We were a bit concerned as we have always liked the venue here. But we were looked after like we were the treasured guests of royalty...
... The grub was good and the rooms warm and comfy. The staff were all sweetie pies.
There were some funny things though.
Like the too-quiet -listen-to-music in the background. Always there but never able to be really identifiable. Bit irritating in fact.
Then there was the whole cutlery thing going on ... the tables were laid with cutlery on plates, on serviettes. So the waiters have the ritual of coming to each person and taking the cultery and serviette of the plate and taking the plates away. The plate was never used for food, just cutlery. Why? What is that about? Am I uncouth? It was a mystery.
Maybe it is a special new grammar that is coming out.
Perhaps it is fashionable.
Maybe Becks and Posh do it??
Aaaaaanyway, the weekend was great, kicking off with Bob Lingard talking about
Productive Pedagogies.
This is a model for teaching produced by a team Bob worked with while in Queensland; it evolved through a huge piece of research and has been written about in a range of publications from the team.
Allan Luke is continuing the good work in Singapore now.
Suffice to say our students loved what Bob had to say and were excited by what he had to say about teachers and their ability to make a difference through professional pedagogies.
We also had Mark Vicars talking about life history research; I was really interested in what he had to say about the usefulness of GOSSIP of ways into life history work... fascinating stuff. I am going to look these up (as Mark recommended):
Leach, M (1997) Feminist figurations: gossip as a counter discourse. Qualitative studies in education vol 10, no 5 305-314Blum Kulka, Shoshana. (2000).
Gossipy events at family dinners: Negotiating Sociability,presence and the moral order. In, Justine Coupland (ed.) Small Talk. London: Longman.213-240.
They sound good, don't they?
Kate's work on her Turkish person, who she has been working with for years looking at her literacy and languae practices also was really fascinating and we all wanted to be a fly on the wall. Kate is learning Turkish now as she is realising the importtance of understanding the nuances of the language and the idea of taking on someone's vision through the frame of their cultural Discourses/discourses. She is having her paper on this matter published here soon. The paper is not out yet but some of the work is in here. I can't wait for her paper to come out ...
David's stuff on Critical Analysis went down brilliantly as usual and all in all it was a good weekend. (I rambled on a bit about blogging, Flickring and play theory , but that was all.)
I was so excited this week to see these fab posts on the play blog.
Anyhoooo, another tough week coming up with loads of teaching, a few deadlines and then a weekend school. Oh well the following week SHOULD be easier and I am lucky enough to have a REALLY interesting job.
2 comments:
Its it too churlish, given the context of this post just to point out this:
'looking at her literacy and languae practices'
PLease DON'T go looking for spelinig mistakes on my blog.... and in my experience its usually Simply Clare who picks people up on their grammer and spelink etc.
I also thought I would comment because the secret word for today is 'codnum', do you think that like the idea of 100 monkeys randomly hitting keyboards would eventually write the works of shaka-spear (the great african writer) that given enough commenting we might come up with a legible sentence once in a while or a least a smutty word like the ones that were the bugbear of Countdown - I'll have a pee please Bob!
Yeah it's weird the spelling/typos thing on the blog. If I spot it as I am writing, I sort it out, but sometimes i see one after posting and just leave it ... I think, well, these are notes, not for publication. I guess it is a way of, despite everything, acknowledging that his is in some way casual as well as being serious .. . I know that Guy recently took down a post and then put it up again looking neater. I am not sure I would do that. Yet I like the blog to look pretty with pix.
The random words ... mine nearly always have a q in them. Very strange.
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