I read yesterday’s post and discovered a number of typing errors, hey-ho. Thank you for the excellent completion of homework, new work has been set for this week.

Today we continued looking at British identity, we decided to do some cultural Geography and see what other people thought of us.

We watched the ‘Regina Monologues’ episode of the Simpsons and made notes on the British icons and values shown. The icons were easy to get, the Queen, Tony Blair, Mini etc, there is a nice article on Wikipedia which highlights some of these. Values and attitudes were a bit more difficult, but we discussed…

Politeness

Manners

Taste and Class

Affluence

Sense of humour

Nice one about being push-overs.

We should have discussed what it didn’t tells us about Britain and Britishness but this slipped my mind.

After this will discussed Gordon Brown’s idea for a revival of Britishness and the teaching of Britishness in schools. We looked at a couple of sources to draw out what might be such values, we used some of the staff feedback and a news clip of children discussing the issue. Our values weren’t too far from Gordon Brown’s ideas

Freedom of Speech

Democracy

Respect for the rule of Law.

Tolerance of minority and ethnic groups.

Respect for equal rights.

Some of you were critical of such values, suggesting that these aren’t unique to Britain, but should be fundamental to humanity in any country, whilst some expressed concern at the lack of tolerance in the U.K. at the moment. See Gordon, I’ve done my citizenship bit!

We finished this section by reading an extraction about Britishness from a book entitled ‘Is it me or is everything sh*t?’ Volume 2′. I meant to send Alan a copy. It summed up nicely what  I was trying to get across over the course of the lessons, Britishness can be defined by space, through a made-up and artificial country (Nation-State), but apart from the Geography, what defines Britishness is, well, …..

I should have drawn this together better, but I leave this open to you…

Are you British?

Post Script

We also discussed some of the highly pointless scientific ideas to reduce the impact of global warming, as via Richard and Judy and the B.B.C. Two programme last night. Sulphur rockets…..

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Posted in Lesson evaluations, My place
Written on Tue, 20 February 2007 at 9:08 pm

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