The Pre-VIT Outfit

Another reason for starting this blog relates to 'the circle' of fellow bloggers as specified in my links bar. These colleagues of mine are other early career teachers, in other schools in Victoria, who have been blogging about their teaching experiences for a while now, and, well, I didn't want to miss out any more!

Apart from being another type of learning community that I can now be involved in, who knows where else this could lead? We could be on the brink of starting a minor revolution in the English teaching profession! (Hey, I'm allowed to dream, right?) SB, M and Darce are writing some amazing, thought-provoking stuff that isn't just benefitting them, but also their readers, and hopefully we can find some ways of getting that readership to grow- an anonymous and mysterious note in a VATE newsletter, SB??

I've been doing some reading about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lately, and, I must say, I find the parallels between the PRB and 'the circle' to be quite uncanny! The PRB came about because a group of young artists were dissatisfied by the state of the artistic community at the time, particularly in the artistic schools where they studied. As they saw it, Art was being taught in too rigid and stylised a manner, with no scope for individual expression or original ideas. Lucinda Hawksley (2004) writes that they "also objected strongly to the use of boring, sombre colour palettes. They wanted to paint vibrantly coloured works that would mean something to the viewer, subjects that would provoke the imagination and cause discussion". Hmm... Interesting...

The group basically pinned the blame on Raphael for the rigid codes that existed at the time within the British artistic establishment (hence their name). The PRB were also well practiced in subversion, and signed each work of art with the letters 'PRB". No one knew what it meant, until good old Dante Rossetti shot his mouth off and let the cat out of the bag. Suffice to say that the rest of the art community were scandalised, and that's when the persecution of the PRB began. Oh d-d-dear, perhaps it's not such a good analogy!