DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Yesterday I went into a Sheffield school to film a teacher who loads of kids reported to be really good. It was their history teacher who they liked so much and their views were passed on to me by their form teacher.

I have been thinking for a while about the inadequacy of my PhD work and how in focussing just on spoken language in the classroom, I had missed all sorts of crucial information about the communicative process. (My PhD looks at spoken language, learning and gender). Aaaaanyway, influenced by Gunther Kress , Carey Jewitt et al, I decided to take in 2 video cameras to the school and had one trained on the pupils and the other on the really good teacher. I wanted to look at what things he seemed to be doing that so engaged the kids.

I am so pleased with the quality of the recordings - visually and sound wise. For the teacher I used my new Sony DVD recorder with a bluetooth microphone. The microphone was excellent. But diappointingly the mini DVD only records half an hour, so that I had to change it half way through. AND then you have to put the recording onto a bigger DVD if you want to use it with most playback machines. So TRY before you buy. (Unlike me.)

The fsacinating thing is that the kids’ favoutrite teacher keeps them under PERFECT control, is very traditional (suit and tie) and makes no jokes. It has to be said (counter-intuitively) that he is an excellent teacher and held the kids spellbound for much of the lesson. They seemed to REALLY learn. It is going to be so good doing a mulit-modal analysis of all the data.

Later I went for a research conversation at The University … and as is so often at these things, it triggered off things in my mind about my work and I was able to scribble down ideas about how learning takes place when affinities form online. I was thinking about how (as in off line situations) shared jokes emerge; shared phrases; how people joke around with those; how those shared jokes sometimes work through visuals; through sound; through moving image (e.g through You tube.) . And I was thinking about how this stuff is a magnification of the learning through language stuff I wrote about in my PhD. How through using language, through talk especially, kids ‘come to know’. (Vygotsky’s stuff.) This is the way as groups of people we blend our ideas together and create third spaces. I wanted to use the word ‘culture jamming’ for this, but that term is already taken. It is some kind of jamming process though. It is ‘SOMETHING jamming. Anyway I was thinking also how these things happen off line of course and that in fact it is these things which a multi modal analysis in the classroom can look at. I realised how looking at things online, sometimes makes more explicit for me, things that are going on off line. (Does that make sense?)