Karen Matthews and single mothers

Some more stuff on single mothers, linked to the Shannon Matthews' case.

Daily Telegraph article defending single mothers (and lots of comments attacking the article).

Barbara Ellen in The Guardian on "why Karen Matthews really offended the middle classes".

News of the World "Evil Karen Matthews two-timed pervert lover with sick kidnapper" (or something like that)

Social workers and children's services

Following the horrific Baby P story, the papers have been full of vitriolic attacks on social workers in Haringey (and in general). Here's a taste of some of the ways in which this social group and individuals such as Sharon Shoesmith have been represented comments on The Sun's message boards.

Sun letters and texts

Daily Mirror - view from a social worker

Daily Mail - "bungling social workers put children at risk"

Daily Mail - social workers criticised for "flimsy abuse claim"

You can't win with the Daily Mail, can you?

As an ENGA1 mode exercise, you might find the comparisons between Sun letters and text messages useful too.

Single mothers

I've encouraged my students to google a phrase to get texts on a more specific topic.  Demonstrating it with "single mother", some of the first-page hits I got were: this Guardian piece on J K Rowling and her rags-to-riches story (from July 1997); this Independent comment by Kate Saunders on her own experience (from Apr 2007) and this wonderful example from the Daily Mail about a single Nigerian mother who lives in a big house that - guess what - we the taxpayers are funding (from Nov 2008).  There's clearly enough here for an investigation, but any of the texts could also be used as part of an 'institution' investigation into the idea of Family, or further texts about J K Rowling or Omowunmi Odia could be found for a piece on individuals.

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?

Gordon Brown's speech to Labour Party conference

I've blogged this at the SFX site if anyone wants to use the links there.

Knife Crime reporting

Programme coming up on Monday night Radio 4 9pm which sounds good. I'm going to try to record it to use.

Binge drinking

Now that term's properly begun, this is what I feel like doing every day. Here's a link to Terry Kirby in The Guardian looking at the background to binge drinking in Britain and its representation in the media.

Andy Murray coverage during Wimbledon 2008

Here are a range of press extracts from this year's Wimbledon, all offering representations of an individual (Andy Murray) during the 10 days he was in the competition: The Sun 25/6/08, Daily Mirror 30/6/08 and 1/7/08, Daily Record 1/7/08, Daily Mail 2/7/08 and The Sun 3/7/08

Youth crime - an historical perspective

Good article about moral panics over youth crime from Mick Hume in The Times.

Channel 4 Dispatches - press coverage of Muslims

Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday 7th July looks at how Muslims have been represented in the British media, particularly since the July 7th bombings.

The very detailed Cardiff University report into media representations of Muslims is available here.

Disarming Britain

Site supporting Channel 4's season on gun and knife crime in Britain.

The programmes themselves could be good for use in class and might help with resources from other modes, plus there's a blog and sets of links to other sites focusing on the issue.

Welcome to new contributors

There are quite a few new contributors joining and what I've done so far is to make everyone an "editor" which means you can all post new material to the blog without it going through the site administrator (me). Hopefully that's the most straightforward and democratic way of running it.

For anyone new to blogging, we can't actually host any files here: what we can do is link to other sites and add a few comments about what might be useful about the links (although that's not absolutely necessary). If you do want to share actual resources beyond links, I have purchased some webspace under a similar name to this blog and we can use that. Just email me if you want some material to go on the site, or if you want help with anything on here.

When you post, there are tags and categories that can be added to help place the different links in the right topic areas. I've tried to base the ones posted so far on the categories in the AQA A spec for this unit, but if you think of your own tags, just add them as you see fit.

With a bit of luck we'll soon have lots of stuff to share and loads of ideas to think about.

Representation of soldiers' wives and partners

From today's Sun. Might be good for its obviously gendered construction of Daniel Gamble's girlfriend's  identity ("Heartbroken Tammy", "Inconsolable Tammy" , "pretty shop assistant Tammy").

Social groups - "pikeys"

BBC Magazine article on the word "pikey"

Wikipedia's definitions of "pikey"

ENGA2 - representation of Muslims in Britain

The Guardian - Inside the world of UK Muslim women:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/01/britishidentity.islam?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

The Guardian - Recognise our role in society

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jan/21/islamandbritain.comment5

International Herald Tribune - Head-to-toe Muslim veils test tolerance of secular Britain

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6263112

Muslim Women's Sport Foundation in the media

http://www.mwsf.org.uk/media.html

Majeds Blog - Do Muslim Women Need Empowering?

http://majedsblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/event-analysis-do-muslim-women-in-britain-need-empowering/

The Daily Mail - Hairdresser sued for refusing to hire Muslim woman in a headscarf

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-492407/Hairdresser-sued-refusing-hire-Muslim-woman-headscarf.html

Muslim Parents Association UK - Shaping the Future: A Call to Parents

http://www10.brinkster.com/muslimpa/parenting1.asp

War in Afghanistan - reports from Telegraph

I thought these were good links to articles about the war in Afghanistan and a video diary that might be good for transcription and analysis. The Telegraph articles are by Thomas Harding and I think they'd be interesting to analyse on their own as texts as well as ones to group together for study on ENGA2.

Telegraph article on paratroopers' assault on Taliban

Paratroopers launch surprise attack

Video diary

ENGA2 - representation of reality TV

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/27/bbc.television (news feature)

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/01/television.tvandradioarts (TV review, Sam Wollaston)

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/15/television (TV review, Lucy Mangan)

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/22/television.tvandradioarts (TV review, William Leith)

· http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3628496.ece (TV review, Tim Teeman)

· http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-558517/Spare-pathetic-bleating-The-Apprentice-nasty-Britain-needs-winners---politically-correct-losers.html (Opinion feature, Piers Morgan)

ENGA2 - representations of mental health

· http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=frank+bruno&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Search+Archives (Frank Bruno links)

· http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/news/btn/bruno_sun.shtml (on Bruno story)

· http://www.sane.org.uk/News/View/87 (on Bruno story)

· http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2005/10/20/sotv20.xml&sSheet=/sport/2005/10/20/ixothspt.html (on Bruno story)

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/nov/30/broadcasting.comment (Gail Porter)

· http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/story/0,,364026,00.html

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,368968,00.html

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/11/mentalhealth

ENGA2 resources

Representation of celebrity:

Snoop Dogg

Representation of immigration:

First hand accounts of coming to Britain

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