EDUCATION

Does the education system need more feminism? 💪

Education has historically catered to men, with women’s access to education being hindered by patriarchal and outdated views on what their role in society should be, even in the modern world today. Whilst many definitions of feminism exist (and everyone certainly seems to have their own interpretations of this concept!), it is perhaps best defined by the prominent educator and social critic Bell Hooks as a movement to end sexism, exploitation and oppression (Hooks, 2014). So, where does the education system fit into all this? In this educational scoop, we’ll be considering the concept of feminist education, the implications this has for schooling and the ways in which it can be put into practice within educational institutions!

💡 Things to consider

• What do we mean by ‘feminist education’? Feminist education describes an approach that places significance on the experiences of women in relation to educational materials, learning environments, relationships between teachers and students and the associations between academic spaces and the wider world (Mitcho, 2016). This pedagogy centres ideas of what is currently lacking from educational provisions and seeks to increase exposure to feminist principles for students of all genders and backgrounds.

• How can the curriculum better support feminist ideas? Hooks’ popular novel, Feminism is for everybody (2014) discusses a plethora of ways in which feminist education could be implemented within our current education systems. Rather than a total reconstruction, one simple suggestion she makes is that educators should enable the immersion of more feminist works and literature within the curriculum. Centuries of educational and psychological research has demonstrated that learning experiences that occur during early childhood and adolescence have a large impact on intellectual, personal, social and moral development. As such, this strategy works on the premise that through the addition of accessible feminist literature to the curriculum and by published such works in a range of styles and formats to make it more palatable to the reader, schools can contribute to educating for ‘critical consciousness’.

• The importance of educating for critical consciousness: The term ‘critical consciousness’ refers to having an increased awareness of the power structures that influence society and the wider world, and is particularly important for educational processes and practices. As such, Hooks (2014) and other social theorists consider schools to be “one of the most crucial sites” for the development of this quality due to their role as spaces for both academic advancement and the formation of identities and beliefs. In summary, we can see that feminism is needed within education systems to promote ideas of equality, make the curriculum free of bias by equally empowering women’s voices and teach the merit of this perspective.

🔎 Find out more

• Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by Bell Hooks

• Feminist Pedagogy

ENGLISH

The Early Modern solution to information overload… 🤯

If you’re anything like me, chances are you have a notes app full to the brim of random things you want to remember. In my case, that might be a song lyric that stayed with me, a line of a poem that I adored, or a direct quote from something a friend said that I found insightful, or amusing, or both. For Early Modern readers, commonplace books were a bit like the jumbled notes on my phone…

Commonplacing was a popular literary practice whereby readers would note down quotations from things that they had read, often organised under specific headings to make them easier to find again later. When authors in the Early Modern period began to pen some of the first recognisable English novels, these commonplace books were incredibly important. For example, some scholars argue that Montaigne (who wrote several Essais in French musing about his life) uses direct quotations from his own reading in his work, and Erasmus’ De Copia is basically a phrase book to aid writers with their written expression. We can therefore think of writing during this period as a kind of collage of ideas and phrases that might already exist.

💡 Things to consider

• ‘Encyclopaedic ambition’: This phrase comes from the scholar Ann Blair, who suggests that Early Modern commonplace books were precursors to modern encyclopaedias. Commonplace books often had a lot of the features we see in modern encyclopaedias, such as contents pages and alphabetized subject matter. How does this process of finding information change the process of reading? Further, has the internet now become one big commonplace book?

• Picking and Choosing: William Baldwin, arguably the first English novelist, places a great deal of importance on the reader’s own judgement at the beginning of Morall Phylosophie. He writes, ‘I humblye beseche the[e] (most gentle Reader) to take in good part this simple philosophycal treatyse, & so to use it as sainct Augustine hath taught us, takyng the good, and leavyng the bad, neyther reverencying it as the gospel, neyther yet despysing it as a thing of no value’, which means readers should take what they want from his lists of quotations, and ignore what they don’t. How does this notion of choosing from a literary menu impact the way we think about writing?

• Who do words belong to? As we have seen, intellectuals who practised commonplacing took the words of others, often ancient scholars, and adapted them slightly or quoted them directly in their own work. But is this work their own? Does thinking about and reflecting upon the words of others before rewriting them make them one’s own words? Who has ownership over words, and indeed ideas, in this literary practice?

🔎 Find out more

• Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

• Jennifer Richards, ‘Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton’ in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

🍒 The cherry on top

• 🎙️ Voice Notes: “It's something about not being physically seen. Like asking someone to turn their head in the other direction when we sing.” This article delves into the author’s personal experiences with voice notes as a form of communication. A great read if you’re into Life, Philosophy, and Literature.

• 🟫 What is Brown?: Sounds like a silly question at first, right? However, this YouTube video goes down this rabbit hole to explore how we can see brown, even if there’s no such thing as ‘brown light’. Great for the Science fans out there!

• 💊 The reality of narcoculture and its impact on society: Ioan Grillo, a journalist with over two decades of experience covering Latin America, shares insights into his career and the impact of drug cartels on society in an interview with Boletín. Great if you’re interested in Spanish!

👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…

• 22nd January - Balliol College Oxford Insight into: Animal Mimicry Seminar

• 22nd January - UEA Economics Taster Seminar

• 22nd January - UEA Biology/Healthcare Taster Seminar

• 22nd January - Magdalene College Cambridge Subject Taster Session: Neuroscience

• 23rd January - Balliol College Oxford Insight into: Gender Bias in Science and Medicine Seminar

• 23rd January - University of York Holocaust Memorial Day Open Lecture

• 23rd January - Introducing Cambridge - Information Webinar Series for Scottish Students

• 23rd January - University of Oxford History Super-Curricular Lecture

• 24th January - Balliol College Oxford Insight into: Obesity Seminar

• 24th January - ClickCambridge Session for Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Arab students

• 25th January - University of Oxford Online Maths Club

• 25th January - Magdalene College Cambridge Subject Taster Session: Architecture

• 25th January - St John’s College Cambridge Introduction to University Webinar

• 25th January - University of Cambridge Subject Matters Webinar: Post-16 Choices

• 26th January - UEA Banking and Finance Taster Event

🗳️ Poll