Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

Off the Shelves Brilliant titles for you and your students to explore Craftland:AJourneyThrough Britain’sLostArtsand VanishingTrades (JamesFox,TheBodleyHead,£25) Abook that offers a glimpse into the way traditional crafts were practised before the Industrial Revolution, in amanner rarely found in economic history books. Each chapter draws the reader in by focusing on the people still engaged in these trades today, and their often unassuming workplaces. Inmany cases it’s a tiny group, or even just one person keeping the tradition alive.Why does this matter? Because these are stories of determination, resilience and of working with nature, rather than against it. Students searching for alternative career pathways instead of the traditional academic routes will surely findwithin these pages a fascinating andwell-drawn explanation of a craft or tradition that will serve to inspire them. ReviewedbyTerry Freedman bit.ly/Eclecticism Digital CultureShock:WhoCreates TechnologyandWhyThisMatters (KatharinaReinecke,Princeton,£30) There’s beenmuch discussion of the biases inherent toAI, facial recognition and other technologies,but as Reinecke explores in Digital Culture Shock ,what’s often lacking in such conversations is an appreciation of the challenges posed tomodern technologyby deeplyentrenched cultural norms around the globe. InRwanda,where internet connections are subject to frequent unplanned outages,people take the opportunityof theWi-Fi going down to socialisewith friends and neighbours.Or take driverless cars, and consider howhelpless those vehicles trained on urban roads in theUSAwould be in Egypt,owing to thevastlydifferent styles of driving.Then there’s Naver – themost popular internet search engine in South Korea,which operates in averydifferent waytoGoogle. Reinecke takes us on a tour of these and other knottycultural quandarieswe don’t think about as often aswe should,while proposing a few solutions along theway. ReviewedbyTerry Freedman ThePenguinBookofPolish ShortStories (AntoniaLloyd-Jones (ed),Penguin,£30) The 39 stories in this collection span a hundred years, during which Polish society underwent seismic political change several times over. Rather than arrange the stories chronologically, Lloyd-Jones has instead opted to group themunder a series of themes – ‘Animals’, ‘Children’, ‘Couples’, ‘Men behaving badly’, ‘Women behaving badly’, ‘Misfits’, ‘Soldiers’, ‘Surrealists’ and ‘Survivors’. A few of the selections could certainly prove useful for history students, having been written by individuals who lived through WWII. For themost part, the stories are very readable and highly entertaining. Up until now, only nine of themhad previously been available in English translation,making this volume a good introduction to the Polish literary tradition, and some imaginitve approaches to writing and narrative that your English studentsmight not have encountered before. ReviewedbyTerry Freedman 40 teachwire.net/secondary