Teachers teaching teachers, is there pedagogy for that?

So far in my teaching career, I have attended two training sessions both with the aims of aiding the teacher with knowledge of how to teach pupils with English as an Additional Language (EAL). After attending one of these sessions at a Computing at School conference today, I began reflecting on the actual pedagogy behind teaching teachers about these matters. Both sessions began with the session leader conducting the training in another language: in one the session leader began talking to us in Spanish (although I can speak Spanish), and the other gave us an activity written entirely in Polish. I thought that this was a very useful method to get teachers to reflect upon their lessons and the language that we take for granted. Putting ourselves in the pupils shoes is often difficult when we already know the knowledge we are trying to convey, but if we do not know a language it is easier to empathise with EAL learners. This is often one thing that I am guilty of forgetting, I will ensure that when planning lessons for EAL pupils I think about it from a non-English speaking point of view and invoke the use of sound and pictures to convey the meaning.

However, this got me thinking about the overall teaching of teachers. Who trains these teachers to teach teachers? Is there a pedagogy that trainers must understand to teach pedagogy to teachers? It would be very interesting to research into this and find results, watch this space.

Makeovers in film: The scientific superman and the prom queen

Make over films are my favourite type of film to watch when I am feeling like I need to organise my life. When at university, I would always leave my referencing until after I had finished the essay: usually the day before the hand in date. My favourite thing to do, whilst mindlessly Harvard referencing, was to watch Legally Blonde. However, only now do I realise the subliminal influence referencing had over me, watching a film set at the very institution whose referencing I was following: Harvard University. At the end of every essay I always felt like I was physically at my lowest, although intellectually at my highest. My hair was greasy, body hair overgrown, and my health was not at its best having eaten copious amounts of sharing bags of chocolate and crisps. I always felt a need that after I had finished my essays, now was the time to ‘pick myself up’ and makeover my body. Although legally blonde provided me with the girl power motivation to finish my essays and have an intellectual makeover, growing up with these types of films, I am partial to a physical makeover film.

Makeover films provide me with such inspiration and motivation to ‘sort’ my body out. However, just as Legally Blonde invokes making over my mind, it could be argued other ‘makeover’ films are more than skin deep. On the surface, She’s All That, a film in which a popular ‘Jock’ has a bet with his friend that he can make turn the ‘dorky art’ girl into the teen film beloved Prom Queen, appears to simply show the changing physical appearance of the ‘geeky’ protagonist. However, if one adopts a sociological view point, it could be argued that the subsequent ‘makeover’ of the Jock results in his openness and tolerance to go beyond the feminine beauty ideals when forming friendships.

When reflecting upon these films, it occurred to me that all films of this genre involve the smart female protagonist changing into the intelligent attractive ideal of a woman that emerged from the 1990s into the millennium. A quick Google search of male makeover films returns movies in which the male protagonist evolves into a super-human character: the Nutty Professor, Superman, Spiderman, Ironman etc. Often these makeovers are not a result of the protagonist actively changing their physical appearance for social acceptance, but rather the active result of science; the radioactive substance which turns the average man into these superheroes. Indeed, this is sociologically interesting. Men in these circumstances are given no choice with these makeovers, it is not society which decides their makeover but rather an accidental mutation generated by their contact with science (again, a male dominated field). If it was not for these mutations, the men would go about their day and would not be involved with this ‘makeover’.

Once again, a sociological look at some of my favourite viewing material has resulted in looking at my reality in a different, albeit, fractured way. Watching Clueless will never be the same again.