This course will introduce students to the wyrd and wonderful world of Old English literature. Our main focus will be on the first poetic masterpiece in English, the epic Beowulf, but we will also read a selection of shorter poems, including passionate songs of love and loss, intense dream visions, bawdy and obscene riddles, and strange charms contained in manuscripts such as the Exeter Book and the Vercelli Book. In these remarkable, often enigmatic poems, the heroic traditions of the Germanic tribes merge with Christian-Latin learning, pagan kings speak with the wisdom of the Old Testament patriarchs, Woden rubs shoulders with Christ, a lowly cowherd receives the gift of poetry from God, and a talking tree provides an eyewitness account of the Crucifixion. Texts will be studied both in translation and, after some basic training, in the original Old English.
Eyewitness Culture In A Changing World Teacher
One of the key questions that we ask is: How can we develop the skills for learners to thrive as participants in an increasingly more global and culturally diverse world. How can students learn to engage in cultural differences and develop skills and tools for perspective taking. Quaker Valley School District embraces developing the whole child to be an active participant in a rapidly changing world.
A visual and informative guide to the myths of world civilizations.Get up close and personal and be an eyewitness to the mythological stories of cultures throughout the world.Whether it's the creation of the world, the fertility of the land, or a history of its people, each culture has its own mythology: a collection of stories that explain the world as it relates to them and that has been passed down through the generations. From heroes and villains to gods and tricksters to floods and the end of the world, discover the myths of the Norse, Greek, Hindu, Inuit, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and other cultures.DK Eyewitness Books: Mythology is a visual and informative guide to the stories that prove a central part of the world's peoples.Series Overview: On every colorful page: vibrant annotated photographs and the integrated text-and-pictures approach that makes Eyewitness a perennial favorite of parents, teachers, and school-age kids.
SFIs are designed to promote discussion and networking among researchers and educators interested in the artistry, history and role of (East) German film in a changing world. Participants range from doctoral students to filmmakers and seasoned faculty at colleges and universities across North America and Europe. Groups of participants have often gone on to work together to present panels and panel series on SFI topics at the annual conferences of the German Studies Association and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Launched in 2015, the DEFA Film Library book series on Film and the Global Cold War (Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford) offers a publication outlet for volumes on Institute and other topics.
Faulty eyewitness testimony is a major cause of wrongful convictions. Covers the fast-growing topic of eyewitness testimony and memory for real-world events, both how psychologists study eyewitness capacity, and how the legal system has dealt with eyewitness issues.
Yet, we recognize the inherent problems in conducting such a study: can we as non-indigenous people talk back to colonizing research? Even if we can construct new narratives that problematize the history of Western imperialism, how might our research still further colonial projects, and how can we be aware of the scripts that we maintain rather than work to dismantle? We address these questions explicitly throughout this paper, and have insisted on self-reflexivity throughout our research process. This reflexivity included a constant re-examination of claims and assumptions we were making, as well as positioning ourselves within critical race discourses (JanMohammed, 1985; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1994; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). For our project, we analyzed two texts from a popular non-fiction visual encyclopedia series for youth called the DK Eyewitness series. In Aztec, Inca and Maya (Baquedano, 2005) and North American Indian (Murdoch, 2005), we identified three trajectories for analysis: 1) the ways the books catalog (collect, order, and label) ethnographic objects, 2) the ways the books construct notions of "progress," in relation to consigning these cultures and people to the past, and 3) the ways that display and pleasure interact with the readers' gaze in this storytelling. We argue that these trajectories relate to a broader positivist and colonial epistemology utilized in museums in order to construct and perform the identity development of Western individuals and nations. Such an epistemology, when presented in a non fiction book for young people, constitutes an instance of what Chappell (2010) has termed "colonizing the imaginary," an "ideological process in which adults write their own culturally-bound values, beliefs and ideas onto narrative structures and performances intended for children's consumption" (p. 11).DK and The Eyewitness SeriesThe publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK) aims to expose readers to various subject matter--including history--through the foregrounding of visual content. The company has built itself on this formula, and hails the books' success on its website: DK's children's reference titles are second to none. The list covers a vast range ofchildren's interests for every age group - dinosaurs, space, nature, history, religion,sport and science. In addition the publishing also includes a number of richlyillustrated and highly accessible encyclopedias for learners of every age (DK site, Company Overview).The Eyewitness Books series was one of the company's earliest offerings. Since 1987, these illustrated guides have formed the core of DK's children's reference booklist, covering a range of topics but often focusing on world history and culture. Guides in this vein include: Africa; American Revolution; Ancient China, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome; Bible Lands; Explorer; Leonardo [DaVinci] and His Times; Medieval Life; Prehistoric Life; Presidents; Russia; Viking; Wild West; and World War I and II. DK recognizes that it owes its success largely to this series, and its "unique lexigraphic design, an explanatory combination of words and pictures" (DK site, About Us/Children's Books). From our observation as parents, teachers, and childhood studies scholars, the Eyewitness Series has a far reach, appearing in many school and public libraries and bookstores. The books establish a common foundation for children's learning about subject matter in the sciences and social sciences.The series' name, "Eyewitness," implies immediacy, a coexistence--albeit brief--with the culture that produced the artifacts. The wording hints at time travel, at adventure, at the reader's presence during exciting and influential events. Just as museums want to persuade their patrons that there is a simultaneity between contemporary and historical within a bounded space--performing a psychological erasure of the glass cases and velvet ropes that demarcate a museum's displays--the Eyewitness series conjures an experience out of photographs and captions. It wants to involve young readers in what Baudrillard (1994) calls the hyperreal, to sell the impossible and disguise learning.In this way, DK's approach differs from traditional reference material publishers, which would likely not promote themselves as leisure reading. Eyewitness books emphasize "fun," from their foregrounding of unfamiliar (to a contemporary middle class US child) artifacts to their use of bright colors in the titles. The book covers promise glimpses into other cultures, as opposed to a series of facts. They imply that the reader will meet historical personages, see events firsthand, and have fascinating experiences. In this regard, they are using stylistic devices reminiscent of graphic novels to teach through entertainment. This simulation of travel and encounter depends on what DK calls its "unique lexigraphic design" (DK site, About Us/Children's Books). Photographs and other reproductions of artifacts dominate the pages, so that the reader encounters primary sources preserved across time and space. These artifacts are interpreted with titles and textual explanations and grouped according to various organizational strategies such as theme or geography. We are interested in the ways that viewers read multiple meanings into the photographs of these indigenous artifacts. Images are ambiguous and produce a surplus of meaning, even when they are presented as artifacts of a culture's "true past." The maker of an image cannot control its connotations, which are dependent on both the viewer's and the image-maker's subject positions. Thus, Barthes' (1977) theory of denoted and connoted meaning is important: "In short, all these 'imitative' arts comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it" (p. 17). For example, in North American Indian, an image of a headdress may denote the artifact itself, but connote a series of (non-native) cultural constructions of that headdress, informed by old Western films, sports mascots, and even "cigar store Indians." Therefore, as we created our own artist book about how children's texts construct indigenous people's stories and cultures, we wanted to engage the potential of this ambiguity and the contradictions that arise when we consider the multiple subject positions (informed by enculturation) of the potential viewers of art objects.Barthes (1977) was also concerned with the relationship of photographs to text. He argued that an image is more precise than a textual description. Text imposes an interpretation, attempting to control the image's connotation. If the artifact or image is available, Barthes suggested, it should stand on its own, or with limited description. When the opposite strategy--one of captioning text--is employed, Barthes wrote: "[I]t is not the image which comes to elucidate or 'realize' the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image" (p. 25). For Barthes, such captioning of images--the fundamental strategy of the Eyewitness series--is negative and misleading. Even proximity makes a difference: "The closer the text to the image, the less it seems to connote it; caught as it were in the iconographic message, the verbal message seems to share in its objectivity, the connotation of language is 'innocented' through the photograph's denotation" (p. 26). Although Barthes does not posit the photograph itself as lacking in subjectivity, he is specifically concerned with how the reader can be drawn in by captioning.When teaching children to read images, Freedman (2003) suggests building on Barthes' denotation/connotation binary. Disregarding text, she formulates three steps in the interpretation of an image: Lower-level interpretive skills include the discernment of a simple, intended messageof a symbolic representation or personalizing a situation that one sees represented. Higher-level interpretive skills include: (1) unpacking underlying assumptions; (2) forming multiple, possible associations; and (3) performing self-conscious, critical reflection (pp. 87-8).Through this approach, Freedman introduces the concepts of subjectivity in constructing the image, surplus of meaning, and the effect of situated identity. She sees the ambiguity inherent in the use of image, and knows that this ambiguity is important to bring to children's consciousness, lest they take images at face value and depend on common, uninterrogated, even harmful assumptions.When analyzing the Eyewitness series, our guiding questions were: how are the books constructed? What messages do they convey? How do we subjectively understand them? And, what are the pedagogical and cultural implications of displaying artifacts and constructing knowledge in a way that parallels a traditional museum experience, with icons (photos or artifacts), indexes (explanatory text), and symbols (frames, pointers, glass cases)? We respond to these questions through the construction and display of an artist book. 2ff7e9595c
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