A Study of Western Celebrity

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, TV shows, internet blogs, and even newspapers are often full of the latest news, gossip, and scandals about current celebrities.

Paragraph A

It seems that our current society cannot get enough information about the daily lives of celebrities. But how did celebrities become so much an important force in our culture? While people have always had a certain obsession for the fantastic and the famous, the notion of celebrity, as well as the types of people termed 'celebrities', has evolved greatly throughout the ages. The word 'celebrity' has its roots in the language of the ancient Roman civilization. The word we now know to mean 'a condition of being famous' or 'a famous person' is derived from the Latin word 'celeber', meaning 'frequented or populous'.

Paragraph B

The celebrities of the ancient world were the powerful and awesome deities of Greece and Rome, and the citizens of these civilizations believed in a vast number of immortals who had a direct impact on their lives. It was, therefore, important to know about these figures' personal lives. This need to know led to the creation of myths, which personalized the gods and involved them in ancient celebrity scandals that thrilled and excited the common people.

Paragraph C

During ancient times, amateur and professional athletes also began to make an impact on the celebrity culture. Victors in the ancient Olympic Games were treated as heroes and were often elevated to god-like status. In the ancient Roman civilization, gladiators - the equivalent of today's professional athletes - were also revered by the common people for their heroics and seemingly superhuman strength.

Paragraph D

As Europe moved into the Dark Ages (the years spanning approximately 400-1300 AD) and a time when athletics and the arts were largely forgotten, monarchs and rulers continued to maintain celebrity status, while religious figures took on newfound fame. The miraculous lives and fascinating deaths of spiritual figures lent excitement to the lives of common people when there was often little else to be excited about, as they faced war, disease, and food shortages.

Paragraph E

During the period 1300-1600 AD, or the Renaissance period as it is known, interest in ruling figures faded. As Europe emerged from its long neglect of the arts, there was greater appreciation for portraits, statues, and stone carvings. This period of appreciation for the arts lent a sense of celebrity to artists who were noted for their works and their personal achievements. It was a time when artists began to surpass political and religious individuals for supreme celebrity - a trend that would continue into later centuries.

Paragraph F

While the figures of the ancient and early modern civilizations were able to achieve moderate and sometimes lasting celebrity within particular cultures, the global reach of their fame was limited. It was not until the 1700s, when technological advances made publishing commercially viable, that the extent of a person's fame could spread further. The increase in the availability of the written word was accompanied by a huge rise in the number of common people who could read, allowing a mass audience to find out about celebrities for the first time. Suddenly, the lives of authors, politicians, war heroes, and other celebrities could now be read about in newspapers around the world. These gave ordinary people the opportunity to become intimately knowledgeable about the figures they most admired.

Paragraph G

In the modern era, particularly as radio and film took off in the 1900s, things really began to change. First, radio began to make its way into the average home in the 1920s and 1930s. Professional athletes also began to be regarded as stars, as their games and exploits could be broadcast over the air for an entirely new audience. Then, the rise of television in the 1950s only cemented the premier level of celebrity that film stars, athletes, and television actors were beginning to share. This also meant a huge increase in the individual salaries of these celebrities. Even a few animals gained fame through children's TV shows. The emergence of reality television shows in the late 1990s allowed all kinds of people with little ability to enjoy a short burst of fame on the television screen. All you needed, it seemed, was an attractive appearance. Today, reality television programmes make it possible to be famous not for doing anything in particular, but simply for being, with the audience deciding whether someone deserves to become a celebrity or not.

Research into the Effects of Different Teaching Styles

A Prior to 1960, most inquiries into pupils' learning skills explored the relationship between factors such as children's social background, personality or measured intelligence and their achievement in various school subjects. Studies of teachers were largely a quest for criteria of effectiveness, and numerous investigations sought links between personality or attitude and 'success' at teaching. By 1950, Domas and Tiedeman were able to survey 672 such studies of teacher effectiveness. Yet there was widespread disappointment with such research, partly because so little of value seemed to emerge. First of all, there was little agreement about what constituted 'good' teaching or who the good teachers were. Secondly, there were numerous conflicting and contradictory findings. No sooner had one investigator found a relationship which appeared to be significant, than another discovered the opposite effect.

B For example, in 1945, two American researchers, Rostker and Rolfe, both using standardized testing techniques and broad samples of teachers, reached exactly opposite conclusions. Rostker concluded that the intelligence of the teacher is the most important single factor conditioning teaching ability, and that there is no significant relationship between personality and teaching ability. Rolfe, however, found no correlation between intelligence and teaching efficiency: he claimed that the teacher's personality was what produced good teaching. Another American writer, Barr (1961), summarized a massive amount of American research and underlined the chaos in the research literature on effectiveness: "Some teachers were preferred by administrators, some were liked by the pupils, and some taught in classes where there were substantial pupil gains, and generally speaking these were not the same teachers."

C One of the earliest pieces of research dates from 1912, when Stevens made 100 random observations of lessons in a variety of subject areas, in order to analyze the number and nature of questions being asked by teachers. Stevens's overall total was 64% teacher talk and 36% pupil talk, figures which are remarkably similar to a number of findings half a century later.

D For many years in the first half of the 20th century, so-called 'formal' teaching was the norm. Teachers taught their classes as a whole group, gave out information, asked questions which predominantly required factual recall, and frequently set a common written task for the children to complete in a prescribed period of time. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that one focus of classroom interaction research in the decades following Stevens's inquiry was on the phenomenon of 'attentiveness'. A number of studies in the 1920s and 1930s, by Morrison and others, sought relationships between the degree of attention being paid by children and the amount they subsequently appeared to have learnt. Such research was usually based on observing teachers at work, a technique which was also employed extensively by United States administrators in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to assess teachers' competence and allocate merit payments to so-called 'superior' teachers.

E As the 1930s came to an end, it was partly the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe which led to a shift in interest in the United States away from attentiveness, with its emphasis on the authority of the teacher, and towards a scrutiny of authoritarianism itself. A number of people began to feel that if dictatorship were to be avoided, children must learn in school how to handle democracy. Several investigators examined the processes taking place within small discussion groups, and tried to establish superiority for discussion groups over lecture classes, but with conflicting results. The movement towards what was becoming known as child-centred education was gathering momentum, and as interest in child development increased, investigators began to discover the usefulness of direct observation and the categorization of child behavior.

F This was when systematic observation of teacher-pupil interaction began in earnest. Anderson (1939) studied what he called 'domination' and 'integration' amongst kindergarten children. Dominative acts by children included blaming and snatching toys, and such acts by teachers included restricting children's activities; while children's integrative acts included sharing facilities and playing harmoniously, and those of teachers included expanding opportunities for self-direction and co-operation. Anderson then attempted to measure what is now commonly called 'classroom climate'.

G Lewin, Lippitt and White (1939 and 1943) studied the effects of different teaching styles. They arranged for three groups of five boys each to be taught in very different ways: these were labelled 'authoritarian', 'democratic' and 'laissez-faire'. The first two of these were similar to Anderson's concept of dominative and integrative teachers.

H Beginning with Withall's work in 1949, there was much greater interest in interaction within the classroom. Withall used the term 'social-emotional climate' to describe the emotional tone created as a result of face-to-face interaction in groups, and, like many who followed him, concentrated his analysis of this climate on the study of teachers' verbal behavior. Withall also made efforts towards increasing the reliability of analyses, and this important pioneering work in the development of classroom observation methodology was followed by many others during the 1950s.

I Partly because of the disappointing results of the teacher-effectiveness research, and partly because of the general neglect in earlier work of the variables of actual classroom behavior, the decade 1960-70 produced a large number of studies of classroom processes, based on observation of teachers at work.