I don't know anything about music : an exploration of primary teachers' knowledge about music in education

Teachers' thinking underpins their actions, in various ways, consciously or nonconsciously, and therefore it is necessary to understand their thinking in order to understand their teaching. Part of such thinking concerns subject knowledge, which is an important, albeit often assumed, feature in professional practice. For primary school teachers who cover the breadth of the National Curriculum there are particular issues. In music, despite frequent reports from Ofsted referring to the good quality of teaching, there still appears to be considerable lack of confidence among such teachers, frequently linked with a perceived lack of subject knowledge. Subject knowledge in music is under-researched in this country and this small-scale study was intended to explore the nature of teachers' beliefs about music in education. In a qualitative case study approach, the teachers in a two-form-entry, inner-city primary school talked individually, in three separate sessions over the course of an academic year, about various aspects of music in education. They also constructed concept maps to represent their thinking. A process of inductive and iterative analysis led to the identification of four main findings concerning enjoyment, the value of music, issues relating to instrumental teaching and the use of schools' broadcasts. These aspects form the basis of a discussion which moves beyond the original research questions to build an orthogonal model that conceptualises and contextualises teachers' thinking within two dimensions representing their professional/non-professional lives and the formal/informal contexts of musical involvement, nested in their beliefs regarding the nature and value of music. It is suggested that this model might also apply to other subjects. There are implications from this study not only for teachers themselves and for the schools in which they work, but also for those involved in supporting student and practising teachers through ITE, INSET and CPD, as well as for policymakers

'I don't know anything about music' : an exploration of primary teachers' knowledge about music in education

Teachers' thinking underpins their actions, in various ways, consciously or nonconsciously, and therefore it is necessary to understand their thinking in order to understand their teaching. Part of such thinking concerns subject knowledge, which is an important, albeit often assumed, feature in professional practice. For primary school teachers who cover the breadth of the National Curriculum there are particular issues. In music, despite frequent reports from Ofsted referring to the good quality of teaching, there still appears to be considerable lack of confidence among such teachers, frequently linked with a perceived lack of subject knowledge. Subject knowledge in music is under-researched in this country and this small-scale study was intended to explore the nature of teachers' beliefs about music in education. In a qualitative case study approach, the teachers in a two-form-entry, inner-city primary school talked individually, in three separate sessions over the course of an academic year, about various aspects of music in education. They also constructed concept maps to represent their thinking. A process of inductive and iterative analysis led to the identification of four main findings concerning enjoyment, the value of music, issues relating to instrumental teaching and the use of schools' broadcasts. These aspects form the basis of a discussion which moves beyond the original research questions to build an orthogonal model that conceptualises and contextualises teachers' thinking within two dimensions representing their professional/non-professional lives and the formal/informal contexts of musical involvement, nested in their beliefs regarding the nature and value of music. It is suggested that this model might also apply to other subjects. There are implications from this study not only for teachers themselves and for the schools in which they work, but also for those involved in supporting student and practising teachers through ITE, INSET and CPD, as well as for policymakers.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

'A kind of singing in me' : a critical account of women writers of the Beat generation

Abstract available: p.

Myth, biography and the female role in the plays of Pam Gems

In this study, I give some attention to the themes and strategies occurring throughout Pam Gems’s career as a female playwright. However, my main interest lies in five of Gems’s plays that feature historical and mythical female figures: Queen Christina (1977), Piaf (1978), Camille (1984), Marlene (1997) and The Snow Palace (1998). My objective is not to ascertain whether or not the plays I consider capture on accurate image of female myth in history, nor even to determine whether or not there exists an accurate image of the female role in literary history. I am far more interested in the ideological uses of myth and more particularly biography, as a form of myth in relation to gender. Such an interest rests upon the understanding that the reconstruction of a life can never be detached from the source of that reconstruction; in other words, the lenses which filter the telling of a life story become at least as important as the narrative itself. Moreover, as further biographies (lenses) are written on the same subject over time, it is possible to detect a gradual reconstitution of that subject to ultimately generate a pluralist evaluation - where truth and myth are flawlessly fused. It is my aim to analyse the variety of lenses and interpretations which have filtered the lives of Gems’s female protagonists with a view to discovering the contribution Gems makes in her personal and feminist reassessment of their biographical narratives. In the beginning the thesis attempts to unite biographical theory with feminist theory and use this as a framework for investigating Gems’s work. After close examination of the aforementioned plays, the thesis concludes with the assertion that Gems strongly embraces the concept of female plurality as opposed to a restrictive ‘feminist’ label in here revisionary recreation of the female role

Women and the American Wilderness: Responses to Landscape and Myth

Women and the American Wilderness: Responses to Landscape and Myth explores three, middle to upper-class white women\u27s responses to wilderness from texts published between 1823 and 1939. Through an exploration of James Fenimore Cooper\u27s heroine Elizabeth Temple in the novel The Pioneers (1823), Isabella Bird\u27s published letters entitled A Lady\u27s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1873), and Muriel Rukeyser\u27s reaction to the Gauley Bridge Tragedy of the 1930s in her book of poems The Book of the Dead (1939), I show that women\u27s responses to the American wilderness not only included a reaction to the physical terrain but also to the developing or established masculine myth of the American wilderness and concept of Manifest Destiny. In chapter one of my study, I show that Elizabeth Temple counters the developing masculine myth of the wilderness through her active engagement with the outdoors and challenges the passive, home-bound femininity being espoused in the 1820s. Despite her challenge to hegemonic gender norms, however, she does not challenge the established patriarchal power hierarchy but utilizes her class privilege within it to gain her own desires, thereby often reinforcing the racism and classism of her time. As I argue in chapter two, the real life Isabella Bird had to carefully negotiate between her own desires for wilderness adventure and socially-sanctioned standards of femininity. In order to maintain a respectable front, Bird capitalized on doctor-prescribed travel as her mode of escape from a home-bound life, and her careful self-representation and depictions of others along her route reinforces her feminine respectability as she climbs a mountain, takes long, solitary horseback riding excursions, and embraces solitude. Yet in her text Bird also does not challenge the masculine paradigm of the wilderness myth but uses her femininity to protect her character and justify her wilderness travels, thereby garnering the freedom associated with the wilderness for herself. As I argue in chapter three, however, Muriel Rukeyser\u27s depiction of the historical American wilderness undermines the masculine myth by highlighting the role of the other in America\u27s development. I also show how her text links the historical racism and classism undergirding the myth of the wilderness and concept of Manifest Destiny to the exploitation of lower-class workers, especially migrant African-American workers, who died from work-induced silicosis at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, during the 1930s. Together, Cooper\u27s novel, Bird\u27s letters, and Rukeyser\u27s sequence of poems highlight the complexities that race, class, and gender bring to women\u27s reaction to wilderness and help us to begin to explore the multi-layered responses that women had to the American wilderness and wilderness myth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Difference, identification and desire : contemporary lesbian genre fiction

The focus of this dissertation entitled 'Difference, Identification & Desire: Contemporary Lesbian Genre Fiction' is the representation of lesbian identity in four contemporary popular lesbian genres: autobiographical fiction, speculative fiction, romance fiction and crime fiction. The aim of the dissertation is three-fold. Firstly, it seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the large variety of representations of lesbianism produced by lesbian writers working with popular forms of the novel during the past twenty five years. Secondly, it explores the ways in which lesbian writers have reworked popular genres in order to highlight lesbian and feminist concerns and to depict aspects of lesbian existence. It analyzes the effects of introducing discourses of lesbianism into the plots of popular genres, showing how the latter have been subverted or adapted by lesbian use. Thirdly, the thesis seeks to specify the ways in which the generic forms themselves, according to their own codes and conventions, shape and mediate the representation of lesbian identity in the text. In addition to this focus, the dissertation traces a number of themes and concerns across and within the four genres under discussion. These include the relationship in the texts between the sign 'lesbian' and the discourse of feminism, and the oscillation between the representation of lesbian sexual identity in terms of woman-identification and difference-between women. The aim throughout the analysis of contemporary lesbian genre fiction is to identify both that which is specific to lesbian representation and that which is characteristic of the particular genre under discussion. The dissertation represents a contribution to three areas of literary study: Genre Studies and Feminist Studies in general, and to Lesbian Studies in particular

Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives

Yancey and Weiser bring together thirty-one writing teachers from diverse levels of instruction, institutional settings, and regions to create a stimulating volume on the current practice in portfolio writing assessment. Contributors reflect on the explosion in portfolio practice over the last decade, why it happened, what comes next; discuss portfolios in hypertext, the web, and other electronic spaces; and consider emerging trends and issues that are involving portfolios in teacher assessment, faculty development, and graduate student experience.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1117/thumbnail.jp

MODELING PROFESSIONAL FEMININITY THROUGH U.S. MEDIA CULTURE, 1963-2015

From 1963 to 2015, the introduction of women into the U.S. workplace has dramatically altered cultures of work. In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between women and work not through “work life balance,” but through an analysis of various models of professional femininity through U.S. media culture. I track these figures in terms of what I call, "the professionalization of femininity," considering forms of the professionalization of domesticity in entrepreneurial homemaking and home economics, and the professionalization of feminism in the form of the feminist professor, the feminist activist, and the career woman. I am interested in exploring degraded sites of feminist theory (the heterosexual cis-gender white woman, the domestic, the mainstream, etc.) precisely because these sites offer insight into liberal feminism’s internal contradictions. This is then, both a study of the contradictions implicit within femininity (between domesticity and feminism), and a study of historical change. My archive includes various materials from the women's liberation movement as well as the work and lives of three particular women, each of whom has a particular relation to professional femininity through U.S. media culture. Considering professional femininity since the publication of The Feminine Mystique and working across rhetoric, media studies, history, and feminist/gender studies, this project considers the figures under discussion as models and also as modeling forms of professional femininity at multiple levels and in relation to various scenes (of knowledge production, genre, media culture, etc). Individual chapters discuss Joan Didion’s literary and journalistic work in relation to the 1960s, Ree Drummond’s work as a blogger in relation to the invention of the internet and the emergence of new forms of domesticity, and Kelly Reichardt’s filmmaking in relation to realist aesthetics. The story I tell traces these contradictions, as I move from Joan Didion's depictions of professional femininity in relation to women’s liberation, to Ree Drummond's affirmatively positive professionalized domesticity in relation to the history of home economics, and finally, to Kelly Reichardt's America, where a crisis involving professional femininity is being represented through a kind of cinematic realism that has echoes in early (and forgotten) feminist film theory.Doctor of Philosoph