Altered States of Academia

Tag: education

  • The Reception baseline assessment: a shameful data extraction process

    Mandy Pierlejewski, Guy Roberts-Holmes, Sara Hawley and Jennifer Holly In October last year, a few short weeks into the new school term, colleagues from University College London and Leeds Beckett University visited reception classes in two schools in England. This class is the final year of early childhood education which, in England, takes place in…

  • Thinking with Foucault and Ferris

    Claire Birkenshaw “Hey Cameron, do you realise if we’d played by the rules right now, we’d be in gym?” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986) Scholars Hunter and Frawley (2022, p.14) argue that use of film as a ‘pedagogical tool’ can help students better understand abstract theoretical concepts to aid their application in imaginative ways. For…

  • Contemporary Childhood: Secured by Design

    Birkenshaw, C. (2024) Beckett Park: Climbing Frame [Photograph]. Leeds. © Claire Birkenshaw. Claire Birkenshaw “We [have built] playgrounds that are so monumentally boring that any self- respecting child will go and play somewhere else” (Gill, 2024, quoted in Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, 2024, p.7). Like the attending Levelling Up, Housing and Committee MPs,…

  • Lesson Planning with Generative AI. Cheating or resistance?

    Dr Mandy Pierlejewski In this blog post, I explore the idea that using generative AI to plan lessons is cheating. I compare artificial intelligence lesson planning with the use of government validated schemes such as Little Wandle, using Foucualt’s work on discipline to explore notions of lesson authorship. I suggest that the use of generative…

  • Thinking with Bourdieu: Illusio

    Claire Birkenshaw “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game.” (Leonard Cohen, 2016) Happy New Year! Set any New Year resolutions? I have. At the heart of my New Year resolutions for 2024 is the improvement of my ‘cultural capital’ portfolio in terms of “volume” and “composition” (Threadgold, 2018, p.45). I am motivated…

  • Thinking with Bourdieu: Doxa

    Claire Birkenshaw “In every cry of every Man,In every Infants cry of fear,In every voice: in every ban,The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” (William Blake, 1794).   Sociology’s purpose, Bourdieu (2013, p.10) argued, is to “uncover the social unconscious” in order to examine and explain “the social relations of domination”, which “deny others the full expression…

  • Discipline, Incorporated

    Claire Birkenshaw “By means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion” (Foucault, [1972] 2009, p.3).  Film, as Sian Barber (2015, p.4) reminds us, is a “crafted artefact”, which is “never produced in a cultural and social…

  • Pupils or products?

    Dr Mandy Pierlejewski. This week, at universities across the UK, Coca-Cola were giving away free samples of their newly packaged bottles of Coke Zero. I noticed that although the bottles were made of a recycled material which was a little darker than the original bottles, essentially the branding was exactly the same. Every Coca-Cola product…

  • Developing doppelganger as method

    Dr Mandy Pierlejewski. Have you watched the Marvel series Moon Knight (2022) or the cult film Fight Club (Fincher, 1999)? In these and many other stories, the protagonist comes face to face with another version of themselves- a doppelganger. The idea of a doppelganger or ghostly double is a feature of the gothic genre of…