In 1950, magazines targeted at teenage girls included no acknowledgement that they might be sexua... more In 1950, magazines targeted at teenage girls included no acknowledgement that they might be sexually active: any sex at all was disruptive and dangerous. By the end of the twentieth century, even though teen magazines were full of sex, fuelling moral panics about girls’ sexuality, there were still rigid expectations about the contexts in which it was acceptable for girls to be doing it.
This paper will explore the ways that teen magazines discussed sex, advised their readers about it, and how they portrayed those girls who engaged in sexual activity outside the currently-accepted limits of appropriate behaviour. Drawing particularly on magazine problem pages, this paper will analyse the ways that both teenage girls themselves, and their magazine advisers, engaged with these changing boundaries, how the discussion of disruptive sex was used in the magazines to enforce the acceptable practice of teenage sexuality, and how girls writing letters to the magazines both challenged and enforced the magazine definitions of acceptable sex. The paper will also make use of the experiences of adults looking back at their own magazines-reading teens, and their experiences of learning about sex from the magazines.
I will argue that girls related the content in the magazines to their own lived experiences of sex and sexuality, and I will draw connections between how they experienced their own sexuality, and how ideal or normative sexuality, and disruptive sexuality, are presented by the magazines.
Before the internet and its wealth of (mis)information was available, many teenage girls got most... more Before the internet and its wealth of (mis)information was available, many teenage girls got most of their sex education from their magazines, learning about safe sex, emotions, social expectations, and physical practicalities from articles and problem pages. Revisiting twentieth century teen magazines including Jackie, Just Seventeen, Mizz and More!, this paper will explore the voices of both producers and consumers of magazines in the confusion of messages about how to say no and when to say yes, what girls should expect from sex, and whether boys really are ‘just after one thing’. I will draw on the advice published with the magazines’ authorial voices, as well as the published letters from readers who were grappling with how to apply the magazine advice to their own lives, and consider the magazines’ aims in the ways these interactions between producer and consumer were framed. The paper will also draw on recent survey data about women’s recollections of their own consumption of teenage magazines, to examine the way these messages about sex have stayed with readers, sometimes decades later. Prominent in those recollections are the ‘position of the fortnight’ in More! magazine, and Just Seventeen’s slogan ’to be sussed is a must, but sex under 16 is illegal’, as well as mixed emotions about the appropriateness of the magazines’ sexual content, and whether the lessons learned turned out to be useful ones, and an acknowledgement that sometimes there were simply no better sources of information available.
At the height of the women’s liberation movement, and not long after the contraceptive pill becam... more At the height of the women’s liberation movement, and not long after the contraceptive pill became available to unmarried women, Honey magazine published an article entitled ‘Why do women feel they should have children?’ which questions the assumption many women make that having babies will be a central part of their lives. Honey was a magazine which encouraged critical thinking in its teenage and young adult readers, and this article was followed by a string of published letters to the magazine in response, both agreeing and disagreeing with its arguments.
This paper will examine the operation of this debate about whether to have children. I will explore the aims of the magazine in publishing the controversial article, and in the magazine’s choice of response letters to publish, as well as considering the intentions of the readers who wrote those letters, and the effect that this article-response cycle might have had on those readers who did not write in, but merely observed.
This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a survey asking adult women to recall their exp... more This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a survey asking adult women to recall their experiences of reading teenage magazines. From over one hundred responders in their twenties through to their sixties, the interim results suggest that the main things women remember about their teenage magazine reading experiences are the magazines’ definition of normality — whether they fit it, and how they could do better if they didn’t — and their reactions to the infamous ‘Position of the fortnight’ feature in More! magazine.
Responses include women whose teenage normality was confirmed by their magazine reading: 'I learnt that I was a fairly normal teenager as other girls were going through the same emotions as me', as well as women who used magazines to learn how to be normal teenagers: 'Teenage magazines helped me to negotiate the culture of my peers and learn to get on with them. I studied them like most kids study their textbooks'.
Some of these women look back on their magazine reading with affection, some with anger. This paper will explore the legacy of girls’ magazines through the recollections of those who read them.
Open online courses at Oxford Brookes University are an accredited option leading to a postgradua... more Open online courses at Oxford Brookes University are an accredited option leading to a postgraduate certificate of teaching in higher education (PCTHE). One of the challenges has been to create an assessment strategy that meets diverse needs yet encapsulates the values of the HEA UKPSF and develops attributes for ongoing academic practice. This presentation will feature #TOOC15 as a case study to demonstrate learning design for assessment within a MOOC, and in particular assessed group work.
This workshop will suggest that open online staff development offerings can be used to meet some ... more This workshop will suggest that open online staff development offerings can be used to meet some of the challenges in the diversifying context of higher education, and will explore ways to approach such provision.
The roles and locations of those who ‘teach’ in higher education are becoming increasingly diverse and permeable (HEFCE 2010); support and professional service staff are increasingly teaching in some form, and there is a push towards delivering HE in different locations such as transnational education and HE in FE. All of these contexts require new thinking in how we can prepare and train staff, especially those new to teaching in HE. Accredited UK PSF descriptor 1 provision is one way of preparing such staff and by offering this provision as an open online course we can offer flexibility and allow universities to extend their developmental options.
This workshop will explore the perspectives of participants on the two 10 credit open online modules of the PGCert in learning and teaching in higher education. Why did they choose to study in this mode? (flexibility, interest, access to expertise of diverse participants) Why did they choose to study for a credit-bearing course? (professional recognition, career development). Using these participant voices as a starting point the workshop will then explore the question of how delegates can use similar ideas to extend their own educational development provision.
Within our own context, and drawing on the expertise available to us, we have chosen a pedagogy that is activity-based, dialogic, reflective, participatory and community-located. The emphasis for us is on building a community of learners (tutors included) that engage in meaningful activity, reflection and dialogue.
This workshop will offer the chance to explore the pedagogic choices you could make in your own contexts, according to your intended audiences and the expertise available.
"The 1990s incarnation of Mizz magazine is unusual in the recent history of the British girls’ ma... more "The 1990s incarnation of Mizz magazine is unusual in the recent history of the British girls’ magazine, in that it seems designed deliberately to encourage its readers to think for themselves on a wide variety of subjects. The magazine’s letters page, ‘Oi!’, printed letters from readers with a mix of praise and disagreement in response to articles in previous issues, and that disagreement sometimes led to further articles showing alternative views of the issue under discussion. In its 1990s heyday, Mizz was therefore full of debate and discussion with its readers, before a relaunch in 2006 to a more conventional pink/boys/lipstick format.
Foreshadowing the social media interactions that current magazines for teenagers rely on so heavily, 1990s-era Mizz made heavy use of the experiences and opinions of readers as a basis for articles, and often extended this platform to other relevant parties, such as boys (the magazine was much more accepting of lesbian relationships than its predecessors, but the primary focus in articles was still relationships with boys). In 1995, an apparently simple question and answer session with a group of boys on their opinions about romance, sex and girls led to a stream of responses to the letters page, and an ongoing conversation between readers, the magazine, and several different cohorts of boys. The conversation spanned articles and letters to the magazine over three months, and explored problems of sexism, equality within relationships, and attitudes to sex.
This paper analyses the ways that Mizz magazine mediated this ongoing debate in the intersection between romance and politics, and the ways the magazine’s readers resisted the boys’ sexist understandings of boy-girl relationships. I show how the magazine offered girls a space within which to rehearse discussions which might be vital in their relationships with boys, and I argue that the magazine was thus performing a feminist, empowering function in helping to equip those girls to demand equality in their own relationships, and to recognise and reject sexist attitudes from boys."
Letters from readers to magazines offer a rich, but relatively under-studied, resource for work o... more Letters from readers to magazines offer a rich, but relatively under-studied, resource for work on reader relationships with magazines, and on wider cultural and social history. However, from a methodological point of view they also present significant problems of authentication. The widespread belief that letters to problem pages, in particular, are ‘all just made up’ can be an obstacle to serious consideration of this source material, one which is not easily set aside, as magazines do not typically keep archives of the letters they receive.
In a conference paper in June 2012, Lisa Sigel suggested that letters to London Life in the early twentieth century were widely believed to be fake because commentators found it implausible that women could have such fetishistic desires, or would be able to write about them if they did. Although the letters from teenage girls which make up my primary source material do not go as far as those in London Life, they do often cover areas which were believed at the time to be unfeminine, or inappropriate concerns for girls, leading to similar doubts about their authenticity.
Using magazines for teenage girls as a case study, this paper will examine the evidence for their authenticity, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of their use as source material. I will ask how much their authenticity matters, and what it means for problem pages as source material if their authenticity can never be proven.
Reference
Sigel, L, ‘London Life and women’s sexual history in inter-war Britain’, Women in Magazines conference, 22 June 2012, Kingston University.
"Acquiring a boyfriend is an important stage in the lifecycle of the magazine woman, and a major ... more "Acquiring a boyfriend is an important stage in the lifecycle of the magazine woman, and a major contributor to the transition from girl to woman. In many ways, it is the entire purpose of Jackie magazine’s early issues to guide a girl through catching a marriage-worthy boy, in order that she may then graduate to being a woman, reading a woman’s magazine, which will then advise her on the care and maintenance of her marital relationship.
This paper will examine the messages from Jackie about the approved methods of catching a boy, and discuss some of the ways readers resisted the magazine’s orthodoxy in their correspondence with the letters and problem pages.
This is a site of particular conflict in the relationship between reader and magazine, perhaps because of the paradoxical contrast between the gender ideology forbidding girls from chasing boys, and the widely accepted belief that catching a boy was the primary interest of all girls. Jackie’s way of reconciling these contradictions is to offer advice that girls must simply ‘go where the boys are’ (issue 1, 1964: 16) and wait, looking pretty, but I argue that for some readers, at least, the socially conservative vision of life portrayed in Jackie is not passively, uncritically, accepted, but assessed, tested and adapted to suit their own purposes and their own experiences of life."
Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of learn... more Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of learning in MOOCs remains limited. This paper reports on an investigation into the pedagogy in one MOOC- Oxford Brookes University’s ‘First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education ’ MOOC (FSLT12). FSLT12 was an open and free professional development opportunity for people moving into HE teaching. It was a small course (200 participants registered from 24 countries) which was focused on introducing HE teaching skills, and, uniquely, to deliberately integrate open academic practice as a vital part of professional development for HE teachers. A qualitative, case-study approach was used in the research, based on surveys, interviews, and social media, to provide evidence about how people learned in this course and consider wider implications for teaching and learning in higher education. The evidence shows that participants who completed the course were able to learn autonomously and na...
This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher ... more This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners ex...
This paper uses a case study from 1970s girls’ magazine Honey to demonstrate how paying attention... more This paper uses a case study from 1970s girls’ magazine Honey to demonstrate how paying attention to reader contributions published in magazines can give a richer, more nuanced view of the relationship between magazine and reader. The case study, a debate on why women assume they will have children, offers a new understanding of the way that such interactions in the magazine contributed to the development of young women’s understanding of the increasing freedoms available to them in the 1970s.
This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher ... more This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners ex...
This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher ... more This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners experienced a transformative shift, but it required reflection on practice, community support, and self-organization; (3) Reciprocal Relationships: New learners needed time to determine their audience and core community, as well as to realize mutual relationships within that community. Learners in a MOOC inhabit a liminal space. Active MOOC participants are skilled orienteers. Engaging local expertise of experienced MOOC learners and developing participatory skills in new learners is a key strategy for those who organize and facilitate MOOCs.
The International Review of Research in Open and Distant Learning, 2013
"Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of... more "Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of learning in MOOCs remains limited. This paper reports on an investigation into the pedagogy in one MOOC - Oxford Brookes University’s ‘First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’ MOOC (FSLT12). FSLT12 was an open and free professional development opportunity for people moving into HE teaching. It was a small course (200 participants registered from 24 countries) which was focused on introducing HE teaching skills, and, uniquely, to deliberately integrate open academic practice as a vital part of professional development for HE teachers. A qualitative, case-study approach was used in the research, based on surveys, interviews, and social media, to provide evidence about how people learned in this course and consider wider implications for teaching and learning in higher education. The evidence shows that participants who completed the course were able to learn autonomously and navigate the distributed platforms and environments. The most challenging issues were acceptance of open academic practice and difficulty in establishing an academic identity in an unpredictable virtual environment. An interesting and significant feature of the course was the support for learners from a number of MOOC ‘veterans’ who served as role models and guides for less experienced MOOC learners. The research shows that small task-oriented MOOCs can effectively support professional development of open academic practice.""
Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching, Dec 2014
Against a background of decreasing funding in higher education for conferences and travel, this p... more Against a background of decreasing funding in higher education for conferences and travel, this paper argues for an alternative approach to international collaboration, based on work by the author and colleagues on an online conference run in Adobe Connect: the ‘Giving Feedback to Writers Online’ conference which took place in June 2014. This paper draws on lessons learnt from that conference to demonstrate that running an online event is both easier and more effective than you might expect. The paper will be of interest to anyone who is looking for ways to widen the reach and accessibility of the seminars and conferences they run, and to learning technologists and others who might be called upon to support such events. As well as the discussion of our experience in running an online conference, the paper pulls together the outputs from that experience to offer a takeaway checklist which maps out the key stages in planning an online conference, and can help organisers of future online conferences to avoid some of the obstacles along the way.
In 1950, magazines targeted at teenage girls included no acknowledgement that they might be sexua... more In 1950, magazines targeted at teenage girls included no acknowledgement that they might be sexually active: any sex at all was disruptive and dangerous. By the end of the twentieth century, even though teen magazines were full of sex, fuelling moral panics about girls’ sexuality, there were still rigid expectations about the contexts in which it was acceptable for girls to be doing it.
This paper will explore the ways that teen magazines discussed sex, advised their readers about it, and how they portrayed those girls who engaged in sexual activity outside the currently-accepted limits of appropriate behaviour. Drawing particularly on magazine problem pages, this paper will analyse the ways that both teenage girls themselves, and their magazine advisers, engaged with these changing boundaries, how the discussion of disruptive sex was used in the magazines to enforce the acceptable practice of teenage sexuality, and how girls writing letters to the magazines both challenged and enforced the magazine definitions of acceptable sex. The paper will also make use of the experiences of adults looking back at their own magazines-reading teens, and their experiences of learning about sex from the magazines.
I will argue that girls related the content in the magazines to their own lived experiences of sex and sexuality, and I will draw connections between how they experienced their own sexuality, and how ideal or normative sexuality, and disruptive sexuality, are presented by the magazines.
Before the internet and its wealth of (mis)information was available, many teenage girls got most... more Before the internet and its wealth of (mis)information was available, many teenage girls got most of their sex education from their magazines, learning about safe sex, emotions, social expectations, and physical practicalities from articles and problem pages. Revisiting twentieth century teen magazines including Jackie, Just Seventeen, Mizz and More!, this paper will explore the voices of both producers and consumers of magazines in the confusion of messages about how to say no and when to say yes, what girls should expect from sex, and whether boys really are ‘just after one thing’. I will draw on the advice published with the magazines’ authorial voices, as well as the published letters from readers who were grappling with how to apply the magazine advice to their own lives, and consider the magazines’ aims in the ways these interactions between producer and consumer were framed. The paper will also draw on recent survey data about women’s recollections of their own consumption of teenage magazines, to examine the way these messages about sex have stayed with readers, sometimes decades later. Prominent in those recollections are the ‘position of the fortnight’ in More! magazine, and Just Seventeen’s slogan ’to be sussed is a must, but sex under 16 is illegal’, as well as mixed emotions about the appropriateness of the magazines’ sexual content, and whether the lessons learned turned out to be useful ones, and an acknowledgement that sometimes there were simply no better sources of information available.
At the height of the women’s liberation movement, and not long after the contraceptive pill becam... more At the height of the women’s liberation movement, and not long after the contraceptive pill became available to unmarried women, Honey magazine published an article entitled ‘Why do women feel they should have children?’ which questions the assumption many women make that having babies will be a central part of their lives. Honey was a magazine which encouraged critical thinking in its teenage and young adult readers, and this article was followed by a string of published letters to the magazine in response, both agreeing and disagreeing with its arguments.
This paper will examine the operation of this debate about whether to have children. I will explore the aims of the magazine in publishing the controversial article, and in the magazine’s choice of response letters to publish, as well as considering the intentions of the readers who wrote those letters, and the effect that this article-response cycle might have had on those readers who did not write in, but merely observed.
This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a survey asking adult women to recall their exp... more This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a survey asking adult women to recall their experiences of reading teenage magazines. From over one hundred responders in their twenties through to their sixties, the interim results suggest that the main things women remember about their teenage magazine reading experiences are the magazines’ definition of normality — whether they fit it, and how they could do better if they didn’t — and their reactions to the infamous ‘Position of the fortnight’ feature in More! magazine.
Responses include women whose teenage normality was confirmed by their magazine reading: 'I learnt that I was a fairly normal teenager as other girls were going through the same emotions as me', as well as women who used magazines to learn how to be normal teenagers: 'Teenage magazines helped me to negotiate the culture of my peers and learn to get on with them. I studied them like most kids study their textbooks'.
Some of these women look back on their magazine reading with affection, some with anger. This paper will explore the legacy of girls’ magazines through the recollections of those who read them.
Open online courses at Oxford Brookes University are an accredited option leading to a postgradua... more Open online courses at Oxford Brookes University are an accredited option leading to a postgraduate certificate of teaching in higher education (PCTHE). One of the challenges has been to create an assessment strategy that meets diverse needs yet encapsulates the values of the HEA UKPSF and develops attributes for ongoing academic practice. This presentation will feature #TOOC15 as a case study to demonstrate learning design for assessment within a MOOC, and in particular assessed group work.
This workshop will suggest that open online staff development offerings can be used to meet some ... more This workshop will suggest that open online staff development offerings can be used to meet some of the challenges in the diversifying context of higher education, and will explore ways to approach such provision.
The roles and locations of those who ‘teach’ in higher education are becoming increasingly diverse and permeable (HEFCE 2010); support and professional service staff are increasingly teaching in some form, and there is a push towards delivering HE in different locations such as transnational education and HE in FE. All of these contexts require new thinking in how we can prepare and train staff, especially those new to teaching in HE. Accredited UK PSF descriptor 1 provision is one way of preparing such staff and by offering this provision as an open online course we can offer flexibility and allow universities to extend their developmental options.
This workshop will explore the perspectives of participants on the two 10 credit open online modules of the PGCert in learning and teaching in higher education. Why did they choose to study in this mode? (flexibility, interest, access to expertise of diverse participants) Why did they choose to study for a credit-bearing course? (professional recognition, career development). Using these participant voices as a starting point the workshop will then explore the question of how delegates can use similar ideas to extend their own educational development provision.
Within our own context, and drawing on the expertise available to us, we have chosen a pedagogy that is activity-based, dialogic, reflective, participatory and community-located. The emphasis for us is on building a community of learners (tutors included) that engage in meaningful activity, reflection and dialogue.
This workshop will offer the chance to explore the pedagogic choices you could make in your own contexts, according to your intended audiences and the expertise available.
"The 1990s incarnation of Mizz magazine is unusual in the recent history of the British girls’ ma... more "The 1990s incarnation of Mizz magazine is unusual in the recent history of the British girls’ magazine, in that it seems designed deliberately to encourage its readers to think for themselves on a wide variety of subjects. The magazine’s letters page, ‘Oi!’, printed letters from readers with a mix of praise and disagreement in response to articles in previous issues, and that disagreement sometimes led to further articles showing alternative views of the issue under discussion. In its 1990s heyday, Mizz was therefore full of debate and discussion with its readers, before a relaunch in 2006 to a more conventional pink/boys/lipstick format.
Foreshadowing the social media interactions that current magazines for teenagers rely on so heavily, 1990s-era Mizz made heavy use of the experiences and opinions of readers as a basis for articles, and often extended this platform to other relevant parties, such as boys (the magazine was much more accepting of lesbian relationships than its predecessors, but the primary focus in articles was still relationships with boys). In 1995, an apparently simple question and answer session with a group of boys on their opinions about romance, sex and girls led to a stream of responses to the letters page, and an ongoing conversation between readers, the magazine, and several different cohorts of boys. The conversation spanned articles and letters to the magazine over three months, and explored problems of sexism, equality within relationships, and attitudes to sex.
This paper analyses the ways that Mizz magazine mediated this ongoing debate in the intersection between romance and politics, and the ways the magazine’s readers resisted the boys’ sexist understandings of boy-girl relationships. I show how the magazine offered girls a space within which to rehearse discussions which might be vital in their relationships with boys, and I argue that the magazine was thus performing a feminist, empowering function in helping to equip those girls to demand equality in their own relationships, and to recognise and reject sexist attitudes from boys."
Letters from readers to magazines offer a rich, but relatively under-studied, resource for work o... more Letters from readers to magazines offer a rich, but relatively under-studied, resource for work on reader relationships with magazines, and on wider cultural and social history. However, from a methodological point of view they also present significant problems of authentication. The widespread belief that letters to problem pages, in particular, are ‘all just made up’ can be an obstacle to serious consideration of this source material, one which is not easily set aside, as magazines do not typically keep archives of the letters they receive.
In a conference paper in June 2012, Lisa Sigel suggested that letters to London Life in the early twentieth century were widely believed to be fake because commentators found it implausible that women could have such fetishistic desires, or would be able to write about them if they did. Although the letters from teenage girls which make up my primary source material do not go as far as those in London Life, they do often cover areas which were believed at the time to be unfeminine, or inappropriate concerns for girls, leading to similar doubts about their authenticity.
Using magazines for teenage girls as a case study, this paper will examine the evidence for their authenticity, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of their use as source material. I will ask how much their authenticity matters, and what it means for problem pages as source material if their authenticity can never be proven.
Reference
Sigel, L, ‘London Life and women’s sexual history in inter-war Britain’, Women in Magazines conference, 22 June 2012, Kingston University.
"Acquiring a boyfriend is an important stage in the lifecycle of the magazine woman, and a major ... more "Acquiring a boyfriend is an important stage in the lifecycle of the magazine woman, and a major contributor to the transition from girl to woman. In many ways, it is the entire purpose of Jackie magazine’s early issues to guide a girl through catching a marriage-worthy boy, in order that she may then graduate to being a woman, reading a woman’s magazine, which will then advise her on the care and maintenance of her marital relationship.
This paper will examine the messages from Jackie about the approved methods of catching a boy, and discuss some of the ways readers resisted the magazine’s orthodoxy in their correspondence with the letters and problem pages.
This is a site of particular conflict in the relationship between reader and magazine, perhaps because of the paradoxical contrast between the gender ideology forbidding girls from chasing boys, and the widely accepted belief that catching a boy was the primary interest of all girls. Jackie’s way of reconciling these contradictions is to offer advice that girls must simply ‘go where the boys are’ (issue 1, 1964: 16) and wait, looking pretty, but I argue that for some readers, at least, the socially conservative vision of life portrayed in Jackie is not passively, uncritically, accepted, but assessed, tested and adapted to suit their own purposes and their own experiences of life."
Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of learn... more Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of learning in MOOCs remains limited. This paper reports on an investigation into the pedagogy in one MOOC- Oxford Brookes University’s ‘First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education ’ MOOC (FSLT12). FSLT12 was an open and free professional development opportunity for people moving into HE teaching. It was a small course (200 participants registered from 24 countries) which was focused on introducing HE teaching skills, and, uniquely, to deliberately integrate open academic practice as a vital part of professional development for HE teachers. A qualitative, case-study approach was used in the research, based on surveys, interviews, and social media, to provide evidence about how people learned in this course and consider wider implications for teaching and learning in higher education. The evidence shows that participants who completed the course were able to learn autonomously and na...
This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher ... more This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners ex...
This paper uses a case study from 1970s girls’ magazine Honey to demonstrate how paying attention... more This paper uses a case study from 1970s girls’ magazine Honey to demonstrate how paying attention to reader contributions published in magazines can give a richer, more nuanced view of the relationship between magazine and reader. The case study, a debate on why women assume they will have children, offers a new understanding of the way that such interactions in the magazine contributed to the development of young women’s understanding of the increasing freedoms available to them in the 1970s.
This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher ... more This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners ex...
This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher ... more This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners experienced a transformative shift, but it required reflection on practice, community support, and self-organization; (3) Reciprocal Relationships: New learners needed time to determine their audience and core community, as well as to realize mutual relationships within that community. Learners in a MOOC inhabit a liminal space. Active MOOC participants are skilled orienteers. Engaging local expertise of experienced MOOC learners and developing participatory skills in new learners is a key strategy for those who organize and facilitate MOOCs.
The International Review of Research in Open and Distant Learning, 2013
"Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of... more "Despite the increase in massive open online courses (MOOCs), evidence about the pedagogy of learning in MOOCs remains limited. This paper reports on an investigation into the pedagogy in one MOOC - Oxford Brookes University’s ‘First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’ MOOC (FSLT12). FSLT12 was an open and free professional development opportunity for people moving into HE teaching. It was a small course (200 participants registered from 24 countries) which was focused on introducing HE teaching skills, and, uniquely, to deliberately integrate open academic practice as a vital part of professional development for HE teachers. A qualitative, case-study approach was used in the research, based on surveys, interviews, and social media, to provide evidence about how people learned in this course and consider wider implications for teaching and learning in higher education. The evidence shows that participants who completed the course were able to learn autonomously and navigate the distributed platforms and environments. The most challenging issues were acceptance of open academic practice and difficulty in establishing an academic identity in an unpredictable virtual environment. An interesting and significant feature of the course was the support for learners from a number of MOOC ‘veterans’ who served as role models and guides for less experienced MOOC learners. The research shows that small task-oriented MOOCs can effectively support professional development of open academic practice.""
Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching, Dec 2014
Against a background of decreasing funding in higher education for conferences and travel, this p... more Against a background of decreasing funding in higher education for conferences and travel, this paper argues for an alternative approach to international collaboration, based on work by the author and colleagues on an online conference run in Adobe Connect: the ‘Giving Feedback to Writers Online’ conference which took place in June 2014. This paper draws on lessons learnt from that conference to demonstrate that running an online event is both easier and more effective than you might expect. The paper will be of interest to anyone who is looking for ways to widen the reach and accessibility of the seminars and conferences they run, and to learning technologists and others who might be called upon to support such events. As well as the discussion of our experience in running an online conference, the paper pulls together the outputs from that experience to offer a takeaway checklist which maps out the key stages in planning an online conference, and can help organisers of future online conferences to avoid some of the obstacles along the way.
Uploads
Conference presentations
This paper will explore the ways that teen magazines discussed sex, advised their readers about it, and how they portrayed those girls who engaged in sexual activity outside the currently-accepted limits of appropriate behaviour. Drawing particularly on magazine problem pages, this paper will analyse the ways that both teenage girls themselves, and their magazine advisers, engaged with these changing boundaries, how the discussion of disruptive sex was used in the magazines to enforce the acceptable practice of teenage sexuality, and how girls writing letters to the magazines both challenged and enforced the magazine definitions of acceptable sex. The paper will also make use of the experiences of adults looking back at their own magazines-reading teens, and their experiences of learning about sex from the magazines.
I will argue that girls related the content in the magazines to their own lived experiences of sex and sexuality, and I will draw connections between how they experienced their own sexuality, and how ideal or normative sexuality, and disruptive sexuality, are presented by the magazines.
Revisiting twentieth century teen magazines including Jackie, Just Seventeen, Mizz and More!, this paper will explore the voices of both producers and consumers of magazines in the confusion of messages about how to say no and when to say yes, what girls should expect from sex, and whether boys really are ‘just after one thing’. I will draw on the advice published with the magazines’ authorial voices, as well as the published letters from readers who were grappling with how to apply the magazine advice to their own lives, and consider the magazines’ aims in the ways these interactions between producer and consumer were framed.
The paper will also draw on recent survey data about women’s recollections of their own consumption of teenage magazines, to examine the way these messages about sex have stayed with readers, sometimes decades later. Prominent in those recollections are the ‘position of the fortnight’ in More! magazine, and Just Seventeen’s slogan ’to be sussed is a must, but sex under 16 is illegal’, as well as mixed emotions about the appropriateness of the magazines’ sexual content, and whether the lessons learned turned out to be useful ones, and an acknowledgement that sometimes there were simply no better sources of information available.
This paper will examine the operation of this debate about whether to have children. I will explore the aims of the magazine in publishing the controversial article, and in the magazine’s choice of response letters to publish, as well as considering the intentions of the readers who wrote those letters, and the effect that this article-response cycle might have had on those readers who did not write in, but merely observed.
Responses include women whose teenage normality was confirmed by their magazine reading: 'I learnt that I was a fairly normal teenager as other girls were going through the same emotions as me', as well as women who used magazines to learn how to be normal teenagers: 'Teenage magazines helped me to negotiate the culture of my peers and learn to get on with them. I studied them like most kids study their textbooks'.
Some of these women look back on their magazine reading with affection, some with anger. This paper will explore the legacy of girls’ magazines through the recollections of those who read them.
The roles and locations of those who ‘teach’ in higher education are becoming increasingly diverse and permeable (HEFCE 2010); support and professional service staff are increasingly teaching in some form, and there is a push towards delivering HE in different locations such as transnational education and HE in FE. All of these contexts require new thinking in how we can prepare and train staff, especially those new to teaching in HE. Accredited UK PSF descriptor 1 provision is one way of preparing such staff and by offering this provision as an open online course we can offer flexibility and allow universities to extend their developmental options.
This workshop will explore the perspectives of participants on the two 10 credit open online modules of the PGCert in learning and teaching in higher education. Why did they choose to study in this mode? (flexibility, interest, access to expertise of diverse participants) Why did they choose to study for a credit-bearing course? (professional recognition, career development). Using these participant voices as a starting point the workshop will then explore the question of how delegates can use similar ideas to extend their own educational development provision.
Within our own context, and drawing on the expertise available to us, we have chosen a pedagogy that is activity-based, dialogic, reflective, participatory and community-located. The emphasis for us is on building a community of learners (tutors included) that engage in meaningful activity, reflection and dialogue.
This workshop will offer the chance to explore the pedagogic choices you could make in your own contexts, according to your intended audiences and the expertise available.
Foreshadowing the social media interactions that current magazines for teenagers rely on so heavily, 1990s-era Mizz made heavy use of the experiences and opinions of readers as a basis for articles, and often extended this platform to other relevant parties, such as boys (the magazine was much more accepting of lesbian relationships than its predecessors, but the primary focus in articles was still relationships with boys). In 1995, an apparently simple question and answer session with a group of boys on their opinions about romance, sex and girls led to a stream of responses to the letters page, and an ongoing conversation between readers, the magazine, and several different cohorts of boys. The conversation spanned articles and letters to the magazine over three months, and explored problems of sexism, equality within relationships, and attitudes to sex.
This paper analyses the ways that Mizz magazine mediated this ongoing debate in the intersection between romance and politics, and the ways the magazine’s readers resisted the boys’ sexist understandings of boy-girl relationships. I show how the magazine offered girls a space within which to rehearse discussions which might be vital in their relationships with boys, and I argue that the magazine was thus performing a feminist, empowering function in helping to equip those girls to demand equality in their own relationships, and to recognise and reject sexist attitudes from boys."
In a conference paper in June 2012, Lisa Sigel suggested that letters to London Life in the early twentieth century were widely believed to be fake because commentators found it implausible that women could have such fetishistic desires, or would be able to write about them if they did. Although the letters from teenage girls which make up my primary source material do not go as far as those in London Life, they do often cover areas which were believed at the time to be unfeminine, or inappropriate concerns for girls, leading to similar doubts about their authenticity.
Using magazines for teenage girls as a case study, this paper will examine the evidence for their authenticity, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of their use as source material. I will ask how much their authenticity matters, and what it means for problem pages as source material if their authenticity can never be proven.
Reference
Sigel, L, ‘London Life and women’s sexual history in inter-war Britain’, Women in Magazines conference, 22 June 2012, Kingston University.
This paper will examine the messages from Jackie about the approved methods of catching a boy, and discuss some of the ways readers resisted the magazine’s orthodoxy in their correspondence with the letters and problem pages.
This is a site of particular conflict in the relationship between reader and magazine, perhaps because of the paradoxical contrast between the gender ideology forbidding girls from chasing boys, and the widely accepted belief that catching a boy was the primary interest of all girls. Jackie’s way of reconciling these contradictions is to offer advice that girls must simply ‘go where the boys are’ (issue 1, 1964: 16) and wait, looking pretty, but I argue that for some readers, at least, the socially conservative vision of life portrayed in Jackie is not passively, uncritically, accepted, but assessed, tested and adapted to suit their own purposes and their own experiences of life."
Papers
This paper will explore the ways that teen magazines discussed sex, advised their readers about it, and how they portrayed those girls who engaged in sexual activity outside the currently-accepted limits of appropriate behaviour. Drawing particularly on magazine problem pages, this paper will analyse the ways that both teenage girls themselves, and their magazine advisers, engaged with these changing boundaries, how the discussion of disruptive sex was used in the magazines to enforce the acceptable practice of teenage sexuality, and how girls writing letters to the magazines both challenged and enforced the magazine definitions of acceptable sex. The paper will also make use of the experiences of adults looking back at their own magazines-reading teens, and their experiences of learning about sex from the magazines.
I will argue that girls related the content in the magazines to their own lived experiences of sex and sexuality, and I will draw connections between how they experienced their own sexuality, and how ideal or normative sexuality, and disruptive sexuality, are presented by the magazines.
Revisiting twentieth century teen magazines including Jackie, Just Seventeen, Mizz and More!, this paper will explore the voices of both producers and consumers of magazines in the confusion of messages about how to say no and when to say yes, what girls should expect from sex, and whether boys really are ‘just after one thing’. I will draw on the advice published with the magazines’ authorial voices, as well as the published letters from readers who were grappling with how to apply the magazine advice to their own lives, and consider the magazines’ aims in the ways these interactions between producer and consumer were framed.
The paper will also draw on recent survey data about women’s recollections of their own consumption of teenage magazines, to examine the way these messages about sex have stayed with readers, sometimes decades later. Prominent in those recollections are the ‘position of the fortnight’ in More! magazine, and Just Seventeen’s slogan ’to be sussed is a must, but sex under 16 is illegal’, as well as mixed emotions about the appropriateness of the magazines’ sexual content, and whether the lessons learned turned out to be useful ones, and an acknowledgement that sometimes there were simply no better sources of information available.
This paper will examine the operation of this debate about whether to have children. I will explore the aims of the magazine in publishing the controversial article, and in the magazine’s choice of response letters to publish, as well as considering the intentions of the readers who wrote those letters, and the effect that this article-response cycle might have had on those readers who did not write in, but merely observed.
Responses include women whose teenage normality was confirmed by their magazine reading: 'I learnt that I was a fairly normal teenager as other girls were going through the same emotions as me', as well as women who used magazines to learn how to be normal teenagers: 'Teenage magazines helped me to negotiate the culture of my peers and learn to get on with them. I studied them like most kids study their textbooks'.
Some of these women look back on their magazine reading with affection, some with anger. This paper will explore the legacy of girls’ magazines through the recollections of those who read them.
The roles and locations of those who ‘teach’ in higher education are becoming increasingly diverse and permeable (HEFCE 2010); support and professional service staff are increasingly teaching in some form, and there is a push towards delivering HE in different locations such as transnational education and HE in FE. All of these contexts require new thinking in how we can prepare and train staff, especially those new to teaching in HE. Accredited UK PSF descriptor 1 provision is one way of preparing such staff and by offering this provision as an open online course we can offer flexibility and allow universities to extend their developmental options.
This workshop will explore the perspectives of participants on the two 10 credit open online modules of the PGCert in learning and teaching in higher education. Why did they choose to study in this mode? (flexibility, interest, access to expertise of diverse participants) Why did they choose to study for a credit-bearing course? (professional recognition, career development). Using these participant voices as a starting point the workshop will then explore the question of how delegates can use similar ideas to extend their own educational development provision.
Within our own context, and drawing on the expertise available to us, we have chosen a pedagogy that is activity-based, dialogic, reflective, participatory and community-located. The emphasis for us is on building a community of learners (tutors included) that engage in meaningful activity, reflection and dialogue.
This workshop will offer the chance to explore the pedagogic choices you could make in your own contexts, according to your intended audiences and the expertise available.
Foreshadowing the social media interactions that current magazines for teenagers rely on so heavily, 1990s-era Mizz made heavy use of the experiences and opinions of readers as a basis for articles, and often extended this platform to other relevant parties, such as boys (the magazine was much more accepting of lesbian relationships than its predecessors, but the primary focus in articles was still relationships with boys). In 1995, an apparently simple question and answer session with a group of boys on their opinions about romance, sex and girls led to a stream of responses to the letters page, and an ongoing conversation between readers, the magazine, and several different cohorts of boys. The conversation spanned articles and letters to the magazine over three months, and explored problems of sexism, equality within relationships, and attitudes to sex.
This paper analyses the ways that Mizz magazine mediated this ongoing debate in the intersection between romance and politics, and the ways the magazine’s readers resisted the boys’ sexist understandings of boy-girl relationships. I show how the magazine offered girls a space within which to rehearse discussions which might be vital in their relationships with boys, and I argue that the magazine was thus performing a feminist, empowering function in helping to equip those girls to demand equality in their own relationships, and to recognise and reject sexist attitudes from boys."
In a conference paper in June 2012, Lisa Sigel suggested that letters to London Life in the early twentieth century were widely believed to be fake because commentators found it implausible that women could have such fetishistic desires, or would be able to write about them if they did. Although the letters from teenage girls which make up my primary source material do not go as far as those in London Life, they do often cover areas which were believed at the time to be unfeminine, or inappropriate concerns for girls, leading to similar doubts about their authenticity.
Using magazines for teenage girls as a case study, this paper will examine the evidence for their authenticity, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of their use as source material. I will ask how much their authenticity matters, and what it means for problem pages as source material if their authenticity can never be proven.
Reference
Sigel, L, ‘London Life and women’s sexual history in inter-war Britain’, Women in Magazines conference, 22 June 2012, Kingston University.
This paper will examine the messages from Jackie about the approved methods of catching a boy, and discuss some of the ways readers resisted the magazine’s orthodoxy in their correspondence with the letters and problem pages.
This is a site of particular conflict in the relationship between reader and magazine, perhaps because of the paradoxical contrast between the gender ideology forbidding girls from chasing boys, and the widely accepted belief that catching a boy was the primary interest of all girls. Jackie’s way of reconciling these contradictions is to offer advice that girls must simply ‘go where the boys are’ (issue 1, 1964: 16) and wait, looking pretty, but I argue that for some readers, at least, the socially conservative vision of life portrayed in Jackie is not passively, uncritically, accepted, but assessed, tested and adapted to suit their own purposes and their own experiences of life."