#the parents were more interested in domineering how their kids see reading than teaching context or analysis

[nozomijoestar]

Typical to see as I read some assigned essays for school that people in the U. S. have always been fucking stupid by and large about treating their children with any respect to the point it actually hurt their literacy skills

[halothenthehorns]

All in the Family

Chapter 47: The Firebolt

Sounds of jubilation rang in Alice's ears before the rest of her senses had even caught up with her. The place smelt strongly of wood polish and she flinched in surprise when something bright red looked like it was fixing to sock her in the face. She stumbled back in surprise and managed to tip over a whole casket of something that went spinning across the floor in every direction.

"Alice?" Frank called in concern as she muscled her way around what she finally recognized as Quaffles, the projectile charmed to be spinning in place showing off its new apparent aerodynamics on display.

"Over here," she called from the corner and following the loud noise around the mess of balls she made to find herself in the store proper, Quality Quidditch Supplies.

Frank sprinted over to her in relief, still shaking wood shavings out of his hair. "Sorry love, I landed in a pile of Make-Your-Brooms, I think some little kid was in the process of carving something into the handle when I interrupted." He caught her hand as he continued to look about. "Do you know where we are? I think that's Diagon Alley past that window, but-"

"You've never been in Quality Quidditch Supplies?" Alice asked in surprise.

"Me mum never brought me in here," he shrugged. "Thought the sport was a bloody waist."

"It's no wonder you wouldn't help me practice for the Beater tryouts next year," she laughed in surprise as his chagrin grew. "Don't worry love, I'll help you learn how to ride a broom over the summer, if you want," she quickly finished.

"I, ah, could give it a try," he uneasily agreed, clearly putting more enthusiasm into his voice than he meant. "Can't be worse than Neville's first try, eh?"

The two exchanged a look of pure love and excitement, their future spanning before them in that moment as Alice's mind corrected the instance, of teaching her son all about a sport she'd loved for ages.

Lily came over to them then with a deeply annoyed expression seemingly frozen in place. "Well, no use in expecting any of them to help us find the book soon. They seem to have reconsolidated their friendship by acting like even bigger loons than usual, if you can believe it."

Alice saw a beach-ball sized Snitch now being tossed into the air at the front of the store and believed her without question. She tugged her boyfriends hand and began waving Lily off to the side, "there's a collection of Quidditch manuals and how-to's on the far wall over there, we should start there."

They found Regulus there flipping enthusiastically threw Brooms to Buy. He began jabbering without even looking up, "these designs are fantastic! I can't believe how sleek the models become in a few short years! Do you think they worked out the design flaw of-"

He did look up then and flushed in surprise to see who it was.

Alice smiled politely and encouraged him to finish, "you mean the tailwind on the Cleensweep models? I sure hope so. I've been angling to save up for a new Silver Arrow because of it."

Regulus blinked several times in confusion, before a smile slowly lit his face. "You follow Quidditch?"

"It's a thing me and my mum love," she agreed. "I was going to try out for the house-team next year."

"We might be playing against each other then," he stated, and to her surprise she saw some excitement beginning to light his usual dower expression.

"You already on then?" Frank asked, eyeing the third year, who seemed almost miniscule to them sometimes being two years older.

"Yep, though I've only been a reserve player so far. The usual Seeker has actually been in the Hospital Wing all week though, so if he didn't make it out by classes today, I got to play in the match next week!" He exclaimed in pure child-like delight, then his face clouded over as he muttered in confusion what day of the week it was supposed to be exactly.

"I hope things work out for you then," Alice told him sincerely as Lily had long since lost interest in the conversation and perused every spine along here, but between the cover of Witch Weekly being dominated by some person with a surly face and heavy dark eyebrows, and a copy of Quidditch through the ages, not finding the book they needed.

Regulus nodded, blinked again in surprise as if just realizing who he'd been talking to, and managed the most friendly smile any of them had seen as he waved them off and began flipping through the magazine again.

"He's a weird kid," Frank muttered as they went traveling aimlessly down the isles of the store now with no clue where to look next, and not in any big hurry to be done and put in a more unpleasant place to use magic to find it. "Sometimes he's so hostile I feel like I can't take my eyes off him, then other's, he's..." he struggled to put into words what they'd just seen.

"A normal kid," she offered politely. "I'm still trying to figure that out as well. Seems he really only gets defensive when his big brother starts pushing his buttons and the pureblood issues come up. Makes you wonder what his home life's like," she finished with a sigh, eyes on Lily as she watched a Bludger go sailing over their head without interest. They heard it crash somewhere in the back of the store, and they all steered clear and went to the front instead.

The Marauders were beside themselves with pure energy, clearly all that candy they'd inhaled had taken hold. Black and Pettigrew were responsible for the majority of the objects being thrown around, unable to handle one for any length of time before daring the other to throw it, and the other complying. Lupin was sitting on the counter with an indulgent smile in place, occasionally waving his wand to fix something right only so his friends could go at it again. Potter was conspicuously missing.

"You lot have no restraint!" Evans snapped as a pile of Puddlemere United towels crashed into the floor from their wild antics. "Would you have some bloody respect for one place?"

"Live a little Evans!" Pettigrew called back, before he burst into a mad fit of laughter that almost sounded like a shriek. He jumped onto the space beside his friend and began hanging from the rafters in the ceiling, scrambling madly to lift the rest of himself up there.

Alice felt a bit of pity for him, it couldn't be easy to learn of this kind of future and the lad seemed to be taking his words to heart and enjoying himself to the fullest now. His friends were clearly indulging this. She turned away, and finally spotted the book. Potter was unintentionally drooling on it and didn't even seem to realize it, as it was propped on the display next to the Firebolt.

She darted over there as well, eyeing the beautiful, sleek design with relish. It looked fast just simply sitting there in the sun, she couldn't imagine the feel of one beneath her. She was surprised Potter wasn't crashing around the store on it yet.

As if reading her mind, he groaned in pain, "it's a display model only, not the bloody real thing."

"That's almost fair," she sighed with longing. "I can't imagine any security charms in the world would stop someone from trying to steal it." Her mind was already putting together Potter discovering this by trying to take one along with him now.

He looked to her in surprise, it looked almost painful for him to drag his eyes away, but clearly hearing her tone. "You like Quidditch?"

"Why does everyone seem so surprised by this?" She pouted.

"You've barely said a thing when Harry's games were going on," he shrugged.

"I like to play it, don't have much enjoyment for listening to it," she said back, while finally and reluctantly grabbing the book.

"Enjoy the chapter then, seems we'll be getting skipped forward to one of Harry's matches," Potter gave her a genial wave and went back to panting over the broom.

Alice wasn't so sure, the timeline didn't seem right for it at all as she'd thought Harry was just starting his winter break, but opened the book curiously to read the chapter title, which gave things a little more context.

Pettigrew fell from the ceiling in surprise, and didn't even seem to notice. "Harry's going to get a Firebolt!"

Alice gazed fondly at the picture, which didn't at all do justice to the lovely bit of wood in the window.

"I guess losing his Nimbus model changed his mind about getting a new broom like that," Frank laughed at the kids indulgence. "Poor lad needs a pick me up I'm sure," he finished more quietly, eyes still on Black who looked like he was trying to do a cart wheel for reasons beyond both of them.

The excitement of this news made everything feel like there was a new energy around it, even the dampening opening reminding them all how Harry was taking this news. It was clear the Marauders were trying very hard not to even listen, the three even abandoning the front counter to join their friend at the window and talking painfully loudly about anything they could think of.

Alice couldn't do the same, and not just because she was the one telling of poor Harry's suffering turned to hatred towards Black. She watched the teen flinch and edge even closer to his best friend, throwing an arm around Lupin like he was trying to hold himself upright at his soon to be godsons feelings. She'd been wondering about her own future ever since she'd learned about Neville, worried why her son never mentioned his parents and was raised by Frank's mother. If her son hated his parents even a fraction of what Harry was feeling for someone he should have been so close with, she didn't know how she'd be able to live with that. She honestly wished she had a better answer for him rather than more accusations.

Lily listened as Harry's friends tried to cheer him up, and Harry wouldn't let them as he reminded Malfoy may have been aware of this news. She vividly remembered the brats words to Harry about the elder Black, Sirius, and how she'd wondered if somehow he and Lupin were in on that horrible murder together. Now with this new information of learning their friend was involved, she wasn't so sure, but then how had the child of a Death Eater been so informed of the event? Was it really possible they'd both turn on their friend in a few years? What of Potter? The longer she thought of this the less sense it made.

Frank hoped that Harry going to visit Hagrid would help him. He needed someone to vent at, an adult in his life who would be a solid presence in this troubled time. He'd never known his dad, but thought he'd be a lot like Hagrid if he hadn't been killed by Death Eaters.

James turned to actually watch Alice with concern and surprise of what was wrong with Hagrid, then they all muttered, "I'd forgotten about that hippogriff."

"I say we start a Quidditch team for him!" Peter said at once, breaking off and making a run for the isles. "The Hogwarts Hippogriffs!"

"I don't think they'll give a school an international team," James snorted as he followed after him.

"If they did, we'd have to form one giant team, and the body count would never end," Remus snickered as he trailed after them.

Sirius hesitated to follow, eyes still lingering on the book. His friends refused to treat him any differently no matter what came to light, but he'd noticed these three with something new on their faces from that last chapter. It had not passed his notice Regulus had been about to draw his wand on someone either, for him. He felt like he owed all of them, something. A peace offering, a thanks, an apology, he wasn't sure, but some way to show he really wasn't this mad man of the future. He'd never really cared what anyone thought of him in school before, but this was different, he didn't want anyone to think he was capable of this! Now it was clear they were reconsidering and even agreeing with the Marauders something was going on about this story, now how to reinforce this when Harry's opinion of him was lower than ever?

Harry helping his friend to save the hippogriff was too sweet, almost sickly so, Regulus wanted to laugh. Hagrid was certainly one strange person, crying over a beast. He wondered idly, as he found a nice chair to sit in and continue flipping through his magazine, how Hagrid had survived Azkaban for as long as he'd been there. Regulus froze when he even realized Hagrid and Sirius would have been in there at the same time. He shivered and was happy for the change of topic to Harry getting Christmas gifts, especially that new broom he'd already snuck a peek at.

The boys ideas of who had sent it to him all had merit, he could even hear echoes throughout the store of varying people's ideas, most of them thinking it was McGonagall or Dumbledore again. Regulus wondered if they were really missing a rather obvious person, Sirius. He was certain he cared enough about Harry to use money he claimed no right to.

There was some scattered sympathy again for Scabbers once again being chased by that cat, and quite a few mutters when Hermione only made her position worse by worrying over who sent the broom instead of just enjoying the gift! He rolled his eyes even harder when he in fact heard the other Muggleborn present voicing this same worry Harry should not just be accepting this gift without question. He'd probably agree, if he thought there was anyone out to hurt Harry that wasn't around the last two years. He'd finally had to admit to himself there was no doubt Sirius was innocent of these crimes, and there was just no reason he'd be 'going after,' Harry.

Once again nobody seemed to give much of a passing notice to Lupin being absent for his health. It was a common enough thing for him in school, seemed he never grew out of that.

Remus flushed at this being pointed out anyways, then paused in confusion as the potion Snape was apparently making for him was again mentioned with no real understanding of it all. There was just no chance it was a coincidence. Snape knew he was a werewolf, and was giving him something for it?

James and Peter froze in front of him with weary expressions as well, but dared not speak of this in such a compact store where anyone could hear. Instead they gladly took the distraction of McGonagall coming to confiscate Harry's broom, and very loudly spoke of how infuriated they were with Hermione going behind Harry's back like that.

"She was looking out for her friend!" Evans shot back from five isles over. "I'd hardly think you would complain about that Potter, considering that's what you've been doing for your friend since the beginning!"

"It's different!" James thundered back, but with that light back in his eyes of finally getting the chance to spare with her again openly. "I'm defending Sirius from false accusations, not tattling to a teacher so they can nick his stuff!"

There was no response, and James preened with satisfaction, seeming to think he'd finally gotten through to her. He even went jogging back over to them, Peter hurrying to keep up.

Remus was all for standing around and watching the show of Prongs and Evans again, but got distracted. "Oi, Padfoot, I found you a Whimborn Wasp Jersey with Bagman's numbers!"

"Moony, you're the best mate ever!" He'd spoken without thinking, all but apparating to the isle he was in, but froze when he reached for it and their hands brushed together.

There was a pause as the two just stood there for a moment gaping at each other.

It's stupid to flush like some school girl, Sirius quickly corrected himself, he knew what you meant! Their fingers were still overlapped over the bright yellow stripes.

The two hadn't found an alone moment in quite some time now, and the more this kept happening the more charged the air became between them. They'd agreed to hold off the awkward conversation of whatever this was and include James and Peter in it, but that had been when they'd thought they were just traveling through Harry's first year. Now all of this horrible new information kept coming up between them all, the two honestly just wanted an escape.

Remus cleared his throat and finally stepped back, effectively putting the conversation off again like it had never been turned back on. "Well, put it on before Smith finishes!"

Neither gave a single care to the exclaims of surprise that Sirius could have sent Harry that broom, it felt obvious to them, and it's not as if this news would change anyone's opinion of him in either way.

Sirius shucked his bag, slipped out of his school robes and threw them off without care, grinning as he exposed his top half and Remus cleared his throat again. It wasn't anything the other hadn't seen over the past five years of sharing a room in the morning, he told himself, but he still found himself preening a bit and hesitating longer than he should have before pulling it on.

Moony caught his eyes and smiled again, whispering, "perfect fit," as they were teleported away.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 31 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and I’m here with Dr. Ake Nicholas, who is a lecturer in linguistics at Massey University of New Zealand in Auckland and a speaker of Cook Islands Māori. Hello! Welcome!

Ake: Hello! 

Gretchen: Welcome to the show! I’m so pleased that we managed to make this line up with me being in Australia and you also visiting Australia. And so the Canadian and the New Zealander will be sitting in a room together talking about language and linguistics.

Ake: Very convenient.

Gretchen: So let’s start with the question that we ask all our guests on Lingthusiasm – how did you get into linguistics?

Ake: Well, if you go back enough into my early life, I’ve got a quite cute life story about that. So my family heritage is from the Cook Islands, which we’ll talk more about in a minute. And when I was a baby, my parents moved back there, and I lived there until I was about 6 years old, which was after I had started school. And so when we moved to New Zealand when I was about 6, I had a little bit of language-adjustment issues coming into an English-medium school, and cultural differences, and migration trauma, and all the rest of it. I got taken pity on by a teacher who wasn’t my teacher, but she was another teacher in the school who was New Zealand Māori. And she pulled me aside one day and said, “Oh, you know that your language is quite a lot like our language? Why don’t you sing me a song and we talk about it?” And so I sang a song for her and we went through the things that were the same and the things that were different. And she told me how it worked in New Zealand Māori, and it was – you know.

Gretchen: That’s so lovely.

Ake: At the age of 6, I was like “Something very exciting is happening here with these languages and these things.” And I was also extremely grateful to her for doing this nice, kind thing and making me feel good about it and not feel stink about wanting to use a different language. “Feel stink” – that’s quite a New Zealandism, isn’t it?

Gretchen: I guess so!

Ake: At that tender age, I became aware of this thing about relationships between languages, and the powerfulness that using a different language makes in your social world, and all that kind of stuff. I was very meta-aware of it from a young age. Also, my parents were really involved in the Kōhanga Reo movement in New Zealand, which is the reasonably well-known language revitalisation method of language immersion preschools.

Gretchen: Oh, is that the language nests?

Ake: Yeah. So that translates as “language nest,” which is what they’re called in other places now. Yeah. So that, as you may or may not know, got started in New Zealand with the Māori language revitalisation. My parents were part of that movement. Being aware about language and being aware about language revitalisation is something that was a very important narrative through my whole childhood.

Gretchen: Were you a kid in one of those language nests?

Ake: Oh, I was a little bit too old for it, but my younger siblings were, yeah.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s so great.

Ake: Yeah. I really think that Joshua Fishman wrote once – he’s a language revitalisation theorist whose work has been quite influential in the New Zealand context for language revitalisation. But he said that when he was a child, every day at the dinner table his father would ask the whole family, “So what have you done to support the Yiddish language today?” So I feel like that was a similar thing for me in my childhood that was a very overt thing that was very, very important – to be worrying about looking after our languages and doing whatever we could to do it.

Gretchen: Maybe just for people who haven’t heard of the language nests – how does that work?

Ake: It’s just like a normal preschool, or “early childhood education” as we call it – so kids, before they go to primary school, or “elementary school” as it’s called in other places – and that’s, in theory, entirely conducted, in our case, in Māori – all the talking, and all the teaching, and all the songs, and not just the language, but the cultural practices, and all of that kind of thing.

Gretchen: Yeah. The food, and going out on the land, and stuff like this.

Ake: Yeah. And all that kind of stuff. And also you don’t just go and leave your kids and never think about it, the parents and the whole family, the “whanau” as we call it, are expected to be involved in their educational experience. And that’s a useful thing for language revitalisation as well, because it’s not just the 3- year-olds who are in there learning language, but the parents who maybe don’t know and the grandparents who maybe do, which was the situation at the time then, worked together so that the whole family gets access to that learning, and it’s very effective when it’s resourced enough to be put in practice.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because you can see if you’ve only run this for a year, then you’ve got a bunch of 1-year-olds who can say two or three words, and you’ve gotta keep going so they can keep doing it for a number of years and become really fluent speakers because that’s how most people become fluent speakers, is being exposed to it from their parents, and their grandparents, and stuff like this. It’s creating a very natural environment, but doing it with a lot of deliberate planning to think about “Here’s how you can actually make an environment happen where you don’t just let English take over.”

Ake: Yes, exactly. And a context like in New Zealand where, like in most English-speaking places, most of the people are monolingual and only speak English, and English is very, very dominant in all spheres of life. And where we had a situation in New Zealand, in the New Zealand Māori context, where there was a time where the language didn’t get transmitted to the children. The people who were my parent’s generation, the ones we call the “Baby Boomers,” most of them didn’t learn Māori when they were children. In the early '80s when this Kōhanga Reo language nest thing was starting up, the parents didn’t speak, or could understand but didn’t speak – were “passively bilingual,” as we call that – but there were grandparents alive who still did. That process made use of those family members that were available to make it work. And the children learning that language in turn facilitate that parent generation learning the language, and that was the model that got deliberately made that way.

Gretchen: The parents can be kind of less intimidated to learn because they only have to learn at the pace of a child, which is maybe just a few words at a time. And they have all that tolerance for error at that point.

Ake: Exactly. Exactly. That happened in quite a grand scale in the early to mid-1980s in New Zealand, and it’s still going strong today. That method has spread to other parts of the world – Hawaii, for example. Another really successful place where they’ve instigated that is in Wales with the revitalisation of the Welsh language. They are doing great there with their language revitalisation, and that’s starting out doing the same the sort of system.

Gretchen: So you had language on your brain, on your mind, constantly from when you were a kid?

Ake: Yeah. Heavily indoctrinated from a young child – yeah.

Gretchen: And then what made you say, “Okay. So here’s this language revitalisation thing” – how did academic linguistics enter the picture?

Ake: When I was in my second year of university, some people said, “You should take that linguistics paper. It’s really easy.”

Gretchen: Was it really easy?

Ake: Um, sort of. But I went along and took this linguistics course and suddenly realised that there was a lot of really interesting, exciting things in that broad area that caught my attention, and so I carried on, which I think is a fairly common story, isn’t it?

Gretchen: I think it’s a pretty common story – yeah.

Ake: And, yeah. Quite early in the – the side of that was what I wanted to study. I learnt that my language, which is Cook Islands Māori, wasn’t properly described yet, linguistically. I knew that that was what I was eventually gonna have to do once I got enough training to know how to do it. There was sort of a bigger-than-me kind of social motivation.

Gretchen: Yeah. And to distinguish it from New Zealand Māori, which is different?

Ake: Yes. Yeah. So do you wanna talk about that now?

Gretchen: Yeah, I guess, let’s.

Ake: Okay. Mostly I’ve been talking about New Zealand Māori when I was talking about the language nests and all that kind of thing. That’s the famous language from New Zealand. It’s usually just called “Māori.” But it’s not actually the only indigenous language that is associated with the nation state of New Zealand. The nation state of the New Zealand is a different phenomenon to what people maybe think of when they think of New Zealand, which is the North Island and the South Island and the sort of main part of New Zealand.

Gretchen: But there’s some other islands?

Ake: Yes. There’s other parts of what is actually – so the legal entity of the nation state of New Zealand is something called the “Realm of New Zealand.” That includes New Zealand proper, which is the bit people are mostly thinking about with the North Island and the South Island just off the east coast of Australia – the “West Island” as we sometimes call it.

Gretchen: Wait, Australia is the “West Island”?

Ake: Yeah. It’s the West Island. So we’ve got the North Island and the South Island and the West Island – yeah.

Gretchen: I like this.

Ake: Yeah. But there’s actually other bits. There’s the Cook Islands, which has 15 islands in it and a few languages. There’s the island of Niue, which is in West Polynesia near Tonga and the Islands of Tokelau, which is up by Samoa. They all have people and languages which come from there. All of those languages, which is quite a few, are technically indigenous to this legal entity of the Realm of New Zealand, which is a different concept to “Aotearoa,” which is the Māori word for the Māori nation, which only has one language, which is Māori.

Gretchen: And that is what’s also known as “New Zealand Māori?”

Ake: Yeah. Also known as “New Zealand Māori.”

Gretchen: So Aotearoa has a language, which is spoken on the North Island and the South Island?

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: And then there are these other languages?

Ake: Yeah. Other different languages.

Gretchen: Other different languages – right. Okay.

Ake: Yeah. And they have a confusing thing – or our two in particular had the confusing thing of having the same name.

Gretchen: Yeah. So is that also the case in the language?

Ake: Yes. So in the language, if you were calling the language by its name, both groups would call their language “Māori” or “te reo māori.”

Gretchen: But there are differences when you actually look at the words?

Ake: But they are different languages. They’re not mutually intelligible. They’re 400 years apart in history and so on. But they happen to have the same name and come from the same place, and the people are culturally fairly similar and look the same as each other, and it’s a bit confusing.

Gretchen: At one point, they were probably the same language, and they split apart and stopped talking to each other as much?

Ake: Yeah. In the migration of Polynesia, the Southern Cook Islands is probably where most of the people who are the Māori people of New Zealand came from, and that part of the migration is the Southern Cook Islands and the Society Islands, or Southern French Polynesia. That’s the immediate jump-off point in that final migration to what’s now on New Zealand or Aotearoa. That happened about 800 years ago.

Gretchen: Which is plenty of time for languages to diverge from each other.

Ake: Absolutely – plenty of time. There hasn’t been ongoing contact between those two groups for about 400 years. So there’s about 400 years of definitely no contact between those two languages. But, indeed, that is plenty of time to become a different language.

Gretchen: Which even 400 years is plenty of time to be –

Ake: Plenty, plenty.

Gretchen: Yeah. 400 years ago is like Shakespeare. That’s quite different.

Ake: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And here’s my example.

Gretchen: Yeah. And 800 years ago is like Chaucer or older than Chaucer, which is really very different.

Ake: It’s entirely a differently language – incomprehensible.

Gretchen: We can definitely link to some sort of map of this linguistic situation with the islands because I am definitely a stranger to this part of the world and cannot picture most of this.

Ake: A map is useful.

Gretchen: There’s a language map we could probably link to?

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: Okay. Make sure to check out the show notes afterwards. Good. So there’s these languages. And you at age 20 or so were like “Here’s my language, which has not been described very well. I wanna write some descriptions of it or make some stuff in it”?

Ake: Yeah. So, yes, eventually. I was a bit older than 20 but...

Gretchen: Young Ake was like “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

Ake: Yeah. I learnt how to be a descriptive linguist. For my PhD, I did what’s known as a “description and documentation” of my language, which is southern Cook Islands Māori. The documentation side involves collecting lots of examples of language, whether that’s written stuff, or video, or audio – as many different kinds of it as you can – and then writing it all down and making it useable for the other side of it.

Gretchen: The translating it and transcribing it and annotating of what everything’s doing.

Ake: It’s an extremely laborious, time-consuming process. And then the description part, sometimes this is called “writing the grammar.” That’s where you describe how the language works, right, from how the sounds work, to how you make words, and how you make sentences, and even how you have conversations. Although, I didn’t get time to do much of that in my PhD because that’s the hard part.

Gretchen: Did you end up having to write a dictionary for it as well? Or were you like “No, I didn’t think to do that.”

Ake: We’re fortunate in that we already had some good dictionaries. A lotta people when they’re doing a documentation project on a previously undescribed language, that’s an important first thing that they need to do is they need to collect as many of the words and make a dictionary. But I was lucky that we actually had that resource already. That made it easier.

Gretchen: Yeah. For sure.

Ake: Yeah. It was also easier that I already spoke the language.

Gretchen: You didn’t have to do that, “Okay. So... does anybody here wanna talk to me?”

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: You didn’t have to do the, “I’m gonna sit with the speaker and record them and ask them ‘Can you say this word? Can you say this word?’” You’re just sitting with yourself and a recorder – or I guess friends and family at this point as well.

Ake: Yeah. More that one. I tried not to do too, too much recording of myself because my language is corrupted by too much exposure to New Zealand Māori.

Gretchen: Oh, okay.

Ake: I don’t have a good, authentic Cook Islands way of talking because I spent most of my childhood in the New Zealand Māori context, so I speak a funny mix of New Zealand Māori sounds and Cook Islands Māori sounds, and it’s all muddled up and funny so I – especially for sound-based things, for phonological stuff – I didn’t wanna use me because I was compromised.

Gretchen: You wanna make sure you’re accurately representing what everyone else is doing and not the individual situation in your own head, which I’m sure is very interesting but maybe less relevant to a broader group of people.

Ake: Yeah. It’s not so much the content of what I was saying, I’m talking about the...

Gretchen: Oh, the actual sounds that you’re saying.

Ake: Especially stress. Because there’re different systems, and I do it the New Zealand Māori way by intuition most of the time – yeah.

Gretchen: So you’re recording friends and family and doing this. Fast forward to today. You teach at a university about linguistics and Māori or some sort of combination of the two?

Ake: Yes. Yes, all of those things. I teach linguistics. So just the normal “How do languages work in a broad way?” and the little, different subsections of languages and how they work and, in particular, Pacific languages and the relationship between Pacific languages. And then also I’m involved in some language teaching for both of those languages – for Cook Islands Māori and New Zealand Māori.

Gretchen: You’re doing revitalisation-type projects? Or I guess is it kind of “revitalisation” at this point if you’ve had this successful program since the 1980s?

Ake: Well, two different contexts here, but in both cases, the answer’s still yes. In New Zealand, a lot of resources have gone into looking after the Māori language and to revitalising and building up and all of that kind of thing, but it’s still classified as endangered, and most of our kids are still not speaking, and most of our kids are still not in Māori-medium schools. Most people in New Zealand still don’t speak Māori. And as a general rule, most Māori people in New Zealand would quite like it if everybody in New Zealand spoke Māori all the time and that was the language that we all used, which is a bit of a difference between some of the contexts in North America about how things work but – yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because there was this thing with your prime minister who was like, “I’m gonna send my kid to a Māori-speaking school,” and she’s not Māori, but she was making this political statement of like, “This is the type of thing that is a very popular thing to do.”

Ake: Yes. And that was received positively by almost everybody – that suggestion that she made. That doesn’t work like that in other parts of the world where other indigenous peoples’ languages, those people don’t necessarily think it’s appropriate for outsiders to use their language. Whereas, in the New Zealand context, partly because, essentially, contrasting to what I said earlier, there’s only one language to worry about as far as people think. That language is associated with that place. This is often the case with indigenous languages. And if you’re gonna be in that place –

Gretchen: You should speak that language.

Ake: – it would be best if you were operating in that language – yeah. That goal is still a little way off. But there’s a pretty positive attitude toward Māori in New Zealand at the moment.

Gretchen: And there’s a few phrases that have made their way into New Zealand English from Māori even if they’re not the whole language.

Ake: Yeah. Well, quite a lot, really. I heard someone say recently that the most unique thing about New Zealand English is the Māori words that are in it – and the KIT vowel, I suppose.

Gretchen: The vowels are also very interesting too. But the most obvious unique thing about it is that there are a bunch of words from Māori.

Ake: Other varieties of English have “this and that” vowel, but no other varieties of English have all these Māori words. And there’s a lot. It’s not just a few, it’s hundreds of words or phrases or expressions from, obviously, place names, and flora and fauna names, and names of animals and plants and things, but also lots of words for other parts of life – kinship words, cultural concept words, greetings – for example.

Gretchen: Yeah. I watched a New Zealand YouTuber once, and she was definitely not Māori, and she just started her channel with “kia ora, everybody. Blah blah blah.” And I was like “I have never heard this.” I had to go look it up. And it was like “Oh, it’s from Māori.”

Ake: Yeah. “kia ora,” which just means “hello,” I think probably you could categorise that as having been a long time ago actually become part of English. That’s an everyday greeting that almost anyone – there’s nobody in New Zealand who wouldn’t understand it.

Gretchen: This wasn’t a video about the language context or anything like that, she was just doing a video about her life, and this is what occurred to her to say.

Ake: I mean, that hasn’t always been in the case. It was actually – this is an iconic story about one of the things that triggered off activism for revitalising the Māori language. As recently as 1984...

Gretchen: Very recent.

Ake: Well, depends on how old you are, but on a human scale – very recent, a generation or so ago – an incident happened where a Māori woman got in trouble, and I think she’d even got threatened with getting fired, for answering the phone at her job at the post office by saying, “kia ora,” which is how we say “hello.” She got in trouble for it, and she, quite rightly, decided that that was an unacceptable thing to get in trouble for. That was the sort of starting off point for some of the more invigorated activism to promote the use of the Māori language in the public space in New Zealand, not just in the Māori context. But, yeah, in 1984, which is quite recent, it was like “Oh, you can’t say ‘kia ora’ on the phone.”

Gretchen: And now, everyone’s saying it, and no one’s thinking anything of it.

Ake: Yeah. I mean, it’s not absolutely considered to be wonderful. There is a little corner of the grumpy old men who are like “What are you talking that language on the radio for? I can’t even understand it. Blah blah blah.” But mostly, people just laugh at them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of – I was in Hawaii a couple years ago, and everyone says, “aloha” and “mahalo” and things like that. That’s just part of how people talk. They don’t realise that people might not know, who aren’t from there, what “mahalo” means or something like this.

Ake: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Gretchen: Okay. So that was New Zealand Māori, which has got this quite established linguistic situation. Cook Islands Māori is different?

Ake: Yeah. In the Cook Islands context, I quite often say that we’re a generation behind the New Zealand context. Cook Islands is, as we mentioned before, not part of mainland New Zealand and, constitutionally, the Cook Islands’ arrangement with New Zealand is that they are internally self-governing in free-association with New Zealand. That means the Cook Islands has their own government that make the laws inside the Cook Islands, but anything dealing with the rest of the world, like the United Nations, or if we decide to invade the United States – or, I shouldn’t say that, military-related things, international affairs – is still operated by New Zealand. Everybody in the Cook Islands is a New Zealand citizen and has a New Zealand passport. It’s an interesting constitutional arrangement, which was copied by the Federated States of Micronesia in relation to the United States. They have the same constitutional arrangement with the United States, different from some of the other United States territories, but – yeah. And that applies to the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau.

Gretchen: And each of those are individually self-governing?

Ake: Yeah. Niue is the same as us, more or less, the same as the Cook Islands. Tokelau is a little bit more New Zealand – not even separate at all.

Gretchen: Right. And so it’s a generation behind in the linguistic situation as well?

Ake: Yeah. Because, as is the case in most of the world, places that are in the tropics, even if they got momentarily colonised by European people, the European people didn’t stay there, which is a pattern that’s happened around the world.

Gretchen: Didn’t like the climate as much?

Ake: It’s a bit too hot for them – that’s right.

Gretchen: A bit too hot for me, I should say.

Ake: So, unlike in New Zealand, where the majority of the population – 70-something percent – still is “Pakeha,” which is our word for the New Zealand people of European decent, in the Cook Islands, it’s majority indigenous population and always has been. That protected that population from the language loss for longer until about the 1980s when one thing that happened was the airport got made big enough to take the big jumbo jets, which increased the number of English-speaking tourists who came and increased the ease of contact with the English-speaking world. And also another thing that happened was TV broadcasts started then, which is all in English. These things happened, which led to, what we call in sociolinguistics, a “shift” towards English and away from Māori, the community language. But that didn’t start happening until the mid-1980s. When I was a child in the early '80s going to school in the Cook Islands, all the kids spoke Māori to each other.

Gretchen: Right. Pretty much everything was just in Māori.

Ake: Māori was the normal language, the “lingua franca” as it gets called – the normal language that people use for everything. People knew English as well but would prefer to use Māori for most things.

Gretchen: And if you’d go to the post office, or the grocery store, or something, everything’s in Māori?

Ake: Yeah. And, importantly, at school the language of instruction is Māori. But around that time, in the mid-to-late '80s, that started shifting, including the language of instruction in schools. Now, the language of instruction in school is predominantly English in most places.

Gretchen: This language shift that had happened in New Zealand before the '80s, is now happening in the Cook Islands in the '80s and '90s?

Ake: Yeah. Now, we’re in the situation that – probably the situation in the Cook Islands now is probably the equivalent of the situation in New Zealand in the early '80s when people noticed there was a problem, and made the Kōhanga Reo, and all that kind of stuff.

Gretchen: So at this point, the parent generation currently doesn’t necessarily speak Māori, but the grandparents still do?

Ake: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, exactly. The grandparent generation – still speakers. The parents – some still do but mostly not. And the kids – definitely, mostly not, especially in Rarotonga, which is the most populous island in the Cook Islands, and in New Zealand proper, where most Cook Islands people live because, from what I said before, Cook Islanders are New Zealand citizens, so just with the general habits that have been happening with humans in the last hundred years or so urbanisation and so on, and moving to the big cities for work – most Cook Islands people, like two-thirds, live in New Zealand.

Gretchen: Oh, so a lot of people moved to New Zealand as well?

Ake: Yeah. That is a prohibitive factor for language maintenance.

Gretchen: Right. Of course.

Ake: Makes it harder to keep speaking your community language.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s a question of, “Well, if you’re a Cook Islands Māori person, you’ve gotta send your kid to a New Zealand Māori school because they’re gonna learn wrong Māori for them.”

Ake: Well, yes. And that is a thing that happens because there’s almost no Cook Islands Māori equivalents that you can do in New Zealand. There’s a few little “Punanga Reo,” which is what we call the Kōhanga Reo. It’s the same concept. There’s fewer of them, but not heaps and heaps. There’s no Cook Islands language-medium schools in New Zealand. So, yeah. A lot of Cook Islands kids do actually go through the New Zealand Māori system because parents are taking the choice. They say, “Oh, well, we can’t have our one. We’ll have the next best thing.” That’s probably a good thing because that’s still getting some of those basic systems into those kids at a young age.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s still a related language, so it will make it easier if they’re adults to try to learn the one that’s actually theirs. Or at least they’re closer in culture because they did have this common historical connection 800 years ago.

Ake: Exactly. Relations between those two groups are generally amicable – more than that, actually – friendly. We’re a close family.

Gretchen: So that’s the situation with Cook Islands Māori. It’s more complicated and there’s less stuff going on.

Ake: At the moment, Cook Islands Māori is more endangered than New Zealand Māori, which seems surprising because people think, “Oh, there they are in the Cook Islands. They’re okay. They don’t have the English problem with the English-speaking people forcing a shift to English that happened in New Zealand a hundred years ago.” But because this modern world and globalisation, the effect has eventually still happened. And now we’re in that crisis point where we’ve stopped our intergenerational transmission in most places. This is a dangerous thing because it doesn’t really matter how many speakers you’ve got, if your children aren’t learning –

Gretchen: In a hundred years, they’re not gonna be around – or 20 years, even, if their speakers are getting older.

Ake: Yeah. As soon as Nana dies, right? It can happen really fast – yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, it seems like, “Oh, we’ve got thousands of speakers,” but if they’re all over 60, then that’s a really unstable situation.

Ake: That’s right. Exactly. In the Cook Islands context, that’s where we are, which is a more perilous stage. And because we’re a smaller language, and we don’t have this status as being –

Gretchen: The prime minister’s not trying to learn your language.

Ake: That’s right. That’s right. Jacinda Ardern is not teaching her baby Neve how to speak Cook Islands Māori.

Gretchen: Maybe she should.

Ake: Well, she could definitely do both at once, right, because babies can do that. They’re really good at learning languages – closely related ones, different ones, all of them. But, yeah, because there isn’t that institutional support in the New Zealand context, where most Cook Islands people are, there isn’t a lot of resources for trying to do things to help the revitalisation.

Gretchen: Right. You’re doing some interesting things with respect to “Okay, there’s this TV coming in. Well, if the kids wanna watch the TV, let’s give them the TV, but in Cook Islands Māori.”

Ake: Yeah. So one of the problems that we’re having with our language revitalisation endeavours that we – the people of the Cook Islands, the older people who are speakers – are having, is a problem that is experienced in lots of language revitalisation contexts where we can sometimes, or often, have trouble gathering up our target, which is our young people – our children and our young people – because something about the traditional way that you try and do it isn’t attractive to them.

Gretchen: They don’t always wanna go off with their grandparents and learn traditional things. They wanna be on their iPads or whatever.

Ake: Yeah. I try to not say it quite as deficit as that. The common thing is like “Oh, that kid’s just interested in their phones, and they don’t wanna know about our traditional things, and they’re just interested in modern life and computer games.” That’s the anti-child position.

Gretchen: That’s the gripe version of that.

Ake: Yeah. I try to say that a lot of our young people are quite insecure about their language skills and about their cultural skills because, along with that stopping learning the language, another thing that just automatically happens – well, not automatically, but often is associated with that – is you also haven’t learnt all these important cultural things too. That can be quite a shameful sort of feeling for people in that situation, that they’re too shy to try and do all of that stuff at once because it’s all really hard because, as we all know, trying to learn a language when you’re not 2 years old is really hard.

Gretchen: And if you show up and your grandparents or elders are shaming you for not doing it right, and also not knowing how to fish right, or also not knowing how to cook right, or do the other traditional cultural practices right, then everything’s bad, and you’re bad at this, so you just might as well just not even come.

Ake: Exactly. Right? That’s pushing the blame where it actually belongs – onto the old people. Sorry, Nana.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess it’s the old people that want the young people to come, and so if they want to bring the young people in, they’ve gotta figure out how to make it enticing for them.

Ake: Yeah. This is a little bit of a point of tension in our context, and I think this is why it’s big in lots of other contexts where people are having this issue. One thing that I try to do in my encouraging language-learning practice – or language teaching practice – is to, instead of putting the pressure to learn all these important traditional things and learn this language as a 12-year-old or a 20-year-old when it’s as hard as learning any other random thing, that I get the students to try to talk about their phones, and their iPads, and the movies, and their favourite movie stars, and talk about the stuff that they feel culturally secure talking about, and the things that they’re interested in, and things that they – it’s not so much the interest side of it, because I think they are often interested in the traditional things –

Gretchen: The things that they’re already familiar with.

Ake: – but the things they feel confident engaging with, where they feel confident or, even in a lotta cases, excited. You ask people to talk about Beyoncé, and they get very excited, and have a lot of things to say, and they have good feelings when they do that. And so all those good feelings will flow onto the feelings associated with learning the language. And instead of being stressed and worried, they’ll be like “Oh, I’m thinking about Beyoncé and learning how to do this kind of sentence.”

Gretchen: Rather than have two sources of tension at once.

Ake: Exactly. Exactly. Taking away one of those sources of tension and trying to trick them that the other one isn’t that hard either. It seems quite a feat, at least for their happiness – they’re happier when they’re doing it.

Gretchen: Well, that’s a big part of language-learning, you need to feel okay about doing it.

Ake: Exactly. Exactly.

Gretchen: You had students make videos about, was it, Harry Potter in Cook Islands Māori?

Ake: Yeah, well, those students made the Harry Potter thing themselves. I was surprised because I would’ve thought that Harry Potter’s a little bit old these days, but apparently everyone still likes it. I don’t know.

Gretchen: I guess so. I don’t know. I still like Harry Potter, I guess.

Ake: Right.

Gretchen: They wanted to retell the basic theme of the story of Harry Potter?

Ake: Well, not quite, not quite. I mean, I’ve got a whole series of these Tampiritoa videos – that’s the Cook Islands Māori way of saying “Dumbledore” – which you can put a link to on here. They just made that up themselves. I have this method I use in-person, the face-to-face classroom, where I have a big box of toys that I get them to with play with. They act out stories and do stuff. They just decided one time, several years ago, that one of these particular doll-figurines was Dumbledore. And they called him “Tampiritoa” and just injected that Harry Potter stuff into the story. It wasn’t like they were retelling Harry Potter, they just sort of mish-mashed it with Harry Potter and whatever –

Gretchen: Whatever the other figurines were.

Ake: What do they call it? “Mash-up?”

Gretchen: Yeah. This is definitely Harry Potter fanfiction.

Ake: Yeah. Well, yes.

Gretchen: Much more than Harry Potter retelling.

Ake: Yes. That’s more accurate – yes. The original one started off – I called it a Harry Potter/Whale Rider crossover. Do you know the film The Whale Rider?

Gretchen: Not really. But I guess it’s about whales and people who ride them?

Ake: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s quite a good film. It’s about the Ewe, a people on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand who their migration story involves their ancestor Paikea, coming to Aotearoa, coming to New Zealand, on a whale. It’s a story set in that community. It’s good. I recommend it. Interestingly, that person, Paikea, comes from Mauke, which is the island that I’m from in the Cook Islands, so we’ve got the other end of that story. In their story, it’s like “He arrives on Tolaga Bay on the...”

Gretchen: And you guys are like “He leaves...”

Ake: Yeah. We’ve got the leaving part of the story, which in modern times, we’ve all reconnected with each other, and we all visit each other’s places and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty sweet. So, yeah, Paikea, who is the whale rider, comes from Mauke. Back in Mauke, we’ve got a place, which is his wife, who’s now stone because she waited so long for him to come back, and he never came back because he moved to Gisborne.

Gretchen: Then this is crossing over with Dumbledore?

Ake: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. The story that they started off making was this mixture of those two things, and then it just sort of carried on because every time I teach that class, I say, “Make a better story than those last lot did,” and so they just...

Gretchen: Oh, okay. People keep adding. This is a very collaborative universe, fanfiction sort of context.

Ake: Yeah. It’s gone a way – if you walk through the sequence, it’s gone in some different directions. The most recent one, which is a couple of years old now, is about Trump and that election and other such. It covers all kinds of contemporary life.

Gretchen: Just various different aspects of this kind of thing. And then so once these videos are created, what happens to them afterwards? Can you use them again?

Ake: Yeah. The context I’m talking about here is the university language classroom with adults, and I make lots of little of these story videos as part of their process. But we just keep most of them in-house. The ones that they agree to, we put on YouTube so that everybody can watch them, and they can take it home, and show their Nana, and get told off for talking funny or whatever. Grandmothers are extremely important people in any family context.

Gretchen: It can lead to shared discussions between different generations about the topics that the kids are already paying attention to.

Ake: Yeah. And it demonstrates to their peers, who maybe haven’t had the chance to learn the language, that maybe if you did, you could talk about these kind of things, and it wouldn’t just always be the serious, traditional things.

Gretchen: It kind of makes the language cool for younger people.

Ake: Yeah. I’ve also done this thing where, in the small islands in the Cook Islands, the language is good. All the children there speak the language, and they use that language at school, and it’s all thriving and wonderful. But there’s 200 people on one island, and 60 people on one island, and 400 people on another. There’s not many people there, but in that small population, it’s thriving and doing really well.

Gretchen: There are kids in those small islands?

Ake: Yeah. In those places there are kids who are super competent speakers of that language. And so another thing I’ve done along this line of stuff is, when I’ve been over there doing other stuff, I have got some of the actual young children, 6- to 10-year-olds, 6- to 12-year-olds – primary school children – to make little stories, little cartoon movies, and comic strips and things like that, which is fun for them because they get interested in literacy and their language and different modes of literacy, so it’s good for them. But also what I’m after sort of more than that is then they make examples of cool kids' language that, if that goes into that collection, then the kids in New Zealand, which is most of our kids, can have access to other peer-language instead of only having old people to talk to. I love old people, but like...

Gretchen: It’s important for them to know that this language is still in-use among kids their age and can be used by kids their age, and it’s not just a grandma/grandpa thing that old people do, and it is something that can be part of their lives the way it’s part of these other kids’ lives.

Ake: Exactly – to use that as a model and to give them the chance to hear how it sounds and copy them and try and be cool like them or whatever – hopefully.

Gretchen: That’s really awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us. If there was one thing you could leave people knowing about the language or linguistics in general, what would that be?

Ake: Okay. This one’s kind of aimed at random people in New Zealand and linguists which is – please stop calling Cook Islands Māori “Rarotongan.”

Gretchen: “Rarotongan” is not the correct word for it?

Ake: “Rarotongan” is not the right name for this language because “Rarotongan” is the name for the specific variety that comes from Rarotonga, and everybody who doesn’t come from Rarotonga doesn’t like it when the whole language gets called “Rarotongan.” And the Rarotonga people don’t like it either because it’s not accurate.

Gretchen: It’s as if they’re taking credit for the whole thing. That’s one island of the 15 Cook Islands?

Ake: Yes. That’s right. It’s the big one. It’s the one that got used to translate the Bible and all that kind of stuff. So there’s all these political tensions. But most Cook Islands people – nearly everybody, I think – don’t like to have the whole language referred to by that name. Some people get a bit a muddled up. They’re like “Cook Islands Māori use English words,” and it’s like “Well, Rarotongan's not a Māori word either.” That’s actually an anglicised –

Gretchen: That’s like an English ending.

Ake: Yeah. It’s got an English ending on it. There is no Māori name for the whole group of islands because the group of islands was only put together by accident. It’s not a historically or politically unified place.

Gretchen: It’s a colonial construct of people coming in and calling them all something.

Ake: Yeah. There isn’t a traditional name for that place because it’s not a traditional place.

Gretchen: There’s an adapted version of the pronunciation of that that’s in your Twitter handle though, right?

Ake: Yeah. Sometimes we call it “Te Reo Kūki 'Āirani.” But “Kūki 'Āirani” is just the words “Cook Islands” pronounced in a Māori way.

Gretchen: Good. Cook Islands Māori, which will definitely be what we call it in the description for this episode – you’ve never done any different, probably, most people who are listening to this, so you’re already doing the right thing.

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: Good.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. 

Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo, and I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. You can follow Ake Nicholas on Twitter at @Te_Reo_Ka, which we will also link to from the show notes. 

To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to Patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include a behind the scenes episode about linguistics conferences, special Q&A episode, and more. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay too. We also really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. 

Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren and Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prevost, and our music is by The Triangles.

Ake: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[yuvilee]

5th November 2019 Student-led seminar 3

Text: Filipović, Katarina (2018) ‘Gender Representation in Children’s Books: Case of an Early Childhood Setting’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education. Routledge, 32(3), pp. 310–325. doi: 10.1080/02568543.2018.1464086.

Table of content:

Introduction Main part: A coherent picture, or is it? From 15 between 1967 - 2013 to today's releases Conclusion: How far have we come? Notes: Books and articles Picture(s)

About the author: International Master in Early Childhood Education and Care (IMEC). Dublin Institute of Technology, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, University of Malta and University of Gothenburg.  Erasmus Mundus joint degree.

BSc. in Pedagogy – Psychology. University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Katarina Filipović had previously worked in a range of educational roles such as primary school Pedagogue and Psychologist, Early Childhood Educator and Associate Faculty Lecturer.

Research interests: Children’s and educators’ well-being, work related stress and burnout, impact of educational policies on practice, professionalism in ECEC, and gender in early years.

Teaching Areas: Professional Practice In The Early Years, Child Protection And Safeguarding, Supervised Practice Placement(1)

Introduction: 

The end of 2019 is just around the corner and humanity can look back at many great achievements by men and women alike, such as landing on the moon, curing or even eradicating many diseases or fast communication technologies, to name just a few. With all those accomplishments, one might think we as a species live in an equal society that strives to build a better world from generation to generation. And I do believe this is the case! Some aspects, however, are still ongoing issues, such as gender equality or ethical equality. 

To think equal, to act equal, live equal also means to teach equal, to live as equal role-models for our next generation. It starts with small things like labelling clothes, hair-styles, or colours to be dominantly female or male. 

To teach equality means to offer learning material that depicts this virtue. In this discussion, I am looking at educators who are aware of gender equality and their use of picture books. Going through recently published picture books one might think that things have changed, for example with the bestselling book ‘Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls’ by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo from 2016. This book compiles short-story biographies of 100 real-life women that could be role-models, including Amelia Marie Curie, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen. Favilli and Cavallo self-published the book with money raised in a Kickstarter campaign. Their original target was set for $40,000, they ended up receiving $675,614 by 13,454 backers between April 27th and May 26th, 2016 (28 days), which shows an amazing response and acceptance by society(2). 

Above: My screenshot of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, (2019)

A coherent picture, or is it? 

The given research by Filipović uses picture books chosen by skilled educators for younger children between the ages of waddler to early school, the books in that study are a mixture from 1967 to 2013(3). 

In my view this study, however, only scratches the surface of the actual topic: the image of the woman in modern societies. Her research shows a glaring imbalance that fits the narrative perfectly but shies away from really forming a conclusion and making a strong statement. And that even though Filipović underlines her research with a broad variety of similar research outcomes highlighting an ongoing problem between gender representation in early childhood picture books. 

Looking back into recent years, we find many different movements with this as their main topic, not just #metoo. Gender studies are more common than ever as Filipović’s references show, and pay-gap has long entered mainstream discussion(4).

Women still tend to enter nurturing professions more than risk-taking, managerial or scientific ones, even though they have equal or sometimes better qualifications. Germany just released a governmental study that showed young girls out-matching boys in mathematics at school, yet they perceive themselves as clearly inferior to their male classmates(5).

Looking at depictions of women vs. men in media and advertisement would open a whole other can of worms(6).

And it all fits together so coherently: we are coming from a patriarchal past(7). Just a few generations ago, men ruled everything and women were confined to the kitchen or tending to the children. While we are looking with suspicious eyes at other societies such as the conservative Muslims in Saudi-Arabia, where this is still very strongly the case, we believe to have developed far beyond this point(8). 

From 15 between 1967 - 2013 to today's releases

Shifting our focus away from the 15 books in Filipović’s study one might think that - as stated in my introduction - the book publishing market would have adjusted by now. Especially since the Rebel-Girls book became a best-seller(9). Publishers might offer more on this topic, right? On the contrary, as The Observer and The Guardian in an in-depth analysis found out:

‘The most popular picture books published in 2018 collectively present a white and male-dominated world to children, feature very few BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) characters and have become more biased against girls in the past year, (...) Male characters continue to dominate the most popular picture books: a child is 1.6 times more likely to read one with a male rather than a female lead, and seven times more likely to read a story that has a male villain in it than a female baddie. Male characters outnumbered female characters in more than half the books, while females outnumber males less than a fifth of the time.’(9)

And even continuing in 2019, in research by Sarah Mokrzycki, Victoria University with 100 best-selling books, similar results are to be found. In her research, books for girls were also highly stereotypical:

‘In the female-led stories, protagonists only showed ambition for traditional feminine pursuits. There were three ballerinas, three princesses and one fashion designer - Claris, a mouse, who “dreamed about clothes” and “read about handbags in Vanity Fair”. (In this story, a misbehaving girl is also chastised for being “neither proper nor prim!”) In comparison, the male-led stories showed protagonists in roles ranging from farmers and chefs to zookeepers and scientists.’(10).

To be fair, her research was for the Australian book retailer Dymocks, a comparable research would need to be done for the UK market. 

How far have we come? Conclusion

It all forms a very coherent picture that is not difficult to understand and to accept and which explains every single problem in gender inequality we have - when considering our past, the way we have developed over the last generations, and the problems that very obviously and provenly still linger. We are still fighting the same problems, not to the same extent as women in Saudi-Arabia have to, but they are the exact same problems, yet it appears that resistance and denial are still extremely present.

Maybe stemming from conservative thinkers who still want the ‘good old times’ back when things were easy and women didn’t meddle in their affairs, maybe people just want to live their lives without being bothered by topics like tolerance in nuances (‘Am I still allowed to tell this joke?’, or ‘This picture is funny but now someone tells me it’s sexist? 5 years ago it wasn’t, why now?’). Maybe, though, it’s a much more underlying issue, one that is ingrained into our very beings from the moment we start learning about it. From large factors like the role our mothers portrayed to us as kids, to the value of boys in the schoolyard who can be daring and risk-takers vs. girls who need to be protected and sheltered and rather should play with puppets that they need to take care of and role-playing games, down to the smaller things like an obvious miss-portrayal of genders in the children’s books we read to our kids. 

Perhaps this is where the foundation is laid, where we will raise yet another generation that accepts slightly sexist images or objectifying women in advertisement. From there, it’s only a few steps to underpaying and discriminating women and worse. So yes, it does make a difference whether we choose a book about a boy and read it to a girl or if we rather choose to tell the girl a story about an adventurous girl. It does make a difference if the female part in a book is only there to care and the male character is away or depicted as brave and working and fun and successful. Those choices by our parents shaped our future and they will shape the future of our children(11).

It’s not difficult to see or understand this, which is why I wished this study would have put things into context more directly and was more critical. Because there is a lot of reason to be direct, and critical, and loud.

So what can we do as illustrators? Let’s identify and lock away the stereo-typical from our stories. Try to address this matter with our publishers, families, gift our children non-stereo-typical books and toys. Create role-models. But what kind of alternative presentation possibilities could be used for male and female figures? Could custom-made children’s books work as a good alternative? What are other alternatives? 

During my research for our presentation on this topic, I stumbled over the campaign ‘Let Toys be Toys’. Their focus is to create a non stereo-typical environment for children in the toy and book industries in the UK. They not only try to convince publishers of books and the toy industry to shift their focus from gender related products to uni-sex products. They also offer help for parents to address their concerns and provide discussion material and lesson plans for teachers(12). I found this to be very encouraging.

Another part that I did not address here but found during my research for the presentation are tests like the Bechdel-Test which was mainly created for movies but can also help to identify books with female protagonists. It’s not only about male-female ratio alone, as The Guardian article quoted above already indicates. We could add more and more tests, such as the BAME test as well(13). 

Notes:

Books and articles

Biography retrieved from TU Dublin (2019), Staff Articles. Available at: https://www.dit.ie/llss/people/socialsciences/staffarticles/name176641en.html (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

Kickstarter (2019), Good night stories for rebel girls. Available at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timbuktu/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls-100-tales-to-dr (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

Filipović, Katarina (2018), ‘Gender representation in children’s books: case of an early childhood setting’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education. Routledge, 32(3), pp. 310–325. doi: 10.1080/02568543.2018.1464086.

The gender pay gap among full-time employees was 8.9% in 2019 according to the Office for National Statistics in a recent release from 29 October 2019. Office for National Statistics (2019), Gender pay gap in the UK: 2019. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2019#the-gender-pay-gap (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

Institut zur Qualitätsentwicklung im Bildungswesen (201), National Assessment Studies and IQB Trends in Student Achievement. Available at: https://www.iqb.hu-berlin.de/bt (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). Cf. Schmoll, H. (2019), ‘Leistungsniveau in Mathe und Naturwissensschaften gesunken’, FAZ Online, 18.10.2019. Available at: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/iqb-bildungstrend-leistungen-in-mathe-und-naturwissensschaften-gesunken-16439167.html (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Still to this year advertisements like recently from VW and Philadelphia got banned, cf. BBC (2019) ‘Philadelphia and VW ads banned for gender stereotyping’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49332640 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Not only due to belief system but also family structures, social surroundings, education, and media.

Cf. Power, G., (2019) ‘Things that women in Saudi Arabia still can’t do’, The Week, 3rd of September. Available at: https://www.theweek.co.uk/60339/things-women-cant-do-in-saudi-arabia (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Cf. Best Sellers in Philosopher Biographies by Amazon.co.uk: Amazon (2019) ‘Best Sellers in Philosopher Biographies’. Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/268059/ref=zg_b_bs_268059_1 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Ferguson, D. (2019) ‘’Highly concerning': picture books bias worsens as female characters stay silent’, The Guardian. 13th June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/13/highly-concerning-picture-books-bias-worsens-as-female-characters-stay-silent (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Mokrzycki, S. (2019) ‘I looked at 100 best-selling picture books: female protagonists were largely invisible’, The Conversation, 03rd June. Available at: https://theconversation.com/amp/i-looked-at-100-best-selling-picture-books-female-protagonists-were-largely-invisible-115843 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Cf. McCabe, J., Fairchild, E., Grauerholz, L., Pescosolido, B. A., & Tope, D. (2011). Gender in twentieth-century children’s books: Patterns of disparity in titles and central characters. Gender & Society, 25(2), 197–226. doi:10.1177/0891243211398358. Also cf. Blake, J., & Maiese, N. (2008). No fairytale. The benefits of the bedtime story. The Psychologist, 21(5), 386–388.

Let Toys be Toys (2019). Available at: http://lettoysbetoys.org.uk/ (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Cf. Darby, S. (2016) ‘11 children's books that pass the bechdel’, Romper, 17th May. Available at: https://www.romper.com/p/11-childrens-books-that-pass-the-bechdel-test-10544 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Picture(s)

Hanser Literaturverlage (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/buch/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls/978-3-446-25690-3/ (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

[jessicakehoe]

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban?

The ranks here at FASHION are not filled with men. Shocking, right? But there are one or two (there are actually, literally, two). Naturally, when a question about male/female dynamics arises it’s only fair that one of them stand in for the members of his gender and provide some insight. Our last topic of conversation was about the social media furor over Ruby Rose being cast as lesbian superhero Kate Kane aka Batwoman and today we’re talking about the controversy surrounding cult Christmas hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Two of our staffers—from the men’s corner, Greg Hudson, and from the women’s, Pahull Bains—talk it out.

PB: Yesterday, when two of our colleagues began discussing the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” brouhaha I realized I’d never actually listened to the song in full. Growing up in India, it wasn’t something we heard regularly around the holidays (shocker, I know) so I was unaware of its baggage. But I knew I had to give it a listen when I heard it described as “rapey.”

GH: I think we can all agree that one of the most beautiful aspects of cultural exchange is sharing and comparing problematic or offensive pop culture. It warms my heart that we were able to share with you this Ode to Toxic Masculinity: The Holidays Edition.

Before we delve into all the ways that song is icky, I think it’s interesting to note how this issue has been growing each successive Christmas. I remember a few years ago, it felt like calling out “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was a unique observation, albeit one that several hundred people were all having independently. It’s like the Die Hard-as-a-Christmas-Movie debate, which seemed to have hit its peak last year. I think it’s interesting that a song that has been a bit gross for, like 70 years, is just now really entering the popular consciousness.

Hot take: this is all happening this year because of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings.

But, anyway: yes, the song. Last week, it made news by being removed from some radio stations owned by Canadian broadcasters like CBC and Bell Media because of the mild outrage. Then, this week, because of the backlash to the backlash (there’s always backlash to backlash), CBC has put it back up. Now that you’ve finally heard the song in its entirety, what do you think about it?

PB: Initial verdict: CRINGE. The woman’s voice is completely negated throughout the song/conversation. She’s repeatedly ignored, patronized and dismissed, while the man is clearly the dominating force calling the shots. By depicting such a skewed power dynamic in which a man refuses to take no for an answer, it’s propagating dangerous ideas about consent. That said, I think we’d be remiss not acknowledge the era in which this song was written. In the 1940s a woman’s voice had very little power and women very little agency or independence. They were expected to be coy and demure, and let a man “take charge” and never, ever make the first move. So the song is clearly a reflection of the societal mores of the time, hugely problematic as they were.

On a second listen, though, my strong initial reaction was tempered a bit. If you listen to all of the woman’s objections, they’re largely of the “what will people say” variety: “the neighbours might think,” “I ought to say no, at least I’ll say that I tried,” and “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” Again, this is an era in which a single woman drinking alone with a single man was bound to raise all sorts of eyebrows. So most of her reluctance seems to stem from a desire to protect her reputation, rather than, you know, a desire to get away from him. What do you think?

GH: That’s a really good point! And by good, I mean, it’s a new point that I’d never noticed before. See, because I always read her stated objections as the excuses she chose to say in order to be the most persuasive, while still being relatively inoffensive. Like, she can’t just say, “No. I don’t want to make out. I want to go home. Back off, creep.” Because, ha! Who cares what a woman wants. But! If that woman makes it about more than just herself, ie. worried mothers, gossipy neighbours, maybe—just maybe—she’ll convince the dude that she needs to leave, despite the cold.

Actually, I realize it’s kind of like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” That song, despite its adulterous undertones, is about a mom and a dad kissing while the dad is dressed as Santa. It’s never explained in the song because the songwriters assume the listeners will know (spoiler alert) that Santa isn’t real. But as a kid, because Santa was real, the Mommy was just a cheater. It’s all about the assumptions you have going in.

From our modern perspective, we can’t help but hear the woman in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as endangered. We assume she doesn’t want to be there, hence her always wanting to leave. But, the piece, which was written by a real life couple, wasn’t meant to carry that kind of baggage. The songwriters would likely have assumed that listeners would believe that the couple was just being coy. That they both really wanted to stay together but were pretending to have doubts. Granted, that people at the time wouldn’t assume a date rape was happening represents its own problem.

PB: Right. I read a couple of interviews the songwriter’s kids have done in recent years, always around the holidays when, like clockwork, the debate rears its eternal head. “They’re really equal roles. No one is really the aggressor,” Frank Loesser’s son told Vanity Fair in 2016. “It was a flirtatious, wonderful, sexy number between people who like each other. It really wasn’t anything but that.”

That said, when people hear a song on the radio, they don’t immediately rush to Google it and get the whole backstory. Their assumptions and opinions will be based on an intuitive response. And that gut response is naturally shaped by the context of the world we live in. Last week, Loesser’s daughter told NBC News that the song was beloved until “Bill Cosby ruined it for everybody.” Well, lets face it: the world is changing. Why should we have to take off our new, Cosby-coloured glasses in order to enjoy a song?

Which brings me to the inflammatory question fuelling this debate year after year: should the song be banned?

I think it’s important to acknowledge just how much pop culture shapes our society. I mean, a generation of young boys listened to this song, which by all reports, seems to have gone the 1940s-equivalent of viral. (It also won an Oscar!) Which means a generation of boys grew up to be men who believed that getting a ‘yes’ out of a woman was just a matter of pushing long enough to invalidate all her hesitations. Whether or not that’s what the song set out to do is besides the point; if that overwhelmingly seems to be the takeaway then that is the takeaway.

I don’t know if banning it is the answer though because a) honestly, which young kid these days is modelling his behaviour on a classic hit from the ‘40s that he probably only hears once a year? b) there are far more pernicious pieces of pop culture out there that deserve an irate debate more than this one (I’m looking at you, R Kelly) and c) I’m not in favour of blanket bans in general. If there are parents out there with an aversion to the song, change the channel. Don’t play it for your kids on Christmas. TALK to your kids about consent.

But if a radio station doesn’t want to play the song, I’m totally fine with it. That’s their executives’ decision. If a nightclub doesn’t want to play R Kelly, that’s their choice. If a film festival doesn’t want to screen a film by a problematic director, again, their choice. And I respect it.

Which side of the ‘to ban or not to ban’ debate do you fall on?

GH: I agree. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that since I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve wanted to leave a woman’s house only to be ignored (and potentially drugged). Well, actually, I have been in that situation, but it was different since there was no potential for physical violence. But I digress.

The truth is, this is one of those issues where both sides seem disproportionately passionate about their cause. Will a Christmas song really influence anyone’s behaviour (aside from going to bed early and choosing not to cry or pout)? No. But will Christmas and Freedom of Speech be ruined if this one song is forgotten? No! A Christmas song—let alone a controversy surrounding one—is basically privilege in action. There are, as you say, more important things to worry about. And until I do something to, like, help the poor and hungry at Christmas, I’m not going to pretend that fighting against problematic songs is really making the world better. And besides, as you say, there’s a teaching opportunity here.

Like how “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” taught me about polyamory.

The post “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban? published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/

[lindyhunt]

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban?

The ranks here at FASHION are not filled with men. Shocking, right? But there are one or two (there are actually, literally, two). Naturally, when a question about male/female dynamics arises it’s only fair that one of them stand in for the members of his gender and provide some insight. Our last topic of conversation was about the social media furor over Ruby Rose being cast as lesbian superhero Kate Kane aka Batwoman and today we’re talking about the controversy surrounding cult Christmas hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Two of our staffers—from the men’s corner, Greg Hudson, and from the women’s, Pahull Bains—talk it out.

PB: Yesterday, when two of our colleagues began discussing the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” brouhaha I realized I’d never actually listened to the song in full. Growing up in India, it wasn’t something we heard regularly around the holidays (shocker, I know) so I was unaware of its baggage. But I knew I had to give it a listen when I heard it described as “rapey.”

GH: I think we can all agree that one of the most beautiful aspects of cultural exchange is sharing and comparing problematic or offensive pop culture. It warms my heart that we were able to share with you this Ode to Toxic Masculinity: The Holidays Edition.

Before we delve into all the ways that song is icky, I think it’s interesting to note how this issue has been growing each successive Christmas. I remember a few years ago, it felt like calling out “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was a unique observation, albeit one that several hundred people were all having independently. It’s like the Die Hard-as-a-Christmas-Movie debate, which seemed to have hit its peak last year. I think it’s interesting that a song that has been a bit gross for, like 70 years, is just now really entering the popular consciousness.

Hot take: this is all happening this year because of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings.

But, anyway: yes, the song. Last week, it made news by being removed from some radio stations owned by Canadian broadcasters like CBC and Bell Media because of the mild outrage. Then, this week, because of the backlash to the backlash (there’s always backlash to backlash), CBC has put it back up. Now that you’ve finally heard the song in its entirety, what do you think about it?

PB: Initial verdict: CRINGE. The woman’s voice is completely negated throughout the song/conversation. She’s repeatedly ignored, patronized and dismissed, while the man is clearly the dominating force calling the shots. By depicting such a skewed power dynamic in which a man refuses to take no for an answer, it’s propagating dangerous ideas about consent. That said, I think we’d be remiss not acknowledge the era in which this song was written. In the 1940s a woman’s voice had very little power and women very little agency or independence. They were expected to be coy and demure, and let a man “take charge” and never, ever make the first move. So the song is clearly a reflection of the societal mores of the time, hugely problematic as they were.

On a second listen, though, my strong initial reaction was tempered a bit. If you listen to all of the woman’s objections, they’re largely of the “what will people say” variety: “the neighbours might think,” “I ought to say no, at least I’ll say that I tried,” and “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” Again, this is an era in which a single woman drinking alone with a single man was bound to raise all sorts of eyebrows. So most of her reluctance seems to stem from a desire to protect her reputation, rather than, you know, a desire to get away from him. What do you think?

GH: That’s a really good point! And by good, I mean, it’s a new point that I’d never noticed before. See, because I always read her stated objections as the excuses she chose to say in order to be the most persuasive, while still being relatively inoffensive. Like, she can’t just say, “No. I don’t want to make out. I want to go home. Back off, creep.” Because, ha! Who cares what a woman wants. But! If that woman makes it about more than just herself, ie. worried mothers, gossipy neighbours, maybe—just maybe—she’ll convince the dude that she needs to leave, despite the cold.

Actually, I realize it’s kind of like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” That song, despite its adulterous undertones, is about a mom and a dad kissing while the dad is dressed as Santa. It’s never explained in the song because the songwriters assume the listeners will know (spoiler alert) that Santa isn’t real. But as a kid, because Santa was real, the Mommy was just a cheater. It’s all about the assumptions you have going in.

From our modern perspective, we can’t help but hear the woman in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as endangered. We assume she doesn’t want to be there, hence her always wanting to leave. But, the piece, which was written by a real life couple, wasn’t meant to carry that kind of baggage. The songwriters would likely have assumed that listeners would believe that the couple was just being coy. That they both really wanted to stay together but were pretending to have doubts. Granted, that people at the time wouldn’t assume a date rape was happening represents its own problem.

PB: Right. I read a couple of interviews the songwriter’s kids have done in recent years, always around the holidays when, like clockwork, the debate rears its eternal head. “They’re really equal roles. No one is really the aggressor,” Frank Loesser’s son told Vanity Fair in 2016. “It was a flirtatious, wonderful, sexy number between people who like each other. It really wasn’t anything but that.”

That said, when people hear a song on the radio, they don’t immediately rush to Google it and get the whole backstory. Their assumptions and opinions will be based on an intuitive response. And that gut response is naturally shaped by the context of the world we live in. Last week, Loesser’s daughter told NBC News that the song was beloved until “Bill Cosby ruined it for everybody.” Well, lets face it: the world is changing. Why should we have to take off our new, Cosby-coloured glasses in order to enjoy a song?

Which brings me to the inflammatory question fuelling this debate year after year: should the song be banned?

I think it’s important to acknowledge just how much pop culture shapes our society. I mean, a generation of young boys listened to this song, which by all reports, seems to have gone the 1940s-equivalent of viral. (It also won an Oscar!) Which means a generation of boys grew up to be men who believed that getting a ‘yes’ out of a woman was just a matter of pushing long enough to invalidate all her hesitations. Whether or not that’s what the song set out to do is besides the point; if that overwhelmingly seems to be the takeaway then that is the takeaway.

I don’t know if banning it is the answer though because a) honestly, which young kid these days is modelling his behaviour on a classic hit from the ‘40s that he probably only hears once a year? b) there are far more pernicious pieces of pop culture out there that deserve an irate debate more than this one (I’m looking at you, R Kelly) and c) I’m not in favour of blanket bans in general. If there are parents out there with an aversion to the song, change the channel. Don’t play it for your kids on Christmas. TALK to your kids about consent.

But if a radio station doesn’t want to play the song, I’m totally fine with it. That’s their executives’ decision. If a nightclub doesn’t want to play R Kelly, that’s their choice. If a film festival doesn’t want to screen a film by a problematic director, again, their choice. And I respect it.

Which side of the ‘to ban or not to ban’ debate do you fall on?

GH: I agree. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that since I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve wanted to leave a woman’s house only to be ignored (and potentially drugged). Well, actually, I have been in that situation, but it was different since there was no potential for physical violence. But I digress.

The truth is, this is one of those issues where both sides seem disproportionately passionate about their cause. Will a Christmas song really influence anyone’s behaviour (aside from going to bed early and choosing not to cry or pout)? No. But will Christmas and Freedom of Speech be ruined if this one song is forgotten? No! A Christmas song—let alone a controversy surrounding one—is basically privilege in action. There are, as you say, more important things to worry about. And until I do something to, like, help the poor and hungry at Christmas, I’m not going to pretend that fighting against problematic songs is really making the world better. And besides, as you say, there’s a teaching opportunity here.

Like how “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” taught me about polyamory.

[nathjonesey-75]

Nine Years An Exile II: The Space Beneath - Part 2

By 2014, I’d seen out the previous year by completing a month of voluntary PR - it began a string of “will it, won’t it?” situations in the sense of roles possibly leading to permanent jobs – eventually nothing came at all. At the time, it was quite interesting – one task involved was organising for – and recruiting a rugby speaker, for a sports PR breakfast at the magnificent Melbourne Cricket Ground – or MCG – or even the ‘G’ – as the multi-syllabic-avoiding natives would call it.

 I would have carried on working there, had the position actually been available and with a salary. Right in the city centre, among the hustle and bustle is something not everyone enjoys, but I like it. In the meantime, what I did get – was another indication that it is more of whom you know, rather than what you know; no matter how much you may know - which makes Melbourne – or Victoria – tick. Sometimes this makes sense, other times it baffles. Depending upon each particular working context. A self-sustaining city – it raises generations who live, develop and thrive here. Far away from the non-Aussie rest-of-the-world and its difference strings. A part-time role for a not-for-profit charity was not a bad place to begin, I thought. All roads lead somewhere. You’d think. Until you’ve seen the sheer magnitude of Australia’s space, then realise – many roads lead to vast nothingness, waiting and waiting to be used!

This is not a direct reference to this role, as in fact I was offering and completing a reasonably noble job with Rainbows for the Children of Australia. Promoting a charity, helping traumatised children gain support. It is a reference to all of my learning since 2013. I thought – if my teaching certification came through, I could juggle both and earn a bit more. That didn’t materialise until nine months after I’d sent away the police check requests. The Australian and British checks came through in no time. Surprise, surprise – it was the “admin is a hobby – Insha’Allah” factor of Qatar which took so long. After three months they sent me my documents asking for my old passport - which had expired in the previous June – just to process my request, instead of specifying in the first place. I received the finalised check in the July. Wibble, as Blackadder once said.

 So, by October 2014, after eight months of travelling to Keysborough once a week for $25 an hour (applying for other work all along – actually hoping I wouldn’t need to use my teaching), I had restarted my supply – or relief teaching, as it is known in the space beneath. I swiftly realised that agencies ruled the roost in Melbourne schools, of Melbourne’s emergency teacher administration and signed up with the dominant agency – ANZUK, which as the name suggests, operated in Oz, New Zealand and Britain. It didn’t take long, either, to complete my first shift. Except the labour tap not-so-much stopped – dripping work; as stopped running altogether over the next few weeks. Thus, I hunted others.

 Soon, I was faced with an unexpected predicament. As my work with Rainbows mainly took me into the schools operated by the Catholic Church – I was told that those schools generally were the better-run; and more respectable out of Victoria’s primary schools. It also shocked me to think that Victoria (mainly as the influence is so high here), with only a slightly higher population than Wales at the time, had nearly 400 Catholic schools, while my homeland had less than 100. By the end of October, I’d been interviewed by a smaller agency’s owner, who worked mainly with Catholic schools and had teaching experience in London, so hopefully some breadth of thought and world experience. First shift – done. Second…third…. suddenly the odd side-effect was that I had received glowing reviews and was flavour of the month with the agency. I was travelling fairly far and wide but was working daily and feeling more confident for the first time in a while.

 Maybe 2015 was going to be a better year and would break the back of my working career, staleness in Australia. After all, despite wanting to leave teaching – I’d taken the plunge, back into the (what felt like shark-infested) pool of schools and so far, – so good. Still, I knew better than to start thinking it would be a cruise. Even the grammar schools – the well-off kids in Melbourne – had plenty of spoilt, uppity little crumbs who could twist your days if given a chance!

What actually came from 2015 was further confirmation; deeper affirmation that I was not a teacher. While I gave my best each day, I was experienced enough - in reading different situations and at best – some glimmer of hope for the majority of schools, from the functional and more respectful minority of academic establishments. At worst, crude casseroles of schools, where values were brought in by – well, well – what’s this? The relief teachers! Regular, contracted teachers didn’t see a need for revamping the gremlin-infested, over-filled classrooms by teaching manners. Instead, I saw (and received what I thought was retribution for my cheeky school days) some awful sights and schools. From the February, I kept a diary, which I intend to publish.

 When I began supply teaching in January 2006, I blitzed it. Travelling across South Wales to schools with only thirty-three pupils from Rhydlewis, Ceredigion - to Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan. There was some mileage driven in the first three months before I gained my first short-term; 3-month contract. So how would Victoria’s roads be? The less said the better, actually. In Wales, I’d mostly find out the previous afternoon – where I’d be the following morning. One mental test here was to have to get up at 6:45-7am in the morning to wait for a call. Not knowing much about the school, so precious little prep time. If work at all. Then; there were the roads, their drivers and the illogical administration of road rules.

 Imagine learning something rigorously then finding yourself in the midst of a population who didn’t learn it rigorously, bent the rules extensively and were never in any urgency to be aware of its values. That was the gist of travelling to schools by car each morning by 8:30am after finding out an hour earlier where I would be working. It took me a couple of years after arriving in Melbourne to realise that professional driving teachers here are a lot like erudite TV news presenters – rare. Almost everyone born here is “taught” to drive by their parents. Not professional teachers. Road awareness is not important; lane discipline – non-existent and road safety is all about avoiding cameras flashing you. End of. There is no happy medium between the ‘boy racer’ brigade who jump lanes, lights and any credible standard of driving (except they’re not just boys, but people of all ages) is lost to those who drive as though they should be in a retirement home, driving a golf caddy; and the clueless speedsters. No sensible in-between at all.

Vic Roads, the governing body treats is all as a “speed kills and that’s all” issue; enforcing slower driving than necessary, lazy driving and traffic light skiving, in all the wrong places (speed limits on open roads, not encouraging lane discipline, or the forever-long amber lights which are jumped by everyone). If it worked in reducing accidents or tension, there would be no argument. As it stands, people jump long queues (by driving to the front of the queue and pushing in), jump red lights and usually ‘flip you the bird’ if you beep your horn at them for dangerous driving. Someone needs to import an ocean of common sense, pour it across Port Phillip Bay and see if civilisation benefits.

[theastonishingkylejackson]

“Communication isn’t just about saying what we want to say, how we want to say it, it’s about saying it in a way that helps others to hear. The words that jump up from the archives of my mind aren’t always the best words to use for this purpose.”- Written By Angela Noel, Contributing Author for The Astonishing Tales Digital Magazine

Originally Published HERE  on April 6th, 2017 at You Are Awesome.

  “You know,” my dad said from his living room in California, “for that You are Awesome thingy you do . . . maybe you could ask people about speaking truth to power.”

The Astonishing Angela Noel Lawson, Author, Writer and Founder of You Are Awesome and contributor for The Astonishing Tales Magazine

“Tell me more.” I held my phone to my ear, enjoying a peek of springtime sun three-thousand miles away.

“Well, in my career (he’s retired) I never really gave much thought to whether I should say something, I just said it.

And it got me in trouble, even fired. But, it’s really important. Especially now. So, I want to know how people do it, and do it well.”

Separated both by geography and sometimes ideology, my dad and I do agree on many things. We both, for example, believe societies big and small–families, workplaces, neighborhoods, countries–need healthy, well-informed debate by people that care.

We believe respectful discourse among equals brings clarity, if not agreement.

But, there’s that whole power thing that mucks things up.

Many, many social constructs imbue power to one individual over another. Parent to child. Boss to employee. Dominant culture over minority culture. Rich over poor. Masculine over feminine.

The types of power an individual can possess are equally numerous and complex: physical, economic, psychological, and legal; just to name a few.

We hold these powers at different times, at different strengths, and among different people.

Some examples: a mother has power over her child, but no power over her work schedule; a father has power at work, but can only see his kids on the weekends; an entrepreneur owns her own business, but can’t stop a stranger from grabbing her crotch as she walks down the street; a college professor minding the law gets pulled over three times a year, every year.

There’s a similar thread among these experiences, though it may not be easy to spot at first.

I wrote a paper in college, the only one I saved for more than twenty years, titled, “The Other Product of Advertisements.”

In it, I argued that though the post-modern era attempted to redefine the power differential, the basic structures that create and maintain that differential remained the same.

Writing one paper on the dynamics of power and reading a few books on social justice do not make me an expert on, well, anything. But I do have eyeballs and am living in the world today. What was true in 1995 is still true.

We haven’t moved the needle much when it comes to redefining core power structures. We’re changing the way things look, without changing the way they feel.

And that’s not good enough.

We’ve changed the names for things without changing the dominant context around them. We say LGBTQIA to offer a more inclusive moniker for non-heterosexuals. But we still use the term straight.

If I’m straight, does that make someone else crooked? Isn’t crooked the term we use for criminals and fraudsters? And that’s just one example.

The words we use matter, they’re the buckets we cart meaning around in. But, the words we choose follow patterns we’ve learned, reflecting the world we’ve grown up in.

Communication isn’t just about saying what we want to say, how we want to say it, it’s about saying it in a way that helps others to hear. The words that jump up from the archives of my mind aren’t always the best words to use for this purpose.

If what I say causes someone else to feel “less than” will they hear me? Or will I just be another petty tyrant reinforcing the story they’ve heard all their lives of their otherness and vulnerability?

And all this comes back to power. When we have it, people don’t mess with us. When we don’t, they do. If we see each other as equals, we have open dialogue and respectful conversations. If we aren’t equals we have exhausted mothers, heartsick fathers, crotch-grabbers, and frustrated professors.

This is not news. I am one more voice, saying what many have said before me. No law or mission statement can make equality real. Individual people must feel it, and act upon it in everyday ways; at the grocery store, choosing a movie, taking kids to school . . . you get the idea.

But making equality a part of every day isn’t easy. We’ve been fed a steady diet of images, words, and experiences that reinforce inequalities from our earliest memories. The messages we thought were innocent, are not.

Disney’s Princess Problem

An excellent blog post by Hayley Beasley Dye on her daughter’s broken Disney Princess cup got me thinking.

Hayley points out that her daughter’s favorite princess, Princess Tiana, had gone missing. Tiana, unlike Belle or Ariel, didn’t (presumably) sell enough merch.

Disney sells stuff to people, that’s their business. Magic and all that loveliness aside, their purpose is to make money. They have no vested interest in upending their Princess machine to change the world for the better.

Or do they?

My son vociferously protested against seeing Moana. He thought it was another one of those “pretty dress movies,” a topic he’s not interested in at all. But, when he learned Moana was an adventurer appointed by the ocean itself for an important mission, he said, “Oh! THAT Moana. Yeah, I want to see that.”

By offering characters representative of more than the damsel in distress, pretty pink dresses, trim waists, and pale white skin, Disney can capture the imaginations of boys and girls of all races, classes, body-types, and orientations.

Teaching every child they can be who they want to be with the help of loyal friends and a boatload of hard work, but without needing anyone’s permission, creates a positive tension in the world.

They do great things because they know they can and want to try.

A Brave New World

Plenty of evidence suggests children aren’t predisposed to prefer one type of toy or hero over another. Girls don’t naturally gravitate to dolls, and boys to cars. We teach them these things.

A recent experience by a little girl, rewarded for her potty training success, demonstrates both sides of our culture today. The two-year-old white girl who sees herself reflected in the African American doll in a lab coat (inspired by a Disney show, Doc McStuffins); and the cashier who can’t understand why, perfectly illustrates where we’ve been and offers a glimmer of hope on where we could be going.

That is, if we speak up. And if we do a whole lot of listening.

Disney’s business follows customer demand. A whole lot of customers want to buy the damsel-in-distress-style Princess gear for their girls. And as long as people still see this merchandise filling the shelves, the dominant themes persist.

Until the demand ceases, the supply will remain. Individual customers might seem to have little power to influence Disney. Much like individual employees have little power to influence CEOs. So how does change occur?

One mind, one choice, at a time.

It’s slow, but important. One voice speaking truth to power when it counts, is added to another voice that does the same.

Getting fired isn’t the goal. Being a jerk is not the goal.

But, speaking up with whatever power we possess–economic, positional, social–and speaking out in defense of respect and equality to those who can influence large scale change, is the goal.

And when we’re the ones in those positions of power, listening is our most courageous act. 

So I’m using my You are Awesomethingy, to ask you my dad’s questions:

What issues matter to you?

How have you used your voice to speak truth to power?  

What was the result?

How have you used your power to listen to others?

I’d love to know your thoughts (and my dad would, too.)

I’m The Astonishing Angela Noel, Contributing Columnist for The Astonishing Tales Digital Magazine and I Am Astonishing, And I Approve This Message!

For more from Angela Noel, check out her website at Angelanoelauthor.com

You will find more of Angela’s work here at The Astonishing Tales Digital Magazine.

Angela can be found on Twitter by Clicking HERE; and also at Facebook by clicking HERE; Her work can also be found on Bloglovin by clicking HERE.

Leave Comments Below If You Like!

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Speaking and Listening: The Power of Truth "Communication isn’t just about saying what we want to say, how we want to say it, it’s about saying it in a way that helps others to hear.

[briangroth27]

Iron Fist Season 1 Review

I went into Iron Fist knowing next to nothing of the character: only his reputation as Luke Cage’s best friend/fellow Hero for Hire and his “zen surfer” portrayal on Ultimate Spider-man. Unfortunately, I didn’t leave the character’s first live action showcase, currently streaming on Netflix, a fan. It’s gotten a lot of bad reviews, and sadly I think they’re largely deserved. The show is low-stakes and repetitive from the get-go, never really has a grasp of who Danny (Finn Jones) is or what the main threat should be, and (though this doesn’t seem to be entirely their fault) boasts a mythology behind its central character that makes little to no sense.

Full spoilers…

First off, I don’t understand the Iron Fist mythology. Iron Fist is supposed to be a great warrior who guards the path to the mystical K’un-Lun (which only appears in our reality every 15 years), meaning he has to stay there. But he’s also the sworn enemy of The Hand…so how can he destroy them if he’s not supposed to leave his monastic Brigadoon? Was the plan to just wipe out any Hand who happened to try to take the village whenever the path appeared, hoping they’d never stop trying until their ranks had been completely destroyed? To the show’s credit, Danny does realize this contradiction…eleven episodes in (and even then, it comes off as an excuse for why he won’t go back rather than a mission-altering epiphany). It would’ve been a stronger character motivation had he left K’un-Lun to destroy The Hand to complete that portion of his duties instead of completely abandoning them, choosing a proactive approach rather than sitting and doing nothing. That’s another issue: since K’un-Lun only appears in our plane of existence every 15 years, their information is outdated, but even that doesn’t excuse the idea that The Hand are talked about as if they’re mythical enemies who haven’t existed for a very long time. Danny has no idea The Hand are currently active in modern-day New York when he gets there; who did he think he was training to fight all these years if he didn’t believe The Hand were still real? Why is the Iron Fist necessary to protect the gateway to a magical training camp that didn't even know its sworn enemy was still around? Is Danny Rand anything more than a mystical doorman? I don’t know if any of this is the case in the comics, but if it is, the show should’ve either updated it, better explained it, or used it to spin the characters into interesting directions.

K’un-Lun itself should’ve been much more explored. We got maybe five minutes of screentime spent there, all of it very vague and barren. There's not much context to anything Danny felt there because we barely even saw snippets of his stay; it's all secondhand for us. These were the 15 most transformative years of Danny’s life and we saw next to nothing. We never see him struggle (except for one random scene of the monks beating him as a child). We never see him as an outsider. What we did see was entirely unimpressive. I didn’t need the entire series to be about his training (nor would I want it to be), but I definitely needed a better idea of what it was like and how being there changed him (since we have no information about the kid he was before he went missing either). Maybe the show should’ve started off with the first two-three episodes detailing his training or the rules of magic in Danny’s world. Much like Dr. Strange, I wish they'd gone FAR weirder and more outlandish with the supernatural elements. A season later, I’m not even sure what's so great about K'un-Lun that makes them so much more important than the rest of the world. And who were the masters of the Iron Fist mysticism, who thought it unnecessary to teach Danny how to use his focused Chi to heal others, or even to recharge his powers? Even if his “training went a little sideways,” as he claims, shouldn’t recharging his abilities have been lesson #2?

My first impression of Danny Rand from the trailers was that he’d be yet another rich guy who got lost/traveled abroad and came back to save his city with new powers and/or skills. Having seen this from Green Arrow, Batman, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange, I wasn’t sure what new twists Iron Fist could bring to the table. Turns out, not many. Not every character has to reinvent the wheel—there are only so many origin story tropes—but they should all find some fresh angle. Iron Fist didn’t. He doesn’t seem to come home with a concrete goal at all, beyond convincing people he’s really Danny Rand. His attempt to get back into his family’s company feels half-hearted (unfortunately so, since I liked him best when he was insisting on better business practices and on using their resources to help people) and is quickly forgotten. It barely even feels like getting in is what he wants (he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to do there once he’s in); it’s just something to kill time. He later centers on trying to figure out who killed his parents, eventually giving us the season’s main villain, but even that felt completely routine; the only trope more well-trodden than dead parents inspiring heroes and guys coming back home with skills/talents is evil businessmen. I didn’t find Danny compelling, but the unfocused writing and direction may take some blame off Jones. They asked him to show several seemingly conflicting facets of Danny’s personality that never had a strong connective tissue (more on that in a bit). 

Rand was surrounded by controversy from the show’s first announcement: some saw him as a white savior figure who’d appropriated Asian culture; a relic of the 70s that didn’t belong in the modern day. Many argued Marvel should change his character to be Asian-American. Others said they should remain faithful to his Caucasian comic book appearance, claiming an Asian character who’s good at martial arts would be racist in and of itself. It seemed Marvel was damned either way. I don't necessarily mind Danny being white and an expert at martial arts—there's no reason someone from any background can't become an expert in any field with enough practice and training (assuming we're not looking at a story where the white guy is just automatically special and better for no reason beyond the idea that he naturally is; a magical chosen white savior)—and the way he talked about wanting to be Iron Fist more than anything and fighting against impossible odds to attain the title and responsibilities associated with it felt respectable and earned. However, the way he's better at every aspect of Colleen Wing’s life and culture (fight skills, speaking Mandarin, knowing where the best food is served, dojo etiquette, meditation and Tai Chi techniques, capturing the attention of students (until he’s too violent), etc.) than she is does grate on me and crosses the line. His apology for correcting Colleen after informing her about challenging a dojo’s master also came off as condescending. Nothing said K’un-Lun culture had to be exactly hers—not every Asian culture is the same, obviously, especially not made-up mystical ones—but the show chose to have them correlate almost exactly, and it’s in his complete domination of her culture that he comes off as appropriating it. Iron Fist had a golden opportunity by going with Danny’s comic book whiteness to discuss cultural appropriation—what it is and isn’t, why it’s wrong, etc.—in the same way that Daredevil did gentrification, Jessica Jones did sexism and misogyny, and Luke Cage did racism. Danny's talk about feeling empty and thinking the Iron Fist would solve all his problems could’ve been a perfect metaphor for cultural appropriation if the show were at all interested in exploring that. But it isn’t. Had they gone with an Asian-American actor instead, Danny fighting so hard to claim the Iron Fist title could’ve been a great parallel to an Asian-American kid (who would already feel out of place in both American and Asian culture, by the way) fighting to reclaim his culture, as Lewis Tan (a potential Danny Rand) said. It was also frustrating that, even though Danny says he worked hard and earned the Iron Fist mantle, the show teases out an idea that he is some mystical Chosen One who was meant to be Iron Fist all along. That plays even further into the White Savior trope, and that’s not something I’m down to explore in future seasons.

One of the most common arguments I read about why Danny “had to be white” was that he had to feel like an outsider in the Asian-cultured K’un-Lun. If that’s an essential part of Danny’s background, the show completely dropped the ball. It feels like they paid lip service at most to Danny feeling like a fish out of water in both K'un L'un and New York. He commented on being called an outsider back in his mystical land and said there were some unhappy memories, but also mentioned a best friend and fun times sneaking wine. Episode 6 reveals that he might actually be a mighty prophesied savior and was trained to believe as such...some outsider. It does seem like the requirements of being Iron Fist are colder than I’d anticipated, but assuming the beatings he received as a child were part of his training (and we have no reason to think they weren’t), that seems like the rigors everyone else was going through too, not something specifically aimed at him because he was white. And there’s no “Man out of Time” element to his journey back to New York after 15 years; the only times he feels out of place amount to people questioning his lack of footwear, him being friendly with the homeless, not sleeping in a bed, and his lack of "business acumen"…which is really just him having the most basic compassion about clean emissions and the price of pharmaceuticals. He doesn't seem to struggle to connect with anyone he really wants to, unless the other party has dubious interests (the Meachums, mainly) and are intentionally working against him or have the common sense not to invite total strangers into their lives after being semi-stalked by them (Colleen). Nothing about his situation feels very different from any other superhero, much less any other rich guy who returns home with powers/tech to be a hero.

Danny's clear PTSD that he ignored to focus on his training feels like something that could’ve been explored more to add dimension to his character. His fear of flying and near-freakout during turbulence (that’s how his parents died) was a great eample of this, but it was never explored beyond his fits. Along the lines of another trope—the dead parents—why is it necessary that Danny's folks be murdered? Batman’s parents’ murders made him vow not to let that happen to anyone else. Uncle Ben was killed to show Spider-man he could and should be doing more to help people with his powers. What does Danny get out of the fact that his parents were murdered? Wouldn't a random accident providing no enemy to take out his frustrations on be a bigger challenge for his survivor's guilt and his (completely inadequate) attempts to re-center himself? Furthermore, his childlike sensibility upon returning to New York would’ve played better had it been the result of his training to suppress his emotions, rather than just existing completely independent of his PTSD, as if one or the other state of his being didn’t exist at various times. The other problem is we don’t really ever see his training work. It appears the best he can manage is seizure-esque outbursts of shouting and hitting things when he gets overwhelmed. These fits seem like they’re trying to show us a character who could break but for the sake of his training, but they only come off as making it seem like he’s wasted the last 15 years. Along those same lines, he says he took a vow of celibacy, but only a few episodes later sleeps with Colleen. Challenging his resolve, vows, and training would’ve been one thing, but it doesn't feel like he trained for 15 years to be the best anything (despite showing up Colleen at nearly every turn), much less a mystical warrior who's supposed to be in total control of his emotions (he is absolutely not). The show could’ve mined that for an interesting character development—and it almost does, with Claire calling out how unhealthy suppressing his emotions is—but Danny’s answer is to go back to K’un-Lun for even more training at the end of the season (completely reversing his epiphany from the final battle). Ultimately, Danny doesn't feel like he has an arc at all because he's just flitting from one situation to the next as the plot demands. It’s as if they regressed him from where he should’ve been at the start for the sake of drama to watch him kinda-sorta regain all of his skill again, only to have him set off for even more training at the end. He has the nuts and bolts of a complex personality, but they aren’t assembled or explored at all.

The series’ best attributes are without a doubt Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), and Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho). Carrie Ann Moss is another very strong Netflix-verse asset, though she doesn’t get as much screentime as the others. I'm glad Claire's here to talk sense into these heroes (she’s the wisest person on these Netfilx shows). I love her as a helper to heroes and I’m glad she’s adding self-defense to her skills (her insisting on going to collect Gao was great!). Claire's talks with Danny about dealing with his issues and letting his emotions out instead of running back to K'un-Lun were really solid. Dawson’s no-nonsense presence and sarcasm ground and humanize these shows so well I don’t know why they’re so afraid to go more fantastical. Galactus could show up and she’d still make it feel like we were tethered to the real world. And she got to say “Sweet Christmas,” which was great! Madame Gao was still the stoic and imposing Hand operative from Daredevil. I’ll always be glad to have her reappear. Since she’s apparently been around since the 17th century, it seems there are many more tales to tell about her!

Colleen was the best new addition to the Netflix-verse and I liked her a lot! Of the characters on the show, she’s the one I want to read more about in the comics. Her struggle with adhering to the Bushido code and keeping her students invested in training and off the streets was far more interesting than Danny stumbling his way through pretrial proceedings that ultimately went nowhere and his other issues. The things she was up against felt real—right down to just paying the rent—and Henwick brought a sense that Colleen really was tested by the forces against her, like with her comments about issues with control in the fight club. Danny’s approach to “dealing” with frustrations served to throw Colleen’s into a much more sympathetic light too. While his dating style—bringing a restaurant to her—felt just like any other billionaire, Danny being impressed with her sword and nunchuck skills—and her glee at showing him she was his equal for once—was cute. I didn’t need them to be together, but I was fine with their relationship. When she was poisoned, I was more concerned about Colleen dying than I was about anyone else at any point on the show, even though I figured she probably wouldn’t die. I absolutely did not see the reveal that she was proudly a member of The Hand coming! That was the one place the show truly shocked me—the one point where it took the more interesting option—and I loved it. I didn’t understand why a martial arts instructor would be training her students to hunt people on the streets, but then it all made sense. Colleen struggling to justify her Hand allegiance and having a good argument that certain segments do help people was good, solid stuff. Claire's retort that they should've chosen another name was perfect...I've had the same thought about SHIELD after they were outted as half-Hydra. It didn’t quite make sense that she wouldn’t know more about the Iron Fist if she were a member of The Hand, but I suppose she could’ve been playing dumb with Danny. I also thought her turn from true believer to betrayer was a little quick, but The Hand attacking Danny was a justifiable motivator and a strong reason to believe him. I’m glad we didn’t get anyone trying to convince her that Danny had struck first. I also felt sorry for her when she realized The Hand would kill her for her doubts, which would’ve been a great parallel to Danny's doubts in the Iron Fist's mission had his side been explored more. Although, him telling her that he knows what it's like to believe in something only to have it pulled away falls totally flat when he's the one who left K'un-Lun.

Iron Fist’s writing definitely has some holes (what psychiatric hospital would let their completely unknown new patient wander around unsupervised with a "tour guide" who was caught trying to convince him to kill himself???), but the biggest problem is that it’s nothing new or inventive. The dialogue isn’t the most original and the show’s pacing is way off. This has been a problem with previous Netflix shows too—I really wish they’d be a little less serialized instead of trying to be 13-hour movies with a single plot—but it was especially apparent here. Two episodes in, Danny was still mostly walking around going “I’m Danny Rand. No, really,” someone disbelieves him, and then he goes on to the next person to start it all over again. There’s also a recurring thing where everyone comments on Danny’s lack of shoes like it’s the funniest running gag ever (it’s not); as if that’s the only thing weird about this guy. There’s also a bit in episode two where Danny’s thought insane because he has a stolen passport with a different name on it, but Danny had no reason to believe his company and his best friends Joy and Ward Meachum (Jessica Stroup and Tom Pelphrey) are no longer friendly, so why didn’t he just call his company? Why all the subterfuge? The later reveal that he knows Jeri Hogarth (Carrie Ann Moss) and that she’s gung-ho about helping him confirms he could’ve just gotten her to bend the rules and let him in the country, making those early plot developments pointless. Even better, why not use his super-ninja skills to sneak in? Unnecessary speed-bumps like these slowed the plot down right off the bat and it never really recovers, thanks to wishy-washy writing around its lead character.

That the Netflix shows keep referring to the Avengers Chitauri invasion as "The Incident" and largely ignoring it has gotten annoying (at least Daredevil used it to regress Hell’s Kitchen and Luke Cage featured bootleg video of it as a plot point). I do not understand the desire to keep halfway pretending that they’re in some separate, mostly grounded universe; they are not. They don't need to talk about it as incessantly as SHIELD did in season 1, but coyly vague references draw more attention to the lack of Avengers than the simple fact that these heroes don't world-savers’ help does. On a show like this with magic, this is especially apparent. I’m not sure why Clarie wouldn’t think dragons might be real in this world. I mean, sure, just because one crazy thing is real doesn't mean they all are, but given everything that's happened to New York alone (not to mention the existence of Thor), a little less skepticism would be believable. Even more baffling, why doesn't Claire call Daredevil (or even refer to him by his superhero name)? He might be absolutely helpful in fighting the Hand! Just use an excuse that he’s out of town or something if they don’t want to bring Matt in.

This unwillingness to venture into a bigger universe extends to the opponents Danny faces. Madame Gao and The Hand are great villains, but The Hand aren't anything like what they were in Daredevil and don't come off as a threat here at all. They seem decidedly toned down and it feels like they could’ve been any generic mercenaries. Where are the badass, creepy, somewhat undead ninjas Daredevil fought? If you're going to start your show with Danny as a superhero (and for all intents and purposes, he was—this is 15 years into his training!), you have to give him opponents who are more threatening than random gangsters (Luke Cage had this issue too) and martial arts-trained street kids. If the street kids are supposed to undergo some kind of process to become the heartbeat-less assassins of Daredevil, where is that happening? And what happened to them after Danny busted out of their training compound? The Hand’s leader, Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez) was just an OK villain, which wasn’t enough on a season this long when he was supposed to be second only to Meachum in terms of villainy (according to the season’s structure, at least). He seemed to have no real plan beyond the continued existence of the Hand via Rand Corp’s assets, making him seem pretty weak. Lewis Tan's drunken guard had more character and charisma than 90% of the characters on this show and also provided the best fight of the series up to episode 8. If they aren’t going to go creepy, they at least need to go distinct. The karaoke-loving assassin from episode 6 felt a little cliché, but at least he and the other three Hand champions Danny faced had personalities and unique fighting styles. Across the board on Netflix series, I want more powered supervillains and far fewer gangsters and businessmen. I don’t know who Danny has in his Rogues Gallery, but he’s gotta have a few mystical enemies he could’ve fought here, if for no other reason than to vary the fights and Danny’s tactics therein. On that note, Danny is the third Defender whose power is super strength. Obviously superheroes are more than their powers, but I’d like to see more variation of them (a super-punch is not that impressive anymore).

Davos (Sacha Dhawan), Danny’s former best friend in K’un-Lun, was another good opponent, and I would’ve liked his arc expanded a lot. There was a lot that could’ve been mined from his well-crafted belief that Danny wasn’t the right choice for the Iron Fist, which never came off as petty jealousy to me. He seemed legitimately hurt that Danny abandoned his duties and sided with a member of the Hand. The one area where Danny’s seeming failure in most of his training worked perfectly was in Davos’ assessment of him; Danny being so unbalanced fueled and justified Davos’ hate quite effectively. I absolutely believe Davos should’ve been the primary antagonist, if not secondary only to The Hand. Imagine how much more complex the show would’ve been had Danny left to defeat The Hand, with Davos following him to stand up for (and represent K’un-Lun and its teachings) and bring him back from the start. Davos chasing Danny for leaving his duties would’ve completed the parallel to Colleen being chased by The Hand for doubting their mission too.

The season’s actual main antagonists, the Meachums, were not compelling to me at all. Danny’s attempts to save Ward and Joy from themselves seemed to fall rapidly to the wayside as the siblings took turns going morally black before bouncing back to gray, then back again, over the course of the season. I understood their desire to keep the company they’d built and didn’t really harbor them any ill will over it—again, Danny never seemed to truly want it—but I never really cared about who controlled it. Ward’s drug problem didn’t interest me at all, nor did Harold’s (David Wenham) attempts to get the company back from his children and The Hand. I didn’t see Ward killing Harold or Harold’s resurrection coming, but I suppose I should’ve, given Nobu’s repeated resurrections on Daredevil. I wasn’t a fan of Harold’s confused undead state and apparently he’ll start becoming a crazed murderer, so a member of the Daredevil cast has that to look forward to… Harold was at least a little interesting to me when it seemed like he really was on Danny’s side, but the reveal of his true evil intentions fell flat because nothing about him stood out in the first place. I didn’t guess that he was behind the Rands’ murders, but it also didn’t shock me. That Harold’s entire goal was to be running Rand (he’s immortal and that’s all he wants? Really?) was so small compared to everything else going on that he felt like a minor villain who should’ve been dealt with by mid-season if not sooner. By no means did he deserve to be the embodiment of Danny’s cave dragon, which felt entirely anticlimactic. I don’t think my lack of interest in the Meachums was the fault of any of these three actors; they were just stuck in a mediocre plot that carried on far longer than it should have.

Speaking of the fights, outside of Bakuto vs. Colleen and Davos vs. Danny (and the massive battle leading into them), none of them have any emotional component to them. Maybe that’s just because most of them involve thugs, but even Danny vs. Harold—the climactic battle of the season—left me cold and just waiting for it to end. If the show doesn’t get me invested in the conflicts between characters, the fights will feel empty. Even though Harold killed Danny’s parents, I wasn’t feeling it. The choreography to Danny’s fights wasn’t the most polished either, but this wasn’t Jones’ fault, as he apparently only had 15 minutes of training before each fight was filmed.

I wish they’d done what the other Netflix shows have done: showcase the hero’s city in the opening credits to make it as much a character as anything else. Here, the credits only showed a CGI Danny doing kung-fu. They should’ve shown off K’un-Lun and juxtaposed it with New York City. The score also felt repetitive.

I didn’t want this to be disappointing (why would anyone want anything they’re watching to be bad?), but unfortunately it was. There are kernels of a good, maybe even great, show here (Colleen, Claire, Gao, Davos), but Danny’s character arc, the villain aspects, and the rest of the show never coalesce around them. It almost always takes the least interesting option, so it comes off as bland and repetitive. If Danny’s character can be redeemed in Defenders, then cool, but it will take a great deal of boldness and precise direction/writing/acting choices to right this ship.