Criticality Archives

Teaching with Art for History and Religious Education

In an age where our emerging global society is increasingly visual, Teaching with Art for History and Religious Education invites a fresh approach to the use of artwork and other visual materials when teaching about religion, history and the stories of art. Visual sources can be illuminating, paradoxical, subversive and disruptive; they can stimulate new ways of thinking about how we understand the past, faith and belief, and what this means for us in the present.

Drawing on new research and practice in schools, museums, galleries and public spaces, the book explores generative ways that visual sources are experienced by young people and educators, as routes for investigating contested pasts, truth claims and traditions, or as provocations and protest. Running through the book is an exploration of theory and practice for using art in education and its potential for prompting interdisciplinary approaches to both RE and history. A ‘manifesto for using art in the curriculum’ offers principles for how art can act as a key pivot for student learning, and a section on the ethics of teaching with images guides teachers through tricky conversations. Ultimately, the book invites educators to use visual sources with young people not as mere adjuncts to text, but as unique, rich, complex, engaging and distinct forms of knowledge in their own right.

Knowledge and Knowing in Media and Film Studies

For traditional subjects such as History, Art and Science, debate about the nature of knowledge in the school curriculum has produced a growing literature on the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and what is taught in schools. For newer subjects, however, the path is less clear.

Knowledge and Knowing in Media and Film Studies is the first book to grapple with the question for these two related subjects. Steve Connolly argues that, while Media and Film Studies each have a clear epistemological base, consideration of craft skills alongside factual knowledge and criticality has led to the development of different criteria for what constitutes valuable knowledge than in traditional school subjects. The book problematises this difference through a genealogy of both subjects as they appear in the English school curriculum, charting their historical and disciplinary origins within that system. In so doing it finds that, far from being ‘new’ subjects, Media and Film Studies have parallel histories with more established subjects. Using a range of primary and secondary data, including interviews with media and film teachers, case studies and historical sources, the book provides an account of knowledge and knowing in school Media Studies and Film Studies, which both consolidates existing views and proposes some new perspectives.

Anti-Atlas

The invasion of Ukraine is the latest in a series of upheavals that have made eastern Europe a telling point from which to consider the place of area studies in the construction of knowledge about the world. The politics of academic knowledge about ‘areas’ now feels more urgent than ever.

Anti-Atlas plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It presents a collection of essays written by an eclectic mix of authors from Europe, both east and west, the UK and North America. These entries analyse a necessarily incomplete selection of topics, but they all engage with the question of how an approach to area can be ‘critical’ – and each entry demonstrates different aspects of criticality. The editors develop a manifesto for such criticality, calling attention to positions that are heterodox, area-informed or vernacular, ‘undisciplined’, and collaborative. Through a variety of genres, including the scholarly article, the travel guide, autobiographical reflections and data visualisations, Anti-Atlas provides readers with a diverse series of intellectual resources, asking them to think critically about the ways in which we construct the world by dividing it into pieces.