Watch Mrs Stevens on TV!!In the summer, the digital TV station - Teachers TV - came to GHS to make a programme called 'Classroom Swap' where your ace Media Studies teacher swapped classrooms with a teacher from a neighbouring school. A bit like 'Wife Swap' but with an educational purpose!
It has been broadcast on Freeview and Sky several times over the past few months and can now be seen online on the Teachers TV website.
What do you think of her performance?
6 comments:
swear down someone 'wolf whistled'at Ms Stevens..oi oi
LoL HAHA yeh i heard that!
puja x
wat the hells goin on y isnt my name on the list im suppoosed to be master editor
Assess the contribution of functionalism to an understanding of the role of education in society.
Education is the biggest source of learning in society today. It is used as an institution of learning to fill the youth of today with vast amounts of knowledge. attitudes and skills. Education also teaches children the unwritten rules of society through the "hidden cirriculum". Education today is used to suppress the opinions of higher powers into the youth to shape how society will turn out.
Functionalists believe that education has three main functions: Firstly education acts as a form of socialisation because it addresses unwritten norms and values of society into young people. Examples of these norms and values are: personal achievement, individualism, competition etc. Secondly, education teaches the skills required by the industrial society. These skills can be literary or numerical or designated skills for a particular type of workforce. Thirdly, education allocates people to jobs that most suit their ability and intelligence. This can be seen as equality of opportunity because people of all abilities can be assigned to a job that fits their needs. Functionalists such as Parsons and Durkheim agreed with this view of how education plays a big role in society.
However, marxists challenge the functionalist view of education stating that instead of educating young people to fit jobs of their own ability, educations main function is to transmit common values. Althusser (1971) refers to education as an ideological state apparatus. He believed educations main focus was to maintain and reproduce class inequalities in wealth and power by transmitting capitalist values as common values. He believes this is fulfilled through the hidden cirriculum, this contradicts the functionalist view arguing that the hidden cirriculum teaches the values of a capitalist society rather than that of an equal society where employment was based on ability of that person. Another criticism of the functionalist view on education is that of Bowles and Gintis (1976) who argue that education reproduces the capitalist relations of production, enforcing the visibility of a hierachy. On the other hand, functionalists like Parsons and David and Moore would disagree fully claiming education is a form of early role allocation. It gets people suited and sorted to fit the occupation which most matches their ability, which could in some forms be seen as a state of equality.
Furthermore, interactionalist Paul Willis (1977) provides major criticism for both theories stating they are too deterministic, this mean they abuse children as passive products in the educational system. Willis' study was the first to point out the rise in anti-school and pro-school subcultures which had developed over the change of the education system. Rosenthal and Jacobson are two interactionalists who investigated how teacher labelling can affect a students achievement. During an experiment to test their theory, they collected a random sample of pupils in an elementary school in USA. They set an iq test within this sample and then reversed the results, therefore, the clever pupils received the low marks and the less capable pupils received the high marks. This led to a year of labelling via the teacher and when they went back a year later to redo the iq test, they found that the less capable students who had received the lower marks first hand, and now immenselt increased their iqs'. Rosenthal and Jacobson left this theory down to the method of labelling and self fulfiling prophecy.
In conclusion, functionalists have a whole different opinion to the way marxists and interactionalists see education. The difference between positive and negative is clearer shown through the contrast between education transmittig equal values to that off teacher bias in the classroom.
Sociological Methods.
f) Sociologists would choose their research methods depening on factors like practical considerations, ethical issues and also methodological issues. However, before resorting to these points, they must consider whether each factor would overtake another.
Practical considerations should be taken when investigating so that the methods are able to be continued. There are many factors which can alter the outcome. The researcher will have to keep an eye on the timing, because if time runs out too quick, then the investigation cannot continue. Financial support is a big issue as well because the researcher would need funds to support their project and if the funds arent there then the investigation will not be able to happen. The nature of the subject and how respondents would react also has an effect as the results could be distorted which means the research can not take place and also the idea of research opportunity, if the research can actually take place and how, plays a major part in what research method can be used. Therefore, practical concerns heavily affect the choice of research methods as if the wrong one is chosen the research would fail and the data gathered would be invalid.
Ethical factors as shown in Item B also hold great importance in the decision of what research methods are used by a sociologist. They must choose a method their participants will give consent to and allow the research to continue. The importantance of anonymity among the identities of the participants is also vital because if it is not kept confidential many respondents would not give consent. Furthermore, is the potential impact the research could have on a participant. As they could be in trouble as they are caught taking part in illegal activities or it could have emotional ill-effects if the research is on a distressing subject such as rape which challenge ethical issues.
However, methodological issues also have great importance. The sociologist would have to choose a method which would lead to the best results according to the type of research subject. The method chosen would also reflect the theory or opinion held by the researcher, if the researcher were an interpretivist, this would lead to qualitative methods being used or if the researcher were positivist, this would lead to quantitative methods.
In conclusion, methodological issues could be seen as the most important because if the incorrect method was chosen the whole research would be pointless. Ethical issues also must be considered as people’s lives and feelings must be taken into account and some methods may be avoided.
Practical Production Brief.
Saz Jayajothy
For my practical production, I have established a group of 4 peers including myself to produce a short film based on common conventions of a typical Italian mafia movie. We have titled our production "The Rose Mob" and we all agreed the rose would have some sort of iconography as an aspect in a gangsta film.
The narrative for this production will be based along the lines of Scarface, however, instead of there being one main character, my movie will have five main characters, who are part of Londons most notorious mob, who all help each other rise to the top of the mafia game. However, in our scandal of a scenario, the rose mob have been framed for crimes that didn't commit and our narrative begins as the good guys projected as bad guys. However this movie has an inventive twist, as you will find out. The target audience we hope to aim this movie at will be 16 -young 20's, this is a younger version of the target audience used for other more modern and up to date 'gangsta' films such as Resevoir Dogs (1992) and which was 18 -late 20's. We aim to attract a mixture of middle class and working class people as they would be most able to adapt to the movie and are most likely to have a particualr genre within the film that they enjoy in other movies that they are interested in. This movie will contain common aspects of an 'Italian Mobster' film because the production has been heavily influenced by other gangsta films such as the 'Godfather' series of the 1970's and the unforgettable 'Scarface' of 1983.
This movie will challenge common views of a stereotypical gangsta films as it will contain Asain actors playing 'gangsta's' in a British suburban scene. The use of guns, drugs and violence will most likely be at a minimal during the production of this film as we aim to focus more on the narrative and how we will portray the story to the audience rather than how many people get killed or how many drugs will can sell. Although we hope to challenge common stereotypes of gangsta films, we also want to extract examples of scenes from movies like Usual Suspects and Resevoir Dogs and twist them to a way which most adapts to our situation. Challenging the view of one main character, our movie will have five main protagonists, all male and all claiming to be blood brothers, which would intrigue our audience as they would be more interested to see how five gangstas make an impact in the gangsta world when after watching such films as Scarface and Godfather, the audience would already know that to be big in these fictional gangsta worlds, you have to be ruthless, so using this idea, the audience will be excited to see how a gangsta mob could possibly face this life of crime.
To advertise the film and to distribute it, we will team up with 'Verve Pictures' and 'Revolver Entertainment' as they were the distributors behind such British urbanized films as 'Bullet Boy' (2004) and 'Kidulthood' (2006). We chose these two companies because they most represent the message of an urban society that we want to portray with our film as well as the fact that they also produced the two biggest urban teen films in the past 3 years . Once the film has gone out of the cinema, we hope for it to be broadcasting on the various channel 4 enterprises. We have chosen channel 4 because the channel has been so popular attracting audiences who have been interested with the italian gangsta soap- 'The Soprano's', that this audience will also be interested in watching "The Rose Mob".#
We have made a list of locations for where we could film various scenes, we have chosen these locations because we think they best adapt to the mafia image. Staying away from the typical street scenes and estate flats that would've been used in a normal urban teen film, we have chosen various restaurants, back offices and snooker halls, to give our film more of an authentic and italian feel to it. Therefore the idea of a gangsta film will not be misplaced and the audience can enjoy a more unqiue british version to the famous Godfather trilogy. We are also going to use diegetic sound, as this best compliments the atmoshphere of the scene.
We hope the scene will be approvimately 7-8 minutes max, so that we leave the audience wanting more after the cliffhanger. Adobe Premiere Pro-editing software will aid us in our bid to create a clean polished look to the scenes as well as help us edit any bits we dont feel match in with the scene. Everyone has their own set of responsibilities and the whole group will participate in one way or another.
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