As we know, the UK doe snot have a codified constitution.
This has frequently led to disagreements and debates. Here is a very interesting debate on the subject
...
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Thursday, May 05, 2022
Local elections
Today there are local elections in Britain. The newspapers front pages are worth a look.
https://news.sky.com/story/thursdays-national-newspaper-front-pages-12427754
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Nouveau programme agrégation
The new programme of the agrégation - for 2023 - has been published this morning. You will find it on the official "devenir enseignant" page.
Of course, myself I am involved in the history section, but I could not help noticing that Hamlet is now the set Shakespeare text. And I have to recommend this classic book about the play, which I consider to be a masterpiece and essential reading :
Amazon.fr - What Happens in Hamlet - Wilson, John Dover - Livres
Monday, March 21, 2022
Thursday, March 03, 2022
Friday, February 18, 2022
What the papers say
Visit this site briefly once a day to see the front pages, often colourful, of all the main UK papers:
https://news.sky.com/topic/newspapers-5993
Friday, February 04, 2022
Thursday, February 03, 2022
MEEF devoir composition S3
En principe j'ai renvoyé à chaque étudiant e son devoir maison commenté, et il y a des commentaires collectifs ici
http://johncmullen.blogspot.com/2022/01/meef-devoir-maison-inclusion-and.html
Si par accident informatique ou autre vous n'avez pas reçu cette copie, n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un mail.
Wednesday, February 02, 2022
Lecture on post-war Britain
All students of 20th century Britain will find Vernon Bogdanor's lectures on YouTube useful. There are many of them. He is generally conservative, but broadly fair-minded and very informative.
I was listening today to this one, on the character of post-war Britain. Why the Labour Party won in 1945, how the welfare state was set up and what people thought about it.
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Suggested translation M2 January exam.
PS: if you send me an email I will send you photos of your corrected work.
He
pressed the switch on the lamp which stood on the bedside table. This filled
the large, barely furnished bedroom with a dim light. He had no need to look at
his watch to know that it was five in the morning. He woke every morning
without fail[1] at
the same time. He pushed aside the covers with a brusque gesture and got out of
bed. The wooden floor creaked under his bare feet in the silence of the dawn.
He
quickly got dressed, putting on a
tracksuit which was lying on the
quilt, and moved towards the window. The closed curtains allowed through lines
of light and shadow. He opened them and half-opened one of the windows. These
were automatic actions among other everyday actions which almost forty years of
living alone had weaved into his life. They were some of so many automatic
reactions which had become essential.
He
suddenly felt dreadfully cold. Despite the hesitant dawn, the moon was still
shining icily. The stars were going out one by one. The day was dawning to a
sky heavy with milk-white clouds. “It is going to snow,” he thought.
Near
the dirt track, he could make out the rocky foothills of the Caïros riverbed,
the river which flowed into the Roya, a small waterway which flowed along the
coast of France and Italy, and then into the sea near Vintimille. He could hear
the bubbling of the water flowing across the dark rows of rocks. Its journey
had begun higher up, 1900 metres below Devil’s Peak. Barely four kilometres
further on, at the foot of Saint Claire’s chapel, the sudden drop in altitude
turned it into a bold torrent. It rushed then down the steep slopes of the
valley, polishing as it passed the rocks and pebbles of the river bed. Its
impetuous waters pulled it to the River Roya, which it joined by the villages
of Fontan and Saorge, 1500 metres further down.
That
was where he had set up home, in this vallée of Caïros. The tiny hamlet of only
a few scattered houses sat on the left bank of the valley, on an ever sunlit
stretch overlooked by the Ceva Plateau. It was wonderful.[2]
Journée d'étude Black Lives Matter: on peut suivre gratuitement en ligne
Le vendredi 4 février 2022, se tiendra à Montpellier une journée d’étude sur le thème “Black Lives Matter : formes politiques et artistiques de l’antiracisme aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume-Uni”, dont vous trouverez le programme ci-dessous.
Cette manifestation, en
accès libre, se tiendra
sur le campus Saint-Charles de l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
(UPVM3), salle des colloques n°2. Il sera possible de suivre les
interventions en visioconférence:
https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/96284093112?pwd=b0xwWEcvM1QxUkFEQWJmSTJGRlROZz09
Cette journée d’étude s’inscrit dans le cadre des activités du thème
“Faire commun” du laboratoire EMMA, dont des membres proposeront des
interventions sur la production artistique liée au mouvement Black
Lives Matter, sur le traitement de la question des vies noires dans les
formats sériel et filmique et enfin sur l’inscription
du mouvement dans l’espace anglophone transatlantique. Faisant suite à
la séance de séminaire
“De Black Lives Matter au renouveau afro-féministe : voix noires contemporaines aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni” du 19 janvier 2021, cette journée d’étude servira aussi de prélude et de journée préparatoire
à un colloque organisé à Montpellier en 2023.
En voici le programme :
9h15 ouverture (Sandrine Sorlin, co-directrice d'EMMA) et introduction
Session 1 (modération:
Niaz Pernon, ENSCM, EMMA)
9h30 Nicolas Gachon (UPVM3, EMMA), « Mouvements sociaux et espace public : le cas Black Lives Matter »
10h10 Marc Lenormand (UPVM3, EMMA), « Les manifestations antiracistes de 2020 au Royaume-Uni: référence états-unienne et séquence britannique »
10h50 pause
11h20 Lawrence Aje (UPVM3, EMMA), « Entre reconnaissance et effacement : la mémorialisation publique de l’esclavage aux États-Unis, 2000-2021 »
12h00 discussion
12h30 pause méridienne
Session 2 (modération:
Raphaël Ricaud, UPVM3, EMMA)
14h00 Claude Chastagner (UPVM3, EMMA), « Black Lives Matter, un nouveau terrain pour la protest song ? »
14h40
Claudine Raynaud (UPVM3, EMMA), « Memoirs from #BLM era »
15h20 pause
Session 3 (modération:
Manon Lefebvre et Monica Michlin, UPVM3, EMMA)
15h50
Marianne Drugeon (UPVM3, EMMA), « From Confrontation to Healing: in-yer-heart and in-yer-ear in debbie tucker green's
ear for eye and Selina Thompson's salt. »
16h30
Hervé Mayer (UPVM3, EMMA), « Black Bodies/White Spaces: the Horrors of White Supremacy in
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) »
17h10 discussion
Sunday, January 23, 2022
Ex minister thinks she may have been sacked because she was a muslim
Questions of inclusion and diversity, in and around Johnson’s cabinet.
Saturday, January 22, 2022
MEEF DEVOIR MAISON INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY
Like many people, I have been considerably slowed down by the covid situation, so thank you for your patience.
PS: I forgot to mention below the photos. Almost nobody described the photos. How is Colton dressed, what kind of street was his statue on, does the statue seem to be glorifying him? What kind of people do we see in the photo of the demonstration? Young, old, black, white? What are they doing? What attitudes are they showing? Etc .
Some feedback MEEF devoir maison
The story of the Bristol statue continues. See here
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/colston-4-trial-adjourned-until-6394848
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/colston-4-trial-updates-bristol-6340000
The aim of the exercise is to show
- your English is good
- you understand both the explicit and implicit meanings of the documents
- you have a good knowledge of inclusion and diversity questions in Britain over the last century.
You must prove all three of these things. So if you do not give any examples of other antiracist activity or laws not mentioned in the documents, or other conversations about commemoration not mentioned in the documents, you have not demonstrated the third element.
A few important points:
When presenting the documents, move straight onto elements which help in the interpretation. It is far better to write
The third document is an indignant article from the very popular conservative newspaper, the Daily Mail. It uses very negative vocabulary concerning the Bristol demonstrators, calling them a “mob”.
Rather than
The third document is an article from the Daily Mail website, published on 3rd June 2021. The title is “[quotes complete headline].
It is far better to write
In the third photograph, the statue has been rescued from the river by the local authorities, thought it has not been cleaned, and is displayed horizontally in a museum.
Rather than
The third photograph shows the statue in a museum.
The first photo shows a statue of Colton, finely dressed, on a pedestal in a city avenue.
The centre of your work is the documents, what they are trying to do. The centre is not as such anti racism, British history or multiculturalism. The structure you announce will show this.
This is good: First I will look at what the documents show about commemoration acts, then I will explore the strong feelings often involved in the national conversation around commemoration and racism….
It is very important to think about the intentions and objectives of the different people and organizations involved. The documents are, or illustrate, attempts to change something or stop something changing. They do not simply portray or depict political events.
What were the objectives of
Those who put up the original statue
Those who pulled it down
Bristol council
The museum
The artist who put up the alternative statue
The makers of the website with a lesson plan about Cable Street
The Daily Mail
Now, these intentions may not be easy to identify, which is why “hedging” is essential: that is, expressing uncertainty and probability. Here are some good examples:
The museum may be trying to encourage debate about the statue.
The artist is probably hoping to get a message across about what role models he would prefer to be celebrated with public statues.
The local government, when they pulled the statue out of the river, may have been worried about the reaction of some local voters if they did nothing. The Bristol community must have been divided on this question.
The webmasters may well be hoping to encourage history teachers to include the events of Cable St in their lessons, since it is often forgotten.
The Daily Mail seems to be denouncing what they take to be the disrespect shown to Colton’s statue both by the demonstrators and by the museum, although for the sake of balance they also quote sympathizers of the demonstrators.
British context
These two conversations: how to deal, in history classes, with the events of Cable Street and what to do with statues which were erected a long time ago but celebrate people who are contested by antiracists today, take place in a context.
When doing this kind of exercise, one of the most important questions is “How typical are the events, opinions and attitudes shown in the documents”. This question allows you to show you know lots of examples *which are not in the documents *, which is essential.
Recent laws in Britain have tried to reduce racism at work by making it an obligation of public bodies to fight indirect discrimination by “promoting racial equality”, a particularly British approach. A specific law was brought in to oppose religious discrimination, especially islamophobia. The Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Bristol can be seen as wanting to go further, and look at discrimination in symbolic public spaces.
At the same time, over the last twenty years, governments, in particularly Conservative governments, have been commenting negatively on multiculturalism, suggesting it causes separatism, or even that it was one of the causes of jihadist terrorism ( three of the four terrorists in the terrible 2005 attacks, which killed 52 people, were born and bred in England. Governments, partly responding to racist sentiment, have said that the most important thing is “community cohesion” and have introduced reforms such as the UK Citizenship test, allegedly to encourage such cohesion.
The referendum which led to the UK leaving the European Union involved significant amounts of anti immigrant campaigning, in particular by Nigel Farage.
So, we have a situation where both moves against racism and negative feelings about immigration are very much present.
Friday, January 21, 2022
agrégation anglais civilisation britannique méthodologie commentaire
The commentary exercise, for the agrégation interne, is only required at the oral exams (and so, not next week). Of course, if you are enrolled for the agrégation externe, this exercise is present at the written exams.
I gave this class for a group of agrégatifs who are not at Rouen, but I think you will find it useful (to listen to in February or March!)
http://www.jcmullen.fr/0122finalamienscommentary.mp3
It only remains for me to
wish you the best of luck with the exams next week.
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