That's Funny You Don't Look Like A Teacher!: Interrogating Images, Identity, And Popular Culture (World of Childhood & Adolescence) - PDF
نویسندگان: Sandra J. Weber
خلاصه: Teachers are figures of such impossible familiarity that they are apt to vanish beneath the general and the particular disparagements such taken-for-granted phenomena may attract to themselves. For many of us who teach, and who have spent much of our lives in schools and amongst teachers, it is their flesh and blood and sweat that haunt us, their actual, historical existence and the work they do with children in classrooms. Yet that reality is shaped and shadowed by all those others: by the transformations performed on teachers by memory and myth, by public obloquy and popular culture and by all the fantasies and fictions which have constructed childhoods for us, and which have then allowed us to scrutinize and revisit the contradictions that those fictions embody. And what is always a surprise at this end of the twentieth century is how many of those fictions turn out to be ones we’ve not just found or made for ourselves, but ones which we share, through film and television and other media, with most of the human race, however vast all the other differences between us may be. I was always a little hurt, I think, as a young teacher, when in drama lessons with my eleven-year-olds, their warm-up actings-out—of policemen and bicycles and puppets and, yes, of teachers—produced (and without a single exception) a finger-wagging harridan of quite exceptional vindictiveness. Where, I wondered, had they come upon the model for such a teacher? Surely, it couldn’t be…? Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell from Canada, which will always be the land of Ann of Green Gables and of Avonlea to me, have written a marvellously illuminating book which undertakes, amongst other things, to reassure me. Much more than that, it unpicks and displays the anomalous links between all our classroom realities and the curious and constant and invariably ambiguous recurrence of teachers within a whole range of popular cultural forms. The book’s focus is, as the authors put it, on ‘the ways that certain images persist over time, and the significance of the continuity of these popular culture images to our understanding of the space that teachers occupy in the real and imagined lives of children and their teachers.