Helen Taylor

Studying for a Primary Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) can be demanding, but this book will help you to succeed on this intensive and challenging course. By showing you how to make the most of your time on the PGCE, the book encourages you to take a positive and proactive approach to your studies, and to reflect on and learn from your experiences. Packed with advice on how to make the most of your lectures, tutorials, assignments, placements and time spent with teachers, the book highlights the need for reflection, professionalism and strong personal commitment if you are to become a good teacher. Designed to help you throughout the course, chapters cover: - using the time before you start the course to get a head start - making the most of your time on placements - being reflective - developing your own personal philosophy for teaching - applying for, and getting, your first job This is an indispensible guide for those embarking on a Primary PGCE, and offers those considering applying for the course an invaluable insight into what to expect and how to get onto a PGCE. The advice is based on the authors' successful work with thousands of trainee teachers over many years, and there are case studies of successful students and students who struggled. This book is a lifeline for those working hard towards the ultimate goal of becoming a great teacher.

For Europeans looking across the Atlantic, American culture is often the site of desire, fascination, and envy. In Britain, the rich culture of the American South has made a particularly strong impact. Helen Taylor explores the ways in which contemporary Southern culture has been enthusiastically produced and reproduced in a British context. Taylor examines some of the South's most significant cultural exports in discussions that range across literature, music, film, television, theater, advertising, and tourism to focus on how and why Southern themes and icons have become so deeply embedded in British cultural life. The enduring legacy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind can be seen today in the popularity of sequels, revisions, and reworkings of the novel. The conversation between these cultures is further explored in British responses to Alex Haley's Roots, the British theater's special affection for Tennessee Williams's plays, and the marketing of New Orleans as a preferred destination for European tourists. The transformation of Southern culture--itself a hybrid of the European, African, and American--as it circulates back across the Atlantic suggests not only new views of the history, racial politics, music and art of both Britain and the American South, but also an enhanced understanding of the dynamic flow of culture itself.

This introductory book offers a rich, stimulating, and authoritative account of key debates and issues in the discipline from a range of highly regarded experts in the field. Carefully structured and edited, it explores sociological understandings of a range of core topics and critically examines what key issues have emerged for debate from past and current research. As state-of-the-art guide to its subject, this volume offers a refreshing and stimulating path through contemporary debates within a familiar and accessible format.

One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised Hollywood films, Gone with the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have. The book was published in June 1936; the film premiered on December 15, 1939. The book has sold 25 million copies, has been translated into twenty-seven languages, and won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize. The film received eight Oscars and has been called the greatest movie ever made. Everyone has heard of GWTW. Most of us have seen the movie or read the novel. In this entertaining and informative book, Helen Taylor is the first to seek reasons for the film/novel's success among viewers/readers. The author asked GWTW fans to relate their experiences with the works, to explain their fascination with the story, to describe the impact GWTW has had on their lives. The results are astonishing and illuminating. In the United States and England, where the author conducted her research, women have to a remarkable degree claimed the story Margaret Mitchell wrote as their own. They name their children Rhett and Scarlett. They see in the lives of the men and women of GWTW their own lives, their own restlessness, their own aspirations for something better than marriage and motherhood. Helen Taylor not only explains the enduring appeal of the work, but also identifies different kinds of response at particular historical moments (especially World War II) and through the past five decades by women of different classes, races, and generations. The author also looks at the contemporary implications of the work's political conservatism, racism, and--paradoxically--feminism. The result is a book that is sophisticated, accessible, and revealing. Scarlett's Women is a book for eery fan, and for all students of film and popular culture.