is also fiendishly complex. Necessarily directional and dependent on recognisable channels, it must nonetheless be vibrant and changing for such is the character of knowledge and our relationship to it. It is at once a thing of beauty and of utility, and both matter. More like the waterways of Venice than a set of roads or paths, it needs specialist maintenance or it won't take you where you want to go, nor make it a rewarding experience. Moreover, like Venice, its waters don't stand alone. If you don't understand the relationship of knowledge in the curriculum to the wider oceans and rains of knowledge that renew or trouble it, you're liable to flood or drought.
Such a thing needs leadership. To stretch my Venice analogy further than it deserves, the collective waterways of the city need overarching leadership not just the individual canals.
Trouble is, the term 'curriculum leadership' is associated with middle leaders – the 'geography coordinator', the 'head of science'. It is, quite rightly, linked to subjects. Subjects are derived from the great traditions of knowledge construction in academic and artistic fields, each with its own rules of enquiry and evidence, its own traditions of argument and debate or its own standards of performance and judgement. Each echoes a distinctive quest for truth and each carries accumulated wisdom that must be mastered if its wider ways are to be opened up. Children need to be brought into these traditions if they are ever to enliven and renew them themselves. The traditions are interconnected all right, but they are canals. Without canals, we have no city, or at least, not a navigable one. Their very separateness matters.
What can senior curriculum leadership mean, that is, leadership of curriculum in the whole school, given that one cannot know about all these subjects in their distinctive channels?
And why on earth does this matter so much? Haven't we gotten along perfectly well thank you very much without such senior staff exercising curricular knowledge?
Actually no, we haven't. The absence of an adequate model of senior curriculum leadership seems to me to deepen fundamental and longstanding problems in schools with which we have all wrestled, from weak assessment systems to problems with generation and interpretation of data, from problematical judgements about teaching and learning, to attraction and retention of fine teachers, from teacher development to the effectiveness of CPD.
My concern is therefore not just about what a person in SLT called 'curriculum VP' or 'curriculum deputy' needs to know, but what everyone in a senior leadership team needs to know about curriculum in order to lead on everything else.
Senior curriculum leadership is the whole SLT's business.
Where SLTs have tried to reach into pedagogy with generic strategies that fail to attend to subject distinctiveness, all manner of distortions have occurred. In tackling the 'how' (teaching and learning) and in attempting to judge its efficacy (progress, assessment, data, outcomes), if we ignore 'what?' is being learned, we risk damaging so much else that school leadership and management ought to foster.
Let's take a closer look at those two areas:
(i) teaching and learning
To talk about teaching without considering what is being learned, is to create an intransitive pedagogy, a pedagogy without an object. Without the curricular substance supplied by such an object, so much school leadership conversation on teaching and learning is operating in a vacuum, and into that vacuum flows genericism.
A couple of years ago I wrote about a chronic example of such genericism : the practice of many schools who for a very long time insisted that teachers structured lessons around Blooms Taxonomy, and thus did violence to the structure and content of various subjects.
If such practice is now discredited, I'm not confident that it is for the right reasons. What should trouble us is not just the assumptions of hierarchy relating to 'evaluate' or 'analyse' but the fact that this was deemed a generic solution.
The problem of genericism is no respecter of 'prog' or 'trad'. While most now accept that expecting pupils to be doing group work every 10 minutes is ridiculous, I would be just as bothered if pupils are expected to be doing retrieval practice every 10 minutes.
Such a directive ignores the matter of what is to be retrieved, in what form, in what interplay with other content and for what subject purpose.
For example, a head of teaching and learning who draws on research in the psychology of memory to argue that that lower attainers should just learn fewer facts, really thoroughly, may be making a very sensible point in particular subject contexts. But applied in blanket ways, it ignores how different subjects hold facts together in ways that make them memorable: through logical relations in some subjects, through narrative in others, through a supporting hinterland in others, and through other types of association in others. So in some settings, certain kinds of surrounding material don't necessarily get in the way; they can, paradoxically, help the retention of the core material.
Thus it may not be the number of facts to which we should attend, but to their status, function and interplay in the disciplinary accounts that give them subject meaning.
These are curricular questions before they are psychological questions. They are about the way in which factual material is 'carried' whether in text cohesion or in other disciplinary structures.
For non-scientists like me, such disciplinary carrying is beautifully explained by Rosalind Walker in her account of where genericism has compromised science teaching. Rosalind writes this post in order to "successfully challenge blithe exhortations to do something in our teaching that is just not appropriate". Notice how in order to explain how generic guidance weakened her students' progress by distorting the curriculum, she needs to explain science's vertical explanatory structure and its declarative elements. She also needs to talk about 'inference', and when she does, those of us reared in the stables of history or English know we have ridden into a foreign country.
Rosalind's blog is a counterblast against misguided whole-school directives on teaching. She writes how she had frequently 'gone off and performed what I now view as contortions, corruptions of my teaching of science subject knowledge, in order to please observers…. I've written up lists of ostensibly hierarchical success criteria so that pupils know how to improve their work….I've created lessons around a hinge question so as to make sure I've got a hinge question in my lesson.'
Her critique is severe. School science has been damaged by the effort to foist upon it inappropriate questions, activities and feedback models.
(ii) progress, assessment, data and outcomes
Conversations between senior leaders and subject leaders must be cognisant of the curriculum sits behind that data, or else the conversation risks being at cross purposes. At worst, it becomes a conversation that imagines it is about outcomes, but is actually just about measure of outcomes.
Stuart Lock, principal of Bedford Free School, once tweeted, "if in some schools every meeting on data was replaced with a meeting on the curriculum, those schools would have much better data".
Stuart's point was that instead of tracking numbers, we need to get much closer to what those numbers represent, to what pupils now know or can do, that they didn't or couldn't before. If the curriculum itself is the progression model, then numbers change their meaning. This places the burden of proof on the curriculum itself.
By contrast, all kinds of curricular blindness have done serious damage in recent decades. They clearly still do in countless school contexts. Perhaps most serious are the pressures that detract from precise formative analysis of progress pupils make in the steady building of underlying components such as knowledge increments or basic procedures. Instead, teachers are too often required to track back from the skill-based language of final summative assessments, turning every lesson into a micro-exam, and for what? The push to use summative assessment for formative inferences has resulted in a confusion between performance and the means of its nurture. Cue the clandestine lament of the conscientious head of department, that they have to waste time "kicking rubbish data upstairs to SLT".
So much for the problem. How does this absence of curricular focus happen? And what can we do about it?
It happens because at the level of a whole school, the pull of the generic is strong and understandably so. Schools must be led and managed as coherent enterprises. Parity must be found across a school's spheres. To ascend the ladders of school leadership, subject specialism must, to some degree, be transcended. Whole-school leaders contribute in vital ways that transcend subject. They must communicate strategy, distribute resource, facilitate collaboration, align systems, review pupils' progress across differing spheres, build policies for behaviour… In short, they must create the best environment possible for all teachers to make things happen.
Therefore, built into the culture of staff development is a sense of subject specialism as transient. Built into the structure of a school is an imperative for common proxies – from performance measures to precepts for pedagogy – all at one remove from the actual substance what is being taught and learned.
How easy, then, to slide into the assumption of equivalence, especially with generic terms such as 'learning', 'progress' or 'skills'.
Of course, in its necessary calculations that place one subject beside another for comparison and management, a school does produce a gain in its collective professional knowledge. But it also creates a loss. It loses sight of the knowledge goods themselves, and these disappear in senior management and leadership conversations.
Yet one subject differs profoundly from another. And these differences are significant. If SLT are to gain a sense of what kind of data might be useful in establishing attainment or progress, if conversations about matters such as 'teaching' and 'learning' are to have any meaning at all, then the substance of what is being taught and learned needs primacy. In seeking to establish the quality of the work of a department or teacher, instead of going too quickly to the generic, SLT might more usefully go via the substance, nature, structure and form of the subject.
Pity the poor senior leader! What on earth is he or she to do? The job of the senior leader is to hold middle leaders to account. But given that he or she cannot master about fifteen subjects, how is this to be done? A scientist deputy head cannot be an artist; a historian cannot be a mathematician. How do we break the eternal barrier of not being able to speak that subject's language?
There must be a way.
Senior Leadership Teams need a curricular language for talking about teaching and attainment, a language which, because of its curricular character, illuminates rather than conceals the thing itself. Such a language cannot be empty of substance. It must be rooted in a shared knowledge base, one that makes curricular communication possible.
So what distinctively curricular, professional knowledge base might equip a senior leader to discern and weigh, incentivise and question, the resource that is a teachers' subject specialism? What kind of knowledge base is necessary to be able to discuss teaching, learning, assessment and data in ways that allow a geographer to breathe geography?
In the remaining posts in this series, I will share a very tentative case for the structure of that knowledge base, breaking it down into nine areas. Each of these nine areas of knowledge furnish questions that senior leaders need to be able to ask if they are to do their core job – to take reliable and useful assurance from middle leaders, to do so without corroding the dignity of the thing being taught and to situate all this within the big picture of the whole-school curriculum with enough knowledge to strategise its future efficacy.
These nine areas for questions are as follows:
The indirect manifestation of knowledge
Substantive and disciplinary knowledge
How does epistemic ascent work? Understanding subject structures: hierarchical and horizontal; cumulative and accumulative
Recontextualisation: the origins of subjects in academic and professional practice outside school
Subject communities: the sources of authority and renewal for teachers' curricular thinking
Crazy cross-curricularity or intelligent interdisciplinarity?
Joining lessons in sequences
The general and the particular
Education as an experience in its own right
Genericism's children
January 11, 2016 January 15, 2019 / Christine Counsell	/ 23 Comments
Many a head of history will have used some of the holiday to do a little thinking about how to move his or her history department's practice forward.
Let's imagine one such head of history. She has been anticipating the likely state of Year 9's essay writing by June. What sorts of things will the essays tell her? How are they going to get better? And what does 'getting better' mean anyway?
Let's imagine that she and her department have focused on causation essays – those essays that will answer questions such as: Why did Russia have a Bolshevik revolution? Why did South African apartheid end? Let's say she's been thinking about this in the light of earlier causation essays, perhaps Year 8's favourite on Napoleon's demise. What is a strong argument in an extended response to such a question? In what different ways do the students arrange, link and prioritise the causes? And what layers of knowledge do the essays reveal? What deficits in knowledge do they betray? What is knowledge 'doing' in the stronger essays? What hidden layers of knowledge from Year 7 seem to be indirectly affecting success in Years 8 and 9? Which causation arguments seem to have the most explanatory power? What is giving these students power as they survey and wonder, judge and reckon?
Our head of history will steep herself in the numerous articles by other history teachers who have considered such matters over two decades. She knows most already, but she will search for new ones. And in order to move deeply into decisions about the nature of what she is after, and to build her own knowledge, she will also read recent historical scholarship: Christopher Clark on the causes of the First World War, Mary Beard on the fall of the Roman Empire, or perhaps that new book on the Ottomans … … is there time?
… Stop. Stop right there, head of history. It's 11pm. 3 January 2016. Time to stop reading. Time to stop dreaming. Time to go back to school. The place where all this should be happening. The place where all this professional knowledge should be prized and used, tested and explored.
The place where it probably won't.
Dream on head of history. Maybe in the Easter holidays?
Our head of history falls asleep, all over the Ottomans.
How will our head of history's efforts to use such knowledge fare when faced with a new whole-school approach to lesson planning, using a generic framework such as one derived from Bloom's taxonomy? Let us imagine three such heads of history conversing with their senior leaders in three schools.
In Scenario 1, lesson objectives commencing with the verbs 'describe', 'explain' and 'analyse' or 'evaluate' must match successive stages of a lesson. Pedagogies associated with these verbs must foster the increments of demand that their hierarchy is deemed to enshrine. These pedagogies form a menu on which teachers are encouraged to draw.
The conversation our head of history has with an SLT member is confused, stressful and culminates in impasse. It does so on two fronts: first, over the term 'explain'; second, over the status of the verbs. The head of history points out that she is indeed privileging pupils' explanation, but causal explanation. She points out that this is a style of disciplinary reasoning that shapes many history essays. She insists that it amounts to an argument in response to a certain kind of 'Why?' question, that students will build such arguments across three or four lessons and that 'explain', in such a context, does not mean 'explicate', 'set out' or 'expand'. It also has nothing to do with explaining the process of photosynthesis or explaining how a bicycle works.
To force an 'explain' (of either meaning) into the middle section of each lesson confuses the journey toward building powerful, informed, causal explanations, especially if, as SLT expects, the teacher must tell pupils that 'explain' is a step more demanding than 'describe', and even more damaging if teachers must distinguish it from 'analyse'. Causal explanation, in history, is, necessarily, analysis.
The tense conversation muddles on. And as efforts to communicate lurch about, our frustrated head of history gradually realises what is going on. SLT is treating the verbs as proxies for learning processes, each with attendant teaching method. She is therefore reading our head of history's comments on 'explanation' through that lens. In other words, our SLT member reads the history department's curricular account as if it were a pedagogy.
But causal explanation is a curricular object; it is neither learning process nor teaching approach. Causal explanation may, of course, command all kinds of learning process; some might coincide with aspects of Bloom's taxonomy, but it is not, in itself, a learning process. It is a disciplinary end, a curricular 'what?', not a pedagogic 'how'. To read curriculum as pedagogy is not to read curriculum at all.
In requiring our head of history to build a lesson around learning processes, our SLT promotes an intransitive pedagogy, a pedagogy without an object.
The conversation is held entirely at crossed purposes.
In Scenario 2, by contrast, our second SLT treats Bloom's taxonomy as curriculum, but the conversation with our head of history is just as vexed. In this school, a variant of the taxonomy is used to capture generic 'thinking skills for the twenty-first century'. In this construal, the verbs describe processes, but processes to be learned rather than processes of learning – a crucial distinction, for it renders them a curricular object.
Underpinning SLT's desire to add these into the curriculum is a perception of deficit. History is construed by SLT as information, as a collection of inert facts; students must therefore be taught, as an addition, the skills of critical thinking. They must be encouraged, as an addition, to be creative.
Yet our head of history knows that history is not a collection of facts but a structured field of knowledge. She knows that intricate relations between its factual elements – relations structured by language, by chronology, by narrative – give all that factual material, once secure in memory, a special power, a function in assimilating new knowledge. Our head of history also knows that history lessons tackle the origin, structure and status of that knowledge: students must re-arrange and re-construe, argue and analyse. A history teacher carefully shuttles between representations of the material that the discipline studies (substantive knowledge) and induction into the tradition of epistemic rules and practices that made such representations possible (disciplinary knowledge). To climb into the conversation that is history, to learn its intellectual rigour, is to nurture criticality and creativity in abundance.
Our head of history's resistance therefore now arises not merely from clashing nomenclature. It arises from the fact that the required curricular addition is redundant.
Scenario 3 yields a happier conversation, yet the result of its harmony is tragic. This time SLT listens well to the head of history. She realises that strong history lessons already see students carrying out all the moves in the school's generic skill taxonomy. Students in history do, indeed, combine and create, arrange and apply!
Delighted at this surprising, if accidental, compliance, all SLT need ask our head of history to do is to show where in her history curriculum documentation these modes of thinking will be taught, and to evidence the result.
Thus, in Scenario 3, curricular by-product has become product. A faux curricular narrative has been created, and now becomes the narrative that will hold the head of history to account. As price for being left in peace, this third head of history will now complete audits against these generic categories. She will screen out the distinctive historical meanings, the ones much discussed in her department, in history teachers' literature, in her own subject-specific training. In order to satisfy a management narrative, she will re-write columns on workschemes and boxes on lesson plans. She will engage in concomitant casuistry in assessment.
It is not that the head of history does not value creativity and criticality; it is, rather, that these outputs do not correspond with the means of their nurture. They are not resolvable into objectives of the same name.
Above all, they derogate the thing that our head of history sees making the biggest difference for the erstwhile weaker student, the thing that gives hope that vocab-poor students might eventually gain the critical skills SLT claims to prize – that is, the systematic, steady familiarisation with layers and layers of rich, fascinating, enabling knowledge.
The double tragedy is that this investigation of the history department has not improved SLT's grasp of the nature of historical knowledge, its relational properties and epistemic structures. It has converted these things into a superficial and misleading curricular narrative, and in order to retain professional harmony, the head of history must pretend her curricular decisions are governed by it. She must be complicit in a lie.
These three conversations, about a non-curriculum, a redundant curriculum and a usurper curriculum, illustrate communication breakdowns between genericist and subject-specialist. They do no more than imperfectly exemplify a stream of cri de coeurs in my in-box from desperate heads of history which have waxed and waned (mostly waxed) over fifteen years. I choose Blooms – or rather common applications of its variants – at random. Any number of whole-school policies, on teaching, learning or assessment, would do.
I share them here for two reasons, each of which I plan to explore in this blog:
First, to illustrate a clash of cultures in many of England's state secondary schools, that between curriculum construed as strongly bounded domains of specialized knowledge and curriculum construed as (or replaced by) sets of aims deriving from assorted perceptions of utility. It is a divide between two views of what is emancipatory for students.
Second, to posit a crisis in our conceptions of senior curriculum leadership. Such a crisis is characterized by an absence of curricular reflection on differing knowledge structures and their epistemic power, on the place of knowledge in definitions of progress, on subjects as distinctive yet shifting traditions into which pupils can be inducted, on the interplay of layers and forms of knowledge within subjects, and on knowledge as the inclusion issue: what Hirst and Peters called 'public modes of knowledge' and the access they give us to educated conversation.
This absence matters because it leaves a vacuum. It is a vacuum into which genericism flows.
Cumulative Knowledge… on Senior Curriculum Leadership 1…
Ee-Reh Owo on Senior Curriculum Leadership 1…
Questions to help yo… on Senior Curriculum Leadership 1…
Core and hinterland:… on Senior Curriculum Leadership 1…
Our favourite educat… on Senior Curriculum Leadership 1…


In 1986 Rajiv founded "Rajiv Menon Productions",popularly known today as RMP, where he started his career in TV commercials. Rajiv received his first national recognition through his Asian Paints "Pongal" commercial, which he both shot and directed and music for which was composed by A.R. Rahman. RMP has since produced over 300 commercials for leading brands in the country, for over 20 years.
Rajiv's career in cinema took off in 1994, when he did the cinematography for the award winning feature film 'BOMBAY'. His skill as a cinematographer received much praise, and since, he has worked with accomplished filmmakers like Mani Ratnam, Shyam Benegal and Girish Karnad. His latest contribution has been in Mani Ratnam's "Guru".
Rajiv's first directorial venture Minsaara Kanavu (Electric Dreams) was not only a popular hit but also fetched four national awards for best choreography, best playback – male & female, and best music director.
His second directorial venture was the multi-starrer Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It), besides winning the Best Director and Best Picture awards at Filmfare, was screened at numerous International Film Festivals like the London Film Festival, the Washington DC Festival and the Danish Film Festival. A song from the film also won singer Shankar Mahadevan his first National Award.
Rajiv Menon is a tremendously hardworking individual and his versatility extends across everything from being an ad photographer, cinematographer, director, actor, singer and orator, making him one of the country's most reputed and sought after filmmakers.
Rajiv is equally interested in giving back to the industry a range of talent it needs to constantly renew itself. It is with this principal aim that he founded the Mindscreen Film Institute (www.mindscreen.co.in), a film school that nurtures tomorrow's talent by providing comprehensive training across all facets of Cinematography, Screenwriting and Filmmaking.


A hobby is what we do for amusement during our free time. There are different kinds of hobbies such as collecting stamps, gardening, and sports Etc. When you start doing it regularly, it will increase the knowledge and skill in that particular field of activity.
Of late, hobbies such as stamp collecting has become outdated because of the popularity of video games. It is not always for monetary benefits that we do a hobby. It is the interest to do things that drive you to start a hobby.
You may be in the job you have once wished to do. But, there may be a reporting structure and you might have to report to your superior officer. Sometimes it may be disappointing. We are working on the plans set up by someone else. But in the case of hobbies you are your own king. You can decide what you want to do. You can do it the time you really want to do. You can be creative while doing the hobby. Thus, you can make a dream come true. This will help you to develop self-discipline.
This is an idea conceived by you. It is you, who put it into action. You get the pleasure of accomplishing or completing what you started. The pleasure you get is immense because you have bypassed all the stumbling blocks to complete the hobby you have started.
It happens sometimes that life comes to a standstill. There may be occasions when our inner positive energy drains out leaving us hopeless. But, starting to do a creative hobby gives a new meaning to our lives. It helps you to get a new energy. This will help to find out a new meaning to your life.
When you concentrate more on your hobby you happen to forget the work tension. It is a wonderful way to spend your extra time productively. It is a positive way of releasing your stress.
When you start developing a hobby you will start to understand your own strengths and weaknesses. You can correctly assess what you are capable of and where you are lacking. When you understand your weaknesses you can work on it to improve yourself.
When I start to pursue a particular hobby, it creates positive thinking in you. It creates hopes in the minds of people and filtrates negative vibes from your mind.
To sum up, a hobby is an activity which brings a sense of accomplishment in the minds of the people. Researchers say that hobbies tend to increase productivity at work. Even great people have developed hobbies over time. The great investor Warren buffet has a hobby of playing the ukulele. Eminent writer Emily Dickinson loves baking. Thus, hobbies enhance the creativity and generate enthusiasm in the minds of the people.


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Bierde is a village in the municipality of Böhme, Lower Saxony, that is part of Heidekreis district in the German state of Lower Saxony.

Bierder Burg
Near the lake, known as the Bierder See, is a wood in which the ruins of an old castle are located. There are the remnants of five ditches that acted as a defence against enemies. The castle itself was intended to control the river Aller, which passes it at a distance of about 100 metres.

Legends
There are many legends about Bierde. The Karlsberg (the highest point in Bierde) is especially shrouded in legend. One of them tells of two giants that fought and hurled stones at each other. These stones then formed the Karlsberg.

Another story tells of when the emperor Charlemagne (German: Karl der Große), stayed there, which is why the hill is named after him.

Dorfhaus
In the centre of the village is the Dorfhaus ("village house"), the old village school.

Heidekreis
Villages in Lower Saxony

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Education, Language & Identity. Creating devolved education systems in Scotland and Wales
16 Mawrth 2016 | 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Prifysgol Aberystwyth, Gawpus Penglais, Penglais, Aberystwyth, SY23 3FL, Y Deyrnas Unedig
Mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Presenters: Dr Rhys Jones and Dr Elin Royles (Aberystwyth University) and Professor Lindsay Paterson and Dr Fiona O'Hanlon (University of Edinburgh)
Chair: Dr Huw Lewis
Location: Interpol Room, Main Hall, Aberystwyth University
Much has been written in various disciplines about the role played by governmental organisations – most notably statutory and more informal educational institutions – in shaping the political and civic identities of young people.
Recent research has increasingly focused on how these kinds of processes are being played out in devolved contexts. This paper builds on this literature by developing a comparative study of youth identities in Scotland and Wales. Drawing on policy literatures from the two countries, as well as interviews with their respective policy makers, it examines the role played by statutory and non-statutory forms of education in shaping civic identities among young people and discusses how these processes are reinforced and complicated by linguistic abilities, especially in relation to the minority languages of Scots Gaelic and Welsh. While certain common features exist in the policy discourses of Scotland and Wales – witness the positive connections that are made in official contexts between minority language ability and devolved youth identities in both countries – there are also marked differences. The paper concludes by developing a place-based approach to understanding youth identities in the two devolved territories, one that may have broader applicability in other non-devolved contexts.
This seminar relates to Work Package 2.3 of WISERD's Civil Society ESRC grant.
I fynychu, cofrestrwch yma
Tagiau Addysg, Lleoliadau | Education, Language & Identity | Elin Royles, Fiona O'Hanlon, Huw Lewis, Lindsay Paterson, Rhys Jones
Rhannu

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The complaint says the BBRSDA is "unlawfully using monies that it receives from taxes imposed on Bristol Bay Fishermen" for uses beyond promoting and marketing Alaska seafood.
A group of Bristol Bay commercial fishermen in Alaska have teamed up with the developer of the Pebble mine prospect to sue the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA) over its use of funds to combat the project.
Alaska Public Media reports the plaintiffs are arguing the BBRSDA's contracts with SalmonState and the United Tribes of Bristol Bay are illegal because the groups oppose the mine, and BBRSDA can only use its funding to market seafood, based on state statute.
The news site also confirms the developers behind the Pebble Mine are funding the lawsuit.
The fishermen are suing BBRSDA over a $250,000 (€222,000) agreement with United Tribes of Bristol Bay and a $27,383 (€23,976) contract with SalmonState, according to a document filed with the Alaska Superior Court on April 1.
The lawsuit alleges both contracts are not being used for seafood marketing. Instead, they are being used to prevent or delay the controversial Pebble Mine project.
The plaintiffs are asking the groups to give back their contract funds to the BBRSDA. They also said the BBRSDA should be "prohibited from using its resource to try to impact the permitting or developing of Pebble Mine."


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A FREE 8 week program for people who had adverse childhood experiences
~ currently offered online ~
The next group starts in January 2023 – stay tuned for details!
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) program helps to build resilience in children, families, and youth. By understanding how such stressors affect the minds and bodies of children, participants can feel safe and supported to break the cycle.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are traumatic or stressful events that may happen before the age of 18.
There are 10 main ACEs that fall under the categories of abuse, neglect and household dysfunction.
Evidence has shown that early life experiences are linked to poor mental and physical health throughout later in life.
Participants of the ACEs Program will learn about how to move forward and build strong family relationships, caregiving skills and resilience.
Join this 8 week program starting in January 2023 on Tuesdays from 10:30 am – 12:00 pm.
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If you want to go VIP, Liquid at Aria is your destination. This 1,200 square foot pool could possibly be this summer's hottest thing. Cool down with one of their signature Mojitos, as you dance to one of the talented DJ's brought in to spin. DJ Loczi and Scene are Liquid resident DJs. Liquid also has eight cabanas, which could comfortably fit a party of 15. Each cabana features two 40-inch plasmas and a PS3 with some of today's best games. Daybeds surround the pool, making for the perfect tanning stations for you and a few friends. And for a high-end experience, Liquid has 2 uber-VIP cabanas that include access to their very own private pool.
If you're looking for a fun time off the strip but still close, Palms is your place. Known for Ditch Fridays, this hot spot is fun and wild! The pool area is separated into three different sections. The first pool stretches in front a handful of rows of lounge chairs in front of the bar and restaurant. Come early if you want your own chair to lie out on. The second area has two-story bungalows, each with their own pool and fireplace. In the third section you tie in an amazing pool with the heart of Vegas and you get six blackjack tables that are set beneath the third pool that offers two waterfalls.
Located at the completely renovated Tropicana. Bagatelle is one of the newest and swankiest pool parties. Classy doesn't begin to describe the atmosphere. They are also known for their Champagne Brunch, so why not spend the rest of the day at their pool?! Let their attentive staff take care of you as you soak in the elegant decor and trendy music.
Hard Rock Beach Club is an oasis tropic with sandy beaches to dig your toes into, multiple pools, a water slide and alcohol that doesn't stop. As one of the largest pool parties in Vegas and a reputation to uphold, the Hard Rock went all out with their pool area. Gamble, drink, dance, and of course swim, all in one location. Why would you ever want to leave?
Be treated like royalty at the Azure pool inside the Palazzo. There are four distinct areas where you can get a different experience within each. The two different pool areas feature plenty of chairs, daybeds, and cabanas. The middle pool is more upbeat with pool toys while the other is more peaceful to relax in. The view from Azure is amazing. You can see the entire strip as you sip on one of their signature drinks at the bar.


Part 1: Mixers and Frequency Conversion.
Part 2: Conversion Gain and Noise Temperature.
Part 3: Terahertz Heterodyne Systems.
Part 4: Feedback Oscillators and Lasers.
Part 5: Negative Resistance Oscillators.
Part 7: Types of Antennas.
Part 8: Link Gain and SNR.
Part 9: Amplitude Modulation & Demodulation.
Part 11: Designing Quasi-Optical Circuits.
Part 13: Demodulating FM Signals.
Part 15: Radar and Ranging.
Part 16: Broadcasting and Communications.
Part 17: Signal-to-Noise of AM and FM.
Part 18: Satellites and their uses.
Part 20: Multiplexing and Subcarriers.
Part 21: Stereo Radio and Colour TV.
Part 22: COFDM and Digital Broadcasting in the UK.
using TechWriter Pro and HTMLEdit on a RISC OS machine.


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Sentica frauenfeldi är en fjärilsart som beskrevs av Scott 1865. Sentica frauenfeldi ingår i släktet Sentica och familjen säckspinnare. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

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Main » Movies » Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
The original name: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Elizabeth Debicki, Chris Sullivan, Sean Gunn, Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell
Genge: Fiction
Release date USA: 2017-05-05
The new movie is going to become the second part of the magnificent adaptation of the epic comic original featuring the same title. Despite the fact that new movie is set to hit theaters only in 2017, there are some details that have been revealed about the sequel already and they keep arriving in trickles.
Considering what is known so far about the second part we can freely conclude we are going to have a new «guardian» who will join the crew of cosmic superheroes as soon as it returns to the big screens. The detail was delivered directly by James Gunn, the director of both parts, in his interview for Twitter's Periscope.
Gunn hasn't revealed however who this additional hero would be, thus it's going to be one of the surprises the movie runners have in sleeve for us. The rumors have it that the new guardian may become a female, as a year ago James Gunn in his interview for Screen Rant said that he fancied adding another woman to the movie lead characters.
According to Gunn they have already started casting for additional characters of the second part of Guardians. He also hinted that he had already discussed informally some details with the actor that to his mind might fit the new story. However, any final decision hasn't been made so far.
Guardians of the Galaxy Cast
While some vague details were given about the cast, nothing is known about the movie plot as well as the exact release date of the second part of Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel Studios is known to be outstandingly good in keeping their projects' details in secret, although there're always some tiny things that manage to leak out.
Gunn have already revealed that in the second part of the story they will somewhat deviate from the comics plot and the search for the father of Star-Lord is going to be the major part of Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
You can also register on site, add Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to your personal cabinet, its date release to Google Calendar. You can vote for your favorite movie of 2019.
Please leave feedback if you watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. It will help others to choose the new film.
The news about Guardians of the Galaxy 2 release was announced even before the first part of this striking movie opened. Marvel Studios authorities delivered that splendid news that was a real bombshell for the movie fans. So, now it's going to be one of the top expected upcoming titles. The release date of Guardians of the Galaxy is prearranged for 2017; the exact date is not scheduled so far. Keep tuned and we will inform you about this as soon as any official information is made public!
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 release date
Subscribe to receive last news and updates status TV show Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. You will receive an automatic email when the show renewed or cancelled.


My entry for Moonlight Challenge Moonlight Challenge. One week left!Hello friends!
What you have to do is just to include an image of the Moon into your photomanipulation. It may be a fantasy, a space scene, a dark work, any genres are accepted. Your moon may be natural or made-up. So you're absolutely free in your imagination! We're sure you'll amaze us with your creativity and originality!
Absolutely stunning. Love your work..xox..
Charming and melodious piece, very beautiful artwork Tatyana.


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Received wisdom is the mind-killer, or, is it time to end the Retro Hugos?
July 30, 2020 science fictionfantasy, history, hugo awards, Hugos, sci fi, science fiction, sf/ffontfolly
False dichotomies…
The Hugo Awards (though at the time they were called the Science Fiction Achievement Awards) were first awarded at the 1953 WorldCon (PhilCon II, which was the 11th World Science Fiction Convention) in a process much different than the way winners are selected today. The organizers of the 1954 WorldCon did not conduct any sort of award survey or ceremony, but the 1955 organizers did, as did the next few WorldCons. It wasn't until 1961 that the rules for the awards were codified with the adoption of the World Science Fiction Society constitution, which also made the awards a permanent recurring part of the convention.
In 1994 the World Science Fiction Society approved the awarding of Retrospective Hugos for those years when there had been a WorldCon, but no Hugos. WorldCons aren't required to award them. Also, Retro Hugos awards are allowed only for specific years: 50, 75, or 100 years before the current Worldcon, and only if another WorldCon hasn't already awarded Retro Hugos for that year.
The original idea was that the Retro Hugos can only be given out 11 times—for the years 1939, 1940, 1941, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, and 1954. Because there was no WorldCon from 1942-1945, due to World War II. A recent rule change now allows for awards for those war years, as well, which is how we got to the ceremony earlier this week at CoNZealand where Retro Hugos for 1945 were handed out.
When I first heard about the idea, I thought it was a good one. People were creating and reading (or viewing) science fiction in those years, and it made sense that the organizations handing out awards for excellence in sf/f should look at award-worthy stuff during that time. It gives fans a chance to read stories with which they are unfamiliar and learn about the history of this genre we love, right? And if gives us, as a community, and opportunity to recognize some works and creators who are less famous today.
In practice, I'm not sure things have exactly worked out that way.
A lot of the Retro Hugos have gone to people who are still famous today (and who often had received plenty of awards while they were still alive). And it isn't even because those are the best stories that made it to the ballot from that year. Several of the Retro Hugos have gone to rather mediocre stories from early in the careers of people who went on later to write much better stuff.
In other words, it seems that a lot of voters aren't actually reading the nominated works, but rather picking works that are written by people they have heard of.
It it difficult to track down some of these old stories, I get it. Even though there are wonderful fan blogs out there publishing lists of links to where you can find these tales (since they have often fallen into the public domain many are available for free). As a voter myself, I admit that each time it has been a struggle to read everything nominated from both the regular Hugo ballot and the Retro Hugo ballot during the time between when the ballots are announced and when voting closes.
An even more difficult category is Best Editor, Short Form. Which is, in practical terms, an award for best magazine editor. So in order to do one's due diligence this year, for instance, you would have to peruse all of the issues published in the eligibility year of the at least the magazines Astounding Stories, Weird Tales, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Planet Stories.
That's a lot of 75-year-old magazines to track down.
And if, like me, you track down scanned versions of the old zines at places like the Internet Archive, probably your first reaction will be a lot of "WTF?" because all the 'zines from that era printed a lot of stuff which would never pass muster today. A month or so ago it shouldn't have surprised me at how much WTF-material there was (because this is hardly my first time looking at stories and magazines from the time), yet it did a bit. It's amazing how quickly we forget the weird stuff, the poorly written stories you couldn't force yourself to finish, and so on. You remember the stories you thought weren't bad (and sometimes even quite good) more than the other stuff.
If you aren't willing to do that, you're going to fall back (as the voters did this year), and the name you know: John f-ing Campbell, yet again.
I haven't read every single issue of Astounding (later renamed Analog) Campbell ever edited, but I've read enough to draw an opinion of his skills as an editor overall. Looking at the stories he published in the year under questions, to the extent I could in the time frame, I found his selection of stories to be overall, mediocre. Yes, there was good stuff in there, but the was a lot more meh than wow.
I believe strong arguments can be made for at least two of the other nominees to be ranked above Campbell in this particular year. But if you point that out, people come back with basically three counter-arguments:
Everyone knows that Astounding was hands-down the best sci fi 'zine of the time so who else could anyone vote for,
Campbell's influence over the field dwarfs everyone else so who else could anyone vote for,
I liked more of the stories in the Astounding issues I sampled than in the others so…
The third of those arguments is the only one with any legitimacy. But let's deal with the first two before I tackle the third.
It's amazing how many people still feel the need to defend the already much lauded racist, fascist misogynist…
"Everyone knows" is simply a really bad reason to make any decision. We're talking about very subjective things here, for one. And for most people it's all second-hand knowledge at best. Most contemporary fans weren't alive 75 years ago, let alone comprehensibly reading everything that was published. And cultural artifacts don't survive equally. Astounding appealed to a certain demographic who, for a variety of reasons, are much more likely to live and remain active in a particularly hobby for many years than some others. The demographic has also, historically, had its preferences elevated above other groups, whose preferences and activities are often erased from history.
Also, the Suck Fairy has had 75 years to visit those publications. You shouldn't fall back on the received wisdom without verifying for yourself.
As to the second argument, well, Donald J. Trump's influence over the United States right now dwarfs everyone else, but it hardly means historians should be handing him a "Best President" trophy. I know that metaphor is a stretch, but the point is that having a lot of influence isn't the same thing as using that influence well. And again, how much of Campbell's influence was due to him, and how much is it due to that ability of the demographic he most appealed to to have an outsized impact on how the time period is remembered?
That third argument is a reasonable reason to determine who you vote for, I agree. But at least some of the people I've seen making that argument don't stop at "this is why I voted for him," they went on and tacked on the "…so who else could anyone vote for?"
Judging the editor categories is always difficult. Most people approach it by voting for the nominee who published the stuff the individual voter liked most.
That's not the only criteria one ought to consider, in my opinion. Full disclosure: for over twenty years I edited a very small 'zine that printed science fiction. Our circulation was never over about 300, but we also knew we were aiming at a particular niche. Still, it means I judge editors by more than just whether I like every story they publish. I didn't limit myself, as an editor, to publishing only stories I thought were award-worthy and would stand the test of time. I picked stories because I thought my readers would like them and were worth their time and attention. Another quality I judge editors on is how well they seem to know their audience. If I have information about how they treat the writers they work with and the staff of their publications, I let that influence me, too.
Because giving your audience things they will enjoy (which isn't the same thing as fan service, but that's another discussion), cultivating writers, and managing staff are all also part of the job of an editor.
If I only voted for the editors whose publications I loved (and only stories I loved, et cetera), there would have been a lot more No Awards on my Hugo ballots over the last five years. I can look at something that isn't to my particular taste and say, "Well, I don't like that, but I know a lot of people do, and this seems to be a competent execution/exploration of a topic I don't care for" and go ahead and vote for it. It'll just be lower on my ballot than other things.
None of this is to say that no one has a right to vote for Campbell in the Retros. The question I raise in the title of this blog post is about whether the Retro Hugos are actually recognizing things that are award-worthy, or merely handing out trophies to nominees based on received wisdom instead of merit.
Unfortunately, the jury is still out.
Edited to add: Not many minutes after this published, one reader pointed out a copy-and-paste blunder that ate one whole sentence and part of a word.
Then another pointed out that my question is sort rhetorical for at least the next year, since the 1946 Retros were given out at LA Con III back in 1996, so it won't be until 2022 that the question will come up again. To which I say, an amendment to the WSF Constitution has to be passed at two WorldCons before taking effect, though we don't need a rule change if the organizers of 2022 and later conventions can be convinced that maybe these aren't a great idea…
ETA 2: As always, Cora Buhlert writes much more informatively and nicely than I do on a fannish subject: Some Thoughts on the 1945 Retro Hugo Winners.
ETA 3: I wrote a rebuttal to this a big later: It shouldn't require a keymaster to have fun, or, canon and other forms of gatekeeping in sf/f.
And Cora Buhlert wrote more elequantly on the same topic and included a lot links to other people writing on the same topic: Why the Retro Hugos Have Value.
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3 thoughts on "Received wisdom is the mind-killer, or, is it time to end the Retro Hugos?"
Pingback: Recognizing Who Should Have Been Seen All Along, or, Why the Retro Hugos Are Worth Saving | Font Folly
Pingback: More Reactions to the 2020 Hugo Ceremony and a bit about the Retro Hugos | Cora Buhlert


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Timeline Publication Pvt. Ltd. "Submissions Open For Volume 7,Issue 5,Mar.-Apr.,2019"
Timeline Publication Pvt. Ltd."Submissions Open For Volume 7,Issue 5,Mar.-Apr.,2019"
ISSN : 2319 – 1473 , Publisher : Timeline Publication Pvt. Ltd.
IJAIR ( ICV : 80.67 ) is an international academic online journal which gains a foothold in India, Asia and opens to the world . It aims to promote the research in the feild of agriculture. The focus is to publish quality papers on state-of-the-art of Agriculture. Submitted papers will be reviewed by technical committees of the Journal and Association. All submitted articles should report original, previously unpublished research results, experimental or theoretical, and will be peer-reviewed. Articles submitted to the journal should meet these criteria and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts should follow the style of the journal and are subject to both review and editing.


I should be tackling the ironing thrown over a chair for the last ten days, but instead I'll quickly note some of the FASCINATING bits gleaned from the year-old Guardian review section that I read in bed last night.
1) I had never stopped to think that the word museum comes from "the Greek term "museion"... first applied to temples dedicated to the muses."
2) Resonant lines from poet Kevin Hart: "A single word can darken the widest room / Even in summer."
4) Guppies is the new term for the "Great Unpublished."
5) From Katharine Whitehorn's review of David Kynaston's Family Britain 1951-1957: Tales of a New Jerusalem — "rationing [was] not finally called off until July 1954"; in 1952 London smog was so bad that "a performance of La Traviata had to be cancelled halfway through because the audience could no longer see the stage"; "as late as 1958, Woman's Own didn't do bathroom features, because too few of their readers had one"; and the obligatory sand reference, teddy boys going out for a night on the town with their "wooden stakes and sand-filled socks."
6) Virginia Woolf on the outsider status of women writers (A Room of One's Own): "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in."
All this and I'm only about two-thirds of the way through the reviews. . . .


Stone forts are a common archaeological feature in the west of Ireland. The Irish words caiseal (English 'cashel'), cathair ('caher') and dún ('doon'), all meaning 'a fort', are used to describe them. Many appear to be similar in function to the earthen ringforts found throughout the country and were probably built as homesteads during the period 500 - 800AD. A number of stone forts stand out due to their size, their prominent locations or their complex and massive defensive features.
Twenty-five of these complex forts are known, among them Dún Aonghasa on Inis Mór in the Aran Islands, Co. Galway, Grianán Aileach, Co. Donegal and Staigue Fort, Co. Kerry. Some forts may have as many as three enclosing walls, the inner wall being the most massive. Apart from their strong defences these forts share common architectural features, such as terracing of the walls, stone steps, and passages or chambers within the enclosing walls.
A small number have the unusual feature of a chevaux de frise - a band of closely set upright pillars of stone which formed an extra line of defence. The most spectacular example of a cheveaux de frise in Europe survives at Dún Aonghasa. Some forts date as far back as the Late Bronze Age (circa 1000BC) and a small number were substantially remodelled even into the early medieval period. Grianán Aileach, Co. Donegal provides a good example of this phenomenon. The central stone fort was probably built in the later part of the first millenium AD and was the royal seat of the kings of Cenél nÉogain (Northern Uí Néill).