Gordon Ramsay is a "lying, cheating, hypocritical scumbag"

No, don't beat about the bush: tell us what you really think.

Here's the News of the World's Carole Malone telling us what she thinks of the f-word chef (presumably that f-word is now fidelity). Nice use of premodifiers there...

Obituaries

[caption id="attachment_38" align="alignleft" width="123" caption="elliott smith"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_39" align="alignright" width="86" caption="richey edwards"][/caption]

Representation of individuals in obituaries? Here's one from this week's Guardian which has a bit of a twist: no one is really sure if he's dead or not. And then a couple of others of musicians who've met untimely deaths...

Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers

Elliott Smith

Kurt Cobain of Nirvana

Arthur Lee of Love

Tupac Shakur

Article on Ian Curtis of Joy Division

Ideas for ENGA2 coursework projects - wikis

We've spent about a month with 4 classes on the ENGA2 work so far. Our classes are all taught by 2 teachers with one doing ENGA1 and the other doing ENGA2, so it means we get 3 periods a week on coursework.

In my 2 classes we've done some early work on social groups and individuals, with students using our college VLE (Moodle) to track a celebrity/ individual in the news and post their links to a wiki. It's a pretty simple idea but if you've not come across a wiki before, it might need some explanation.

Basically, a wiki is a lo-fi website that allows students to create their own pages with text, images and links to other sites. We've got it set up so each student has their own wiki and we can, as teachers, access all their wikis to check on progress. The kinds of things they're posting are links to stories about their chosen individuals and celebs, so one student has been looking at how Jean Charles De Menezes has been represented in the press during the inquiry into his shooting, several have looked at Barack Obama in the run up to and afternmath of his election, some have looked at Madonna, Guy Ritchie, Kerry Katona, Sarah Palin, Lewis Hamilton, Gordon Brown...the list goes on. But they're posting the links to their wikis and keeping tabs on evolving news stories, so that's a start.

The difficult bit is getting them to then select the most useful stuff from these stories to analyse for representation. We've spent about 3 lessons so far selecting and analysing anything from 2-3 word noun phrases ("troubled Amy Winehouse", "former drug abuser Kerry Katona") to whole paragraphs of text where more complex discourses are presented.

They're now moving onto a 2nd tracking exercise on events, issues or institutions, before we do a third and final one at the end of term on social groups.

Alongside this, we've started getting them to do some analytical work to show them what kinds of frameworks are relevant, and for this I've used extracts on how young people are represented. I'll post up the links or files later this week.

Anyway, what's everyone else doing or planning to do? I can't claim that our approach is particularly original or successful (who knows what'll actually get written for the coursework) but it'd be good to hear of any other approaches from teachers of ENGA2.

More on representation of young people

This follows on from the Barnardo's ads earlier in the week.

Martin Narey of Barnardo's in The Times

Most adults chink children are "feral and a danger to society"

Kids these days: are they all bad?

Marcel Berlins in The Guardian

They're people not animals

Representation of young people

Some good stuff on the BBC website today linked to the new Barnardo's campaign "Children in Trouble".

BBC story

Barnardo's campaign

Could be a good investigation focus with a ready-made creative task in writing a charity ad to present a more positive representation?