Talking Points
Chapter 1.
Everything depends on the teacher
The teacher is the expert
Teachers are self-made
Signs
Signifiers
Practices
Languages
Meanings
Signs and symbols
Catherine Belsey writes, “the differences [language] constructs may seem to be natural, universal, and unalterable when in realityt they may be produces by a specific form of organization.”
Chapter 2.
Common sense oppositions: e.g.,
between content and method
professional knowledge and individual teacher identity
in school and outside of school concepts and structures
Teacher descriptions as metaphors for whole sets of philosophical assumptions about the purposes and goals of schooling
7. Oppositions usually construct hierarchies and value judgments seen as natural but constructed through language and practice
What are the implications for the school curriculum? This remains unclear.
Reader-response theory is juxtaposed to expert interpretations of popular culture. Who knows how the consumers are making meaning?
Creating problems that then have to be solved by the experts
Establishing languages that make some people members of the discourse community (professionalizing the work)
11. Power: think about power as a characteristic of relationships (NOT as a “thing” that people have or don’t have, and NOT as a designator of hierarchy).
12. Technology of … practices work like “machines” in that they do the work that makes something possible, or makes something into common sense, etc.
13. Power/knowledge: People used to think of power and knowledge as two separate “things” that may or may not be related to each other in some way. Foucault’s clever move was to see them as one and the same, and to see them as enacted through practices that serve as technologies of power/knowledge.
14. Technology of morality: practices act to construct a “natural” state of affairs regarding technologies of the self and technologies of morality. The stuff on oppositions in discourse resurface in this theoretical context.
Chapter –1.
15. Commodities. Stuff that can be consumed. Often, commodities are “things” understood as things only through practices of “commodification.”
16. Cultural resources. This goes back to reader response and consumer consumption: how DO people consume? Maybe they are using commodities as resources for the creation of new meanings and new identities?
17. But even if commodities can be understood as cultural resources, people are still living in consumer culture! There’s no escape! What are the implications?
Further discussion:
Consumer culture creates children and adults as distinct product markets, with further subdivisions of these markets. Adult culture and education are constructed for children as negative and in violation of the pleasures of childhood. For adults entertainment is marketed as potentially educational. For youth, entertainment is marketed as specifically NOT educational. Adults recoil in horror at popular culture. But anything that is setup as taboo is cultivated by advertisement as related to the anti-adult culture, and hence becomes attractive as a commodity.
The danger with consumer-media education is its potential association in kids’ minds with negative authority, with adult criticism of kids’ pleasures and fantasies. Deconstruction may appear more like destruction, teaching more like preaching and teachers may be construed as anti-youth and anti-pleasure. It is possible that teachers unwittingly offer students the implicit message that somehow or other they are in the wrong – ‘their own worst enemy’ in fact. (Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen, Consuming Children)
In schools, the popular is profane. What do we mean by this?