PhD submission

Two weeks ago I submitted my PhD!

It's been a crazy couple of months and I am glad everything is done now. My viva is currently scheduled for April, but unfortunately my external examiner dropped out due to health reasons so my supervisors and I are currently looking for someone else you might be suitable.

After feeling very deflated at BERA, I started to turn my mind more towards my local community. Founding and running the MK Food Revolution (and its food festival FEAST) has been immensely rewarding. I am about to open my own shop in Wolverton and look forward to collaborating even more on a local level over the coming months.

Although my PhD has not been directly relevant to my work of the past months, I have used lots of skills I improved over the last three years: perseverance, organisation, documentation and many others. I also still work as an online postgrad tutor for Leeds Beckett university and education consultant for NotDeadFish in London to top up my income. I have also produced a few resources for NotDeadFish and look forward to working with other film organisations in London soon.

Not having an academic post (or rather: being paid to write) means that I have not had a chance to invest more time into publications. I would like my work to be read (by anyone who wants to, not just academics at universities which pay for journal access), so I have approached a few film education organisations to see whether they would pay me to produce a summary for them. After 3 1/2 years of a minimum (or no) salary unfortunately I can't afford to work for free any longer.

In the end, the PhD showed a change in motivation and attainment of the Film Literacy groups, but unfortunately I was only able to use it as a case study of one particular area, rather than the comparative study I had hoped to produce. Too many factors inhibited the collection of comparative data and pointed towards the uniqueness of Bradford as a whole. I am proud of the work I have produced but have also become much more realistic about the needs of such an extensive study (and its collaborators).

I will continue adding to the blog when I have news about PhD-related publications- wish me luck!

BERA 2015 and the last months

It's been a very long time since my last blog post. In late spring I had to take a few months off from my PhD because of family matters, a move and several new projects. However, I am back on track now and my first full draft submission is only a month away. I am looking forward to finishing the analysis section and concluding with a flourish!

Unfortunately the last months have shown me that my heart is not that of an academic after all. I am very proud of the research I have done over the last years for my PhD, Cambridge, Manchester and Durham Uni, but often hundreds of hours of work simply flow into a report or a journal paper which very few people are going to read and which is not actually going to make a difference on the ground. I am determined to make the time I have invested in the PhD count and I am trying to make connections with people and organisations who will then be able to use my work to advance the cause of using film as a tool in education.

This week I was able to attend two conferences: My own, the Holistic Education conference, and the conference of the British Education Research Association. At the first, I was able to present a paper about some real life experience to 50 delegates, spend £40 for a two day conference and met some outstanding people who loved to connect. BERA on the other hand cost me £350 fees plus flights and accommodation and in the end TWO people listened to my paper. The conference had up to 27 parallel slots, allowing only a very small audience per session. I did meet some interesting people and got to discover Belfast (which I am very grateful for) but I can't but help walk away disillusioned. This is not the kind of community I feel connected to.

The more I engage with the local food scene in Milton Keynes and spend time thinking about the difference I really want to make to my community in terms of creating a sustainable culture, the more I feel that research is important, but only if it has a real application. I love finding out about things and using the new knowledge to bring together components and create something, but I will never value theory for theory's sake. This feeling really made me struggle at BERA.

Now that the end date of my thesis is drawing nearer, I have decided not to apply for further academic posts but will instead start working as an on-and-off education consultant and project manager. The next big goal is starting the Milton Keynes Urban Farm and building my own horticultural business. I am sure that my research skills and connections will continue to help me in the future and I might return to a full academic post one day, but until then, the world of activism is waiting for me!

The first draft...

... is almost here! Yesterday I spent some time formatting my chapters and putting them in one document. I am now 76,000 words in and with the double spacing of what has been signed off so far, the thesis is almost 300 pages long! The first draft should be all done for mid June, and I can't wait to look at it.

This is what my cover look like on the iPad. Pretty swish!

I had a quite frustrating time over Christmas, trying to understand the statistical part of my data, but after finally finding someone who could help me with SPSS, everything is coming together. Now there is just three further chapters on my list: The analysis (of which a draft already exists to some extend), the conclusion and then the introduction. Great stuff!

I have also had some further good news that I have been accepted to the BERA conference in Belfast in September. It will take place the week after our own HEO conference, so that is going to be an exciting month. BERA is a proper 'grown up' conference and I am chuffed to be speaking there.

PhD paperwork and the last deadlines

It is difficult to believe that my last blog post is already almost five month old now- how time flies! 

Since November, I have used my new research skills working for the Manchester University on the Culture Metrics Research Project and have also picked up various bits and pieces of work at Leeds Beckett University. A colleague and I founded the Holistic Education Organisation UK in January and we are planning our first conference for September- there is much to do!

My PhD viva date has now been set to the 7th October and my external examiner is going to be Dr Rachael Levy. The title of the thesis is now also confirmed: It's going to be called 'Nurturing writing skills in the primary literacy lessons of the 'City of Film': The impact of using moving images on attainment and subject perception'. Fingers crossed the next weeks promise good progress!

I have a couple more deadlines between now and June, when the first full draft is due. The data chapters needs to be reviewed (and has been giving me a great headache because of its statistics), and there are still three chapters to write: the analysis, the conclusion and the introduction. I can't wait for everything to come together soon. It's going to be a very high pile of paper in print!!

Last week, I spoke at the Bradford Film Summit, and have also been accepted for a conference in Sheffield and one in Marseille together with my colleague Abi Gilmore from Manchester Uni. Have a look at the conference page for details. It is my hope that the conferences will also help me to finally get pen to paper and draft at least one more journal article. I about to start applying for work for September and it would be great to have a few more publications under my belt before trying to enter the scary world of professional full-time academia. 

First presentation of the results

Hello from Prague and the Media Education Summit 2014!

Two exciting months have passed since my last blog post: both the data and the methodology chapter have now seen a review and I am looking forward to getting started on the deeper analysis before Christmas. This afternoon, I am presenting some first insights of the attainment site of the project at the MES and hope to convert the presentation into a journal paper before too long.

In other academic places, October and November have also seen a couple of short term and part time research and teaching positions at the University of Manchester, Durham University and Leeds Beckett University. It's exciting to get stuck into the different areas of education, cultural analysis and policy. The Manchester project is particularly interesting, as I am working for another report for the NESTA R&D project fund. This time, I am looking at common quality metrics across arts projects.

25 months into the PhD, I feel much more comfortable amongst the different academic tribes I dip in and out of and seem to find my own corner more and more. There are just two more chapters to go for my thesis and I am really pleased about my progress. Fingers crossed all this researching, writing and lecturing experience will help me to find an interesting position next summer.

Bam! The data presentation chapter is done

Wow, this one was long in the making. After getting (happily) distracted by the Cambridge live coding project in June, it was really only two weeks ago that I returned to my PhD and started to summarise and code the rest of the questionnaires, interviews, observations, writing levels and photos. Working through this absolute TONNE of data has been quite scary but as the days went by my headlines and appendices became clearer and things came together.

I found word's automatic labelling tools for chapter headings and tables absolutely invaluable this time around and it helped to me 'slot in' my data under different headings rather than write in a linear narrative- which would have been impossible! Overall, the whole chapter now spans 22,412 words (71 pages) plus another 22,000 words appendices- it's massive.

My supervisor is currently on holiday and so I will probably not receive feedback until the end of the month. However, I am feeling super that I have finally concluded a big chunk of work and that I am now certain about the differences the scheme has made to the students!

My Analysis chapter will now consider the following research questions:

1. Can watching films have an emotional impact on students? If yes, what kind of impact becomes visible in the classroom?
2. Does the watching of film increase students’ motivation for learning? If yes, how does this become visible?
3. Does the students’ engagement with the film literacy scheme impact on their writing scores? If yes, how so?

These have changed quite a bit since the beginning of the research process, but I am hoping that this is just a natural development. Finally I feel like the end is in sight! I understand that the Analysis and Conclusion are still going to take a bit of time (and that I will have revisit previous chapters, too), but I am definitely beyond the writing summit now!

Interview case studies

I am just in the process of coding my interviews with the teachers and came across three lovely case studies of students' progress which I wanted to share with you. I think they illustrate brilliantly why the scheme has been such a success this year. (Please bear with me on the shoddy transcription.) Enjoy!

Teacher 1: "At the moment, we’ve been looking at Joseph the musical. So rather than looking at a feature film, we’ve looked at something filmed on a stage, that’s all told through song. And I really thought, when I started it, although it’s a good story, and it’s about betrayal and people getting murdered, and thrown down wells and things like that, and someone ending up in jail and lots of things like that – I sort of thought, that because it was a musical interpretation, the boys might really, sort of, not like it. […]  But I went with it anyway any and one of the boys who really, really struggles to concentrate, he’s all over his chair. He’s a nightmare to try and get him to write anything. I often scribe for him to get his ideas down because he has got the ideas, but he just can’t, physically, you know, put his brain in gear to pick up his pencil. And he has been really into it and asking, you know, to watch the parts of the film again. And the main aim at was for them to retell - to write from Joseph’s point of view, the story, because obviously the musical is from a third person. And we did lots of drama around it and things like that. And that’s really up Adam’s street - drama type.  Where he normally falls behind when he tries to write it down - and his was amazing: it had dialogue in it. It was fantastic. It was all punctuated perfectly, and things like that. So I suppose that’s one of my success stories that I was really happy with that. Because normally he would just not be interested in the final piece. He would do all the drama, do all the activity. But in this, he was really keen to get all the whole story written down. And he really enjoyed being Joseph, and he had lots of ideas of what he would feel like, what he would say -yeah, what he’d actually experienced. Because a lot of the children found it hard to disconnect from the musical. We had Elvis in our last stories and things like that. It’s like no, its Faro, not Elvis. Whereas, Adam really got the gist of his. So that was nice."

Teacher 2:  "One particular boy, in fact was interviewed the other week – a lady came in to speak to us – she sent me a quote from him, she was just talking about - I was at the other side of the room so he wasn’t saying it because I was there  - she was looking at the media literacy display, and he came up to her and was like “we’ve got another media display in the hall if you want to go see it, of our awards ceremony from last year.”  And she said “All right,” and he said, “I’ve become a media leader this year.” And then he just started telling her, he said, “I like literacy. I wasn’t very good at it. I found it really hard,” he said, “but now, I absolutely love the lessons,” he said. “They’re really good fun,” he said, “and I can now write in paragraphs, I can put speech into my work,” he said, “and my levels are going up through the roof,” he said. “I’m just doing so well,” he said. “And I enjoy coming to literacy now, it’s my favourite lesson." And he has gone from level two and he is up towards level four now. And he does have Dyslexic tendencies, but he has just really run with this.  And another particular boy, who has made progress in his writing and I think he has made eight points in his reading, he again hated literacy, with a vengeance, and I chose him to come to the session with the filmmaker here, and he just turned around to the filmmaker and he went: “I used to hate literacy, but I love it now. I love doing all these films.” And we recently had Ofsted, and I was doing some comprehension around a film when they came in, and he shone. And the Ofsted Inspector afterwards asked me about him and I said: “he is one of my special needs children.” And he said “you would not have though it the way he was firing questions,” he said, “and challenging you as well, as a Teacher.”[…] “And challenging your discussions.” And then he was sort of arguing with some of the higher ability children as well, about the film. I just find it fascinating – the effect that it has had. The first thing that all my class have asked, because I won’t have them next year - - when they went to transition day, apparently all they kept saying to the year six Teacher was, “we will be doing films again, wont we? We will be doing films."

Teacher 3: "We were doing myths, and myths are quite difficult to do and we watched a short film, just from the BBC short films clips – and it was where Perseus was heading towards the cave of the Minotaur […] and it had a voice-over, but you could also see what was happening. There wasn’t - - it wasn’t a massively impacting film, I didn’t think. There wasn’t many sound effects, there wasn’t much extra animation going on. But the kids just loved it and the actual work that they brought out from it was just amazing. And they felt - - I think they felt like they were heading towards the Minotaur. You can sense in the room when they’re all like, “oh what’s coming on next,” and all that kind of thing. So yeah, that was just one example of a film that really geared, particularly the boys up. And get the boys interested to write. I actually used it as an observational lesson, and the lady who came to see said I can’t believe that that child particularly, who normally struggles – doesn’t want to write – was just literally writing. He kept coming over to her and saying, “read mine, read mine,” and he put his own slant on it, as he always does, but she couldn’t believe how enthused he was with writing."

First data analysis and mastering SPSS

Good evening everyone!

After spending most of the last two months on the live coding project for Cambridge Uni, I am slowly but surely returning to working on my PhD full time. I finished collecting all of my data over the summer and this is what I am going to analyse over the next months:

1. Questionnaires (2 sets for teachers and 4 sets for students)
2. Lesson observations
3. Interviews from the end of the year (with the teachers)
4. The writing scores

I learned a lot on the Cambridge project and I am looking forward to open coding and engaging further in SPSS. After a few weeks of being quite uncertain about how to approach the masses of data, I read parts of Doing Quantitative Research in Education with SPSS and it really helped me to understand what I wanted and how I could achieve it.

The chapter is still a bit of a mess, but here you can see the components I have added already:

I have already got a few results, but they are not certain yet- it's going to be fantastic to actually have something special to say! I am especially interested in the relationship between the different variables and achievement: Did the use of film have more of an impact on boys/ older students/ better students due to the use of film? I am hoping to have completed the data presentation chapter by the end of next week...

More publications and research for Cambridge uni

Since my last post much has happened. In July I got a job offer for work for the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge to work on a really exciting and very geeky live coding education project and have been busy with that since. However, my part time contract will be up next week and I will return to completing the PhD. I am hoping to be done by spring next year so there will be enough time to get through the viva and find a new job before my scholarship runs out.

After more than 12 months, I finally got the news yesterday that my first journal article is now online. You can find it on the Corerj journal website. I also submitted another article on our Free School application to the Journal of Education Policy so keep you fingers crossed for me! I am hoping to submit one or two more before starting to apply for work at the end of the year.

First thoughts on some of the attainment data

Disclaimer (08/09/2014): I wrote this blog post at a point where I had very little data AND did not understand how to use the software and statistics properly. What I have written is not accurate any more, so please don't quote these results. I left the post, instead of deleting it, as even 'wrong' analysis is part of my research journey- and this instance taught me to check my results three times before being sure of ANYTHING!

***

Hello everyone!

This week I have finally hit the interesting point where I am collecting the attainment data of the schools which are taking part in the film literacy scheme. So far, I have the results from ten of the 21 schools I am researching and after capturing the data, I can make some tentative first observations:

- On average, the students of the schools on the scheme have made almost four points progress over the year (three are the expected progress)
- The older the class was, the more progress the students made (rising to 4.2 points in Year 6)
- The 'worse' the school had been graded by Ofsted, the more progress the students made (rising to 4.2 for the 'requires improvement' schools)
- Although girls made a little bit more progress on average (0.2 points) this is really minimal
- There was little to no difference in attainment between students who had started the year below their expected level in writing and those who started at the expected level

Please don't quote me on anything yet- there is still lots more data to come! Great to see that the scheme is actually making a difference though and that I can finally use some of my new statistics skills!

Publications and the Bradford Media Literacy Screening day

The last two days has marked the end of the media literacy year for the students of the Bradford primary schools. Over the course of two morning and two afternoons all 30 schools came to the Media Museum to introduce and screen the short films they had made over the past months. The quality of the films was mixed (as expected), but it was wonderful to see how excited everyone was to see the films on the big screen.

Yesterday at the Leeds Young Film Network meeting I heard that Leeds is now thinking about running a similar scheme as part of their Young people's film festival. It's great to see that the scheme is spreading and they seemed to be keen to collaborate.

In two weeks time (on the 7th) the Media Literacy teachers are meeting for one last time to evaluate the scheme. I hope to gather the last questionnaires and writing levels then. Fingers crossed at least most of them bring the required material!

In the meantime, I have been busy starting and editing a few journal articles I'd like to send off in the next weeks. The first one is a condensed version of my Master's dissertation which looks at how, why and when teachers use films in lessons. Cutting 20,000 words down to 6,000 is really hard but I am proud of the final product. The article has just gone off to two tutors for review and hopefully I'll be able to submit it next month. Two further ones on the PhD and the Free School experience are in the pipeline.

Unfortunately there have also been some sad news: After several weeks of trying to negotiate/ collaborate with the New Schools Network, my friend Natalie and I have decided that we are going to withdraw from the Free School School application process. Things got too stressful and after not being able to satisfy one of the main criteria we decided that this was going to be the end of the road for us. I am still incredibly grateful for the experience and look forward to continue to write about Free Schools- it's a fascinating research topic!

More thoughts on Florence and other things

Hello again from Florence!

By now, I am back at the hostel to have a bit of a breather before my friend and I are going to head out for the first World Cup game of the year. So far, I've had a great time in Florence. This evening we took a walk around the city centre and I bought a pasta roller to inspire me when I get back home.

The conference is interesting (and I am still super chuffed about being here) but unfortunately I don't quite feel that it lived up to its title 'Future of Education'. It's been a shame to hear a few vague desinterested people talk about their commercial projects and I've really been missing the amazing key notes I am used to from other conferences. That said, the programme for tomorrow looks a little bit better and I already made a good friend today. I am also looking forward to my presentation tomorrow afternoon.

My talk is going to be on Free Schools (see post below) and unfortunately we've been having a really tough time with the New Schools Network and the application in general. It seems that one of the primary requirements for the applications at the moment is that the team has to have at least one outstanding school leader as one of the main applicants and although we've got a lady who is helping us with it, she is unsure whether she'll be able to commit. And as a busy principal who would be able to dedicate an extensive amount of time to a project like a completely different school to their own?!

My friend Natalie (who is also an academic) and I have been thinking and writing extensively on our application and I am hoping to try to finish a prospective journal article at the end of June. Additionally, I would really like to finish my PhD data gathering by the end of the month. In three weeks' time I am seeing the Film Literacy teachers for the last time and have just sent out a batch of questionnaires to them. Hopefully at least some of them are going to come back!

I have recently started to work with SPSS and NVivo and can't wait to post some exciting findings next week when I am back home. SPSS has helped to to think about how girls and boys think about writing and it will hopefully also show me whether the film literacy scheme has actually made a difference to attitudes and attainment at the end of the year. Fingers crossed something useful is going to emerge!

At the Future of Education conference in Florence

Yesterday I arrived in Florence for this year's Future of Education conference. Unfortunately I don't have time to write a whole blog post (more tonight!) but just wanted to share some joy for now. This morning I picked up my copy of the conference proceedings which have been published as a book- and found my first printed paper!

I am very lucky to be here in Florence and that the University of Bradford funded my attendance- thank you! More thoughts later...

More conferences and publications

Last week I had some brilliant news: I have been accepted for this year's Kaleidoscope conference in Cambridge and the Future of Education conference in Florence! The latter even includes a publication and I am chuffed to bits that the University of Bradford is paying for me to go. Here is the submitted abstract:

Ros McLellan, my new second supervisor from Cambridge, came to see me last month and together we discussed many questions I have had for a long time. She also encouraged me to do get involved in some additional research and to potentially apply for a postdoc position for next year. It was really wonderful to talk to someone who has so much experience in the academic education community and I am looking forward to working with her over the next year. Our next meeting is at the end of the month at the Kaleidoscope conference.

In the last month, I also re-submitted an article for the Kaleidoscope journal and hope to hear back from them soon. It would be great to go into my second research summer knowing that I have two publications under my belt already.

My research is currently focused on observing as many media literacy lessons as I can. I am working closely with one particular teacher and I think her school might become a case study for the scheme. I am also planning my questionnaires and interviews for the end of the year. The project evaluation day is not actually until the beginning of July, but I am hoping to see a couple more classes until then. I am particular looking forward to evaluating the data about students' emotions about writing. It's going to be fascinating!

Last official media literacy training in Bradford

Today was the last day of the media literacy training at the Design Exchange in Bradford. I spoke to the teachers about the importance of the research and also conducted some short questionnaires on what they thought about the scheme so far. Here is a bit of quantitative data for you:

2/3 through the school year...
... 10 out of 13 teachers had seen an impact from using the film literacy scheme
... 7 out of 13 felt that students felt differently about writing
... 10 out of 13 had seen changes to students’ attainment in writing

Teachers also had lots of other positive things to say about the scheme. They felt that it had made a couple of changes to their classes:

- Progress in reading
- Students are excited about literacy
- Better inference skills
- Range of sources to draw information from
- Allows all children to participate- no matter what level
- Students write at length
- Children pay attention in lessons
- Good progress
- More interaction and focus
- Greater variety of language used
- Emphasis is taken away from writing

The best thing about the morning was to hear from three teachers who had been on the scheme the previous year but are still implementing film literacy almost daily. They came up with some amazing examples of how to use films for whole units and across the whole of the curriculum.

It was very interesting to see the difference in how teachers approached the resources and how they thought differently about the scheme and its use. While some teachers said that they implemented the film literacy ideas into 80-90% of their lessons, others had 'only' used it for a handful of lessons over the course of the year. I will have to take these differences into consideration when it comes to analyse my data over the summer.

Last spring, I attended the Kaleidoscope Conference in Cambridge and submitted a journal paper after the conference. In January, I heard back and was asked to make some changes. The paper is now in its second review and I have my fingers crossed that I'll hear back in the next weeks. I am currently in the process of writing a second article about the Steiner Academy Leeds and its place in the Free School landscape.

Media and Learning Newsletter

I am very happy to announce that I have just had an article published in the Media and Learning newsletter. You can find it here. Apart from the AERO article from a few years ago this is my first reviewed publication so I am pretty chuffed.

In other good news, I met with my new supervisor, Ros McLellan from Cambridge University, on Tuesday and she has really helped me to think about my next steps. I am hoping to get back into the primary schools as quickly as possible and look forward to continuing my research.

The Steiner Academy Leeds is also taking shape and we had an interview in London with the New Schools Network last week. If we are accepted into their Development program we'll have access to lots of funding and support so please keep your fingers crossed!

Happy new year!

I am now almost half way through my PhD; time has really flown. After a year of reading and writing, I finally finished my literacy review yesterday. It now includes sections on film and education, literacy, motivation and emotion and I am really proud that  it is done. Overall, it spans 40,000 words. I am very excited about passing it on to my (potential) new supervisor Ros McLellan from the University of Cambridge. Hopefully we will finally be able to start working together in a fortnight's time.

In the first week of January, I visited the MeCCSA in Bournemouth and spoke about the student population of the Bradford Film School. This was a very interesting experience as it was the first time I visited a conference and held a presentation on something that was not PhD related! You can actually find a short video here. I am writing quite a lot for the Steiner Academy Leeds free school bid at the moment, so I might try to put a different paper together for that, too.

Unfortunately my PhD research has hit a bit of a wall- the schools are not very good at getting back to me and after gathering data from the first 10 classes, it is very quiet now. I am a little bit worried that it is too late to re-approach some of the class teachers and I am hoping that Ros can help me to figure out a new strategy to gather as much data as possible in the last months of the school year. Fingers crossed!

A common framework for literacy assessment

A lot of the best things that happen at conferences take place between the talks: no matter whether it’s receiving feedback for your presentation or meeting someone who feels passionately about an interesting area of research, these conversations are really the human backbone of why I enjoy taking part in conferences.

This lunchtime, I met Kamakshi Rajjagopal from the Open University in the Netherlands and we had a very interesting chat about literacy frameworks. Something that almost everyone at the conference seems to struggle with is ‘assessing’ media competencies. How do we know whether someone is media literate?

On a holistic and more general level this is easy to determine: I would expect the person to be able to access and evaluate the media and then, possibly, to be able to produce it, too. In the case of film education for example, there should be an understanding about how meaning is constructed (shots, editing, lighting, …) and what effect these techniques have. However, as soon as we move into the categorisation of these skills at different levels, things become more difficult. I have always found the AQA and WJEC marking criteria for practical coursework pretty limiting.

Kamakshi suggested that we should look at the common aspects between old and new literacy and consider the common frameworks for literacy competence across Europe. Here, competencies are described with positive statements such as ‘I can write a paragraph without errors’. Where I think this comparison falls short in terms of film is that very little attention is paid to creativity (just like in writing)! Students are rewarded for ‘imaginative’ work but it is much more difficult to define ‘imaginative’ than it is to say that there are no grammatical errors in a sentence.

In a way, however, the comparison is an appropriate one if we remember that written language has many things in common with film making: there are parts (sentences and shots, paragraphs and scenes), there is a framework of rules (grammar and editing rules such as the construction of shot-reverse-shot) and there is the same consideration of fiction vs non-fiction (reports and documentaries). In the end, both forms include a degree of creativity no matter how ‘objective’ they are, too.

There are some examples of frameworks (done by the European Commission and UNESCO), however many definitions are basic and vague. On the other hand: would it really be possible to develop specific frameworks for every 'part' of media (film, radio, newspapers, blogs, ...) and where does that list end? Also, as we have seen with the development of film and media as subjects on their own right, just because something is assessed does not mean it gets taken more seriously. 

Yesterday, I was writing about how surprised I was that even after years and years of discussion, media literacy still did not have a common framework- surely by this point we should have long left definitions behind and moved on to making a united move towards implementation? An assessment scheme like the ones that exist for traditional literacy might potentially have a lot to contribute- whether Europe or communities beyond will be able to agree on one framework is a different topic! 

Media and Learning conference live update

Last night at midnight I arrived in Brussels for the Media and Learning conference 2013. The conference takes place at the Flamish ministry of education and the lunch was suitably exciting. Unfortunately my hotel is not in a very nice area but it’s warm and dry and this morning it only took 15 minutes to walk to the conference. I got lost on the way but in end it was really my fault that I did not see the major signs!

I was scheduled to speak this afternoon at 3:30 and so I had plenty of time to go to talks, meet people and tweet! I really enjoy chatting with people online as the conference goes on and I think this is something that I picked up last year at the conference of the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg. Online people make friends much easier than in real life- although I don’t really have any scruples to go up to strangers and say hi at conferences, either. Tweeting, I made a new friend and connected to lots of interesting people in the media literacy area.

The conference has a coherent strand of ‘media literacy’ and much of what is said centres around this topic. It is fascinating to see how even after years of talking about media literacy, theorists and practitioners from all over the world still seem to take many different things from media literacy- in the opening talk media literacy was defined as ICT, film and online media by three different people.

One of the people who opened the conference was Baroness Beeban Kidron, one of the co-founders of Filmclub UK. I was very surprised to see that she simply explained the Filmclub model and praised it. She is a very engaging speaker and I am sure that she wanted to introduce everyone to her project on a positive note, however saying that media literacy is now playing a big part in schools over the UK and not mentioning that Filmclub does not actually exist anymore annoyed me a little bit.

Filmclub and First Light have now merged to become Film Nation UK and the old organisations are going to disappear. Her comment regarding the media literacy in the schools is simply idealistic- England has removed all traces of media from its latest primary curriculum and in the secondary sector more and more schools cancel media as an A-Level and GCSE because of the move towards the English baccalaureate.

In the afternoon, I went to a lecture on ‘big data’ and the impact of data gathering and analysis on education. Dai Griffiths from the University of Bolton began his talk with a quote from Michael Gove, in which teachers are encouraged to collect and generate data to ‘show what works’. This is very much in line with the approach of my PhD: the education department wants statistics and quantitative ‘proof’ of what makes a difference to learning (or rather testing!). Dai talked about how companies like Wonga and Google gather masses of data and how this data helps them to make decisions but then also noted that this might not be the right model for education.

What data can we really gather as educators? At the moment, all data that we collect or that we are supplied with is about exam results and standardised attainment levels. Does this reflect learning? If you have read a few posts on this blog you might have realised that I feel very strongly about how little testing and grading contribute to education and that much of the education system in which we work is based on the wrong foundations. Dai finished his talk with the question whether using more data (and the trend is developing that way) can really help students and teachers or whether the benefit is just for the managers and data becomes just another inflated tool of performance management.

At 3:30pm it was finally time for my talk. I was part of a panel which spoke about media literacy as a contributor to ‘core competence’ and the two other panel members introduced a practical project and gave a further introduction to Filmclub. I think the beginning of my talk might have sounded a little bit angry- all fired up from the ‘big data’ talk, I passionately argued for the importance of quantitative research and against the casual use of quotes and bad methodologies. I introduced everyone to the City of Film media literacy project and shared a few data points I have gathered so far. I also spoke about the political landscape in the UK and the fact that there was little funding for enquiry and little government support for media. Overall, I think it went pretty well and there were almost 20 people there who listened to me and my colleagues.  Afterwards, I was approached by a lady from the University of Barcelona who wanted to interview me for her film and we agreed to meet tomorrow morning.

This evening, there is the show for the Media and Learning awards. I was a judge for the competition as few months ago and looked at eight media projects from films to interactive software and video games. I am looking forward to seeing some of the other projects which have been nominated. I think there is a group from Yorkshire, too!

Tomorrow, I am going to attend sessions on research into film and media across Europe and one of my new friends, Julie Smith from Southern Illinois University is going to speak about reality TV shows. The plenary at the end of the day will look at how to create systematic change towards a more media friendly education system- something I am particularly looking forward to! Thanks for reading and I’ll keep you updated! 

Starting the research

It's been quite some time since I have blogged- the summer flew by and now I am already half way through the first phase of my research. I started to contact schools in August and also met the teachers at the first teacher training event. Unfortunately it turned out that the classes were actually Year 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (instead of only Year 5), but on the other hand there are almost 30 schools who are part of the scheme this year. It has been challenging to get in touch with them and organise a day at school with the teachers but whenever I have met students it has been very interesting and rewarding. So far, 200 students have taken questionnaires on writing and film.

On a none-PhD note, I have joined a group of people who are trying to apply for a Steiner Free School in Leeds. Have a look at the website if you are interested :-)

I passed my transfer a few weeks ago, too, so there is one thing I can tick off! Hurray! Chapter-wise, I am now done with film, literacy and motivation and also hope to submit the section on emotion at the end of the week. Unfortunately I still haven't got a second supervisors but I have got my fingers crossed that the paperwork is finally going to come through before Christmas.

Last Saturday I attended the Media Education Association conference in London and spoke about the ways in which the scheme uses film to teach literacy. I only spoke to a small group of people, but I think that most of them found it interesting and helpful. One of the attendees turned out to be Paul Reeve, the new head of Film Nation UK. I had another quick chat with him at the end of the day and he told me to 'get on with my PhD quickly' as it was needed by the film education community and that it would be 'dynamite' once it was published. That was pretty great feedback from someone so important!

In three weeks time I am off to my first international conference the Media and Learning Conference in Brussels. You can find the programme here. It looks like a very interesting event and I look forward to sharing my research with the international film and media education community. I have also been accepted to speak at the Meccsa conference in Bournemouth in January and will be presenting a paper on how Bradford introduces film to people on the margins of society.