Horizon

Shit, can't these bozos think of something either more useful or more creative to do with their lives?

I hope it's OK to quote from a review I wrote back in 1986. I was working (as I had done for twenty years) as a teacher in an inner-London primary school, so when I was sent a book called "The Social World of the Primary School", I felt qualified to write about it.

The relevant section starts with reference to another book, also reviewed:

"...in spite of a recurrence of phrases like 'dysfunctional stigmatization' or 'theme-centred interaction methods', it generally avoids the danger of confusing description with explanation.

Dr Pollard's sadly doesn't. His avowed aim is to help teachers make their tacit knowledge explicit; but though he labours hard at his thesis, he succumbs to the appeal of his own unnecessary terminology. His perceptions are buried beneath a weight of mystificatory incantation that Jonson's alchemists or Pentagon press-officers would envy. A teacher beginning to call the children's names 'asserts the frame of the register sub-phase' and children cheerfully accepting a rebuke 'comply behaviourally with a post-desist performance to the teacher's definition of situation.' In fairness, this kind of vacuity is an occupational hazard of the phenomenological approach to the sociology of everyday life.

Dr Pollard's axioms - that people in institutions act on the basis of shared meanings, that children and teachers react to one another by setting up a rule-bound consensus shaped by the balances of power between them, etc. - seem trite, and the detailed accounts of classroom life he draws from them seem more so. The notion of identity at the heart of the book, derived from GH Mead's 'symbolic interactionism', deliberately excludes any concept of personality beyond the sum of a person's social roles; and the book's account of the wider social influences on schools amounts to little more than Gramsci-and-water. Young teachers wanting to understand what goes on in their school would do better to read The Harpole Report and keep their eyes and ears open..."

That still seems fair to me, and I can still remember how annoyed I was by the book and by the sense of distant smugness the author's tone conveyed.

And now the Horizon-synch moment - only a couple of days ago I heard that Dr Pollard - now metamorphosed into Professor Pollard - directs the national Teaching and Learning Research Programme. To quote from their website: "TLRP is a coordinated research initiative. Its overarching purpose is to support and develop educational research leading to improvements in outcomes for learners of all ages..." and "TLRP is directed by Professor Andrew Pollard, Institute of Education, University of London. It is managed by the Economic and Social Research Council on behalf its funders. To date, it has received some £30m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Scottish Executive, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Department for Education and Skills."

I wonder whether that £30 million might have been more worthily spent.

All good stuff: but why didn't this show up on Horizon?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/iraq_debate.shtml

Mr Galloway loses, and badly.

JP

Most likely because Horizon's guiding editorial rule is "if it's been done elsewhere, don't bother." You also didn't see coverage of the Roberts confirmation hearings here, nor of various bombings in Iraq, nor speculation on the wisdom of re-building New Orleans, nor tittering over the shoddy photoshopping at CAIR's site. Harry's Place seems to have covered the Hitchens-Galloway debate quite well, and I see nothing at all that someone who didn't hear it, wasn't there, and hasn't read any more on the subject than anyone else has could add.

Or if you wish, "Boo, Galloway's a slime!" There. Wasn't that a useful addition to the debate? Keep tuned to Horizon for more jaw-dropping analyses of current events.

Back on topic, the discourse analysis translation is nice. I've been thinking about posting a sampling of lines from a few books I'm reading for the purposes of comparison. I think it'll be pretty obvious that Hardcore Java is more of a page-turner than Racializing Jesus.

Back to Alan's original post...

It is revealed that children at the party are not just playing games and opening gifts, but involved in a complex social system where adults model and facilitate the construction and integration of past, present, and future relationships.

I think would be more accurately translated as:

(Parents use this time to teach children that it's a good idea to refrain from hurting the feelings of others if you want to remain friends.)

But that's just a small nit-pick. Other than that, I found Alan's deconstruction of discourse analysis to reveal the humourless structure of the academe's environment with additional implications for understanding how discourse analysis activities provide opportunities for examining how language obsfucation and academic socialization are enacted as interactional achievements and serve to turn the writer into a big fat bore.

Or if you wish, "Boo, Galloway's a slime!" There. Wasn't that a useful addition to the debate?

What Ben said. I get so tired of that red-faced gloating which seems to be the staple of Harry's Place.

Tom, thanks for sharing. Love the phrase "mystificatory incantation".

Ben, I feel bad about leaving you in the lurch because I was lazy about ordering it, but I just don't know whether I can shell out 30 smackers for a book about biblical scholarship which uses capitalization rules from object oriented programming.

Objective consideration of the previous poster's (i.e., Sara's) dialogic contribution compells me to construct an embodied mono-binary affirmative assent action soon to be wideCast to the multyLayered web of hyperDiscourse known colloqially as the net, thereby directing the quizzical gaze of the virtual other in her general direction.

Browsing Amazon today, I was reminded that all of their "Look Inside" books include text statistics. I coudldn't resist looking up Racializing Jesus.

Turns out that Ben's reading-group-of-one's book choice rates in the top (worst?) 5% of books for readability using both the Fog and Flesch-Kincaid Index.

Heidegger is also the most frequently used word in the book.

Heidegger is also the most frequently used word in the book.

Talk about coincidence!