Session 8: Places of Being and Seeing
3rd Global Conference
Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Moral Education and Visual Literacy
Yael Krimerman-Naveh
Department of Philosophy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
In this lecture I shall argue for the thesis that at least one important aim of moral education in a multi-cultural society should be to develop children’s visual literacy with regard to their ability to see and so be sensitive to the various forms that suffering can take. Human suffering is something that can be seen, that has moral implications, that is common to whole mankind but that also has different cultural dimensions. It is sometimes shaped in cultural contexts, and it is sometimes expressed through cultural artifacts. There will be two parts to my lecture. In the first part I shall explain why people need to learn to see the suffering of others. They need to learn to see this because sometimes they are blind to it. People are especially blind to the suffering of others on account of its being connected with culture. Sometimes cultural norms, customs, beliefs, values or institutions make some people suffer. Sometimes people express their suffering through symbols, through symbolic ways of expressions, in a specific language, in prose. Moral education should encourage the pupils to reveal others suffering and visual literacy can give tools to do so. In the second part of my lecture I shall briefly sketch the form such an education in visual literacy can take an education which will enable those who go through it to develop their sensitivity to the suffering of others, especially when their suffer is clothed in a different culture than their own.
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‘I am a smart girl but I don’t look like that at all’: Televisual Constructs of Genius and Gender
Michele Paule
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom
This paper explores some visual and narrative discourses of ability and gender in popular culture texts, with a specific focus on adolescent girls and television.
Joyce Canaan has described the assumption of ability as innate rather than as culturally produced as one of the last bastions of essentialism within the academy. The project on which this paper is based explores giftedness as a discursive construct, which inevitably intersects with discourses of gender.
Context is central in calling into being the (often unstable) subject position of ‘able girl’. Concurrent with the requirement to identify gifted and talented students in mainstream English schools, is the rise of the high-achieving teen heroine on the television screen. Focusing on ways in which the ‘able girl’ is institutionally produced, my research explores the circulation of discourses between educational and popular culture contexts. Via a purpose-built website, www.smartgirls.tv, and focus group interviews in schools, I seek to understand how teenage girls formally identified as ‘gifted’ by schools, or self-identifying via the website forum, reject, reproduce, or appropriate and re-make, the constituent elements of the ‘smart girl’ identities in educational and media settings.
This paper will focus on visual and narrative constructions of ability and gender in popular texts, and ways in which these illustrate both girlhood and ability as contested sites in terms of gendered histories, cultural anxieties and political economies.
Comics in Education: Advocating Visual Literacy – Reinforcing Intercultural Discourse
Evangelia Moula
Philologist in Secondary Education- Greece
In accordance with the spirit of the theory of Multiple literacies, the use of multimodal texts impose a broadening of the range of applied pedagogics. Curriculums tend to include and even consider as equal to the written texts, the various means of production of meaning, that contemporary students need to get accustomed to and be able to interpret.
The acquaintance with the ancient Greek culture, which is a common world cultural heritage, is considered to be an unalieniable condition for an average, minimal acculturation. Ancient Greece some times allusively and some other times unambiguously, imbues the children’s book as well. Nevertheless, the adaptations, the transcriptions, or the transubstantiations of the material from the Greek antiquity into new stories, reflect the values of the historical present of their creation. Within this frame, antiquity is diffused in a variety of texts, among which we find comics as well. In the flesh of these new stories, Greek antiquity offers the mold, where several current ideologies are situated and subtly submitted.
The Olympic games, a representative institution of ancient Greek culture and a popular subject as well, have inspired a great deal of stories for children, that their content- no matter what the targets of each edition are- guaranties their commercial success.
Olympics illustrated by comics- creators coming from three different cultures, French (Gosciny), American (Disney) and Greek (Apostolides),set the prerequisite frame for a prolific intercultural dialogue. The suggested project serves the triple objective of:
•the familiarization with the ancient Greek culture and the understanding of the phenomenon of its ideological exploitation,
•the comprehension of the mechanisms of the language of comics and the way they construct the meaning,
•the detection of the different ideological messages and stereotypes that have different cultural origin, but are articulated in a common language (comics) and reside in different conceptions of a common subject.
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