FINAL POST WOOT

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DcE29xlFCJwdVgpK2BQn-KWf9dph0zUok7ig16U3LjQ/edit?usp=sharing

Let’s talk about collaboration, let’s talk about compromise, let’s talk about how eerily similar all the English teaching students were and how desperately I wanted to work with them because I knew it would be so easy BUT that’s okay! And I’m grateful for what I learned about group work, because it’s been a long time since I did something like this. It was good for me because when I ask my students to do group work, they will butt heads. Someone will be dominant, some people will hang back, and some people will be all in. I certainly won’t shy away from assigning group work—in fact, this class has made me a lot more invested in group work as a tool of education—but I do think it’s important to understand the complications that can come from shoving students together and asking them to create. BYU is wildly heterogeneous, but our schools won’t be. What happens when students in one group come from different social, economic, racial, and/or cultural backgrounds? Hopefully really good, honest things, but also tensions! And that’s good too! Something we’ve talked a lot about in two of my English teaching classes this semester is how peer revision can function (specifically function well) in the classroom. One idea that I’m very attached to is having a class discussion on revision etiquette, which involves things like not being on your phone, making eye contact, and paying attention to what the other person is saying. I’d really like to do something similar with group work: what’s frustrating about group work? What can you personally do to contribute to a good group experience? What can go well with group work? Students can help create a few general expectations (listed on the board or something) that can moderate the social dynamics of the groups.

What did I learn as an artist? Well, let’s start by briefly discussing how I feel about performances like this. I was the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland when I was thirteen, but that’s about the extent of it. I much prefer to make the kind of art that posits me outside of it, allowing other people to read or look while I can appear as a third-party observer. I am grateful that our project did not call for any kind of traditional “acting,” per se. It’s way easier to say the lines of myself or of someone I know very well. But it was such a huge growing opportunity! Working from the ground up was SO FREAKING HARD. There were so many moving parts and so many things that had sentimental value to people so we had to be so cautious and kind but also make brave creative decisions (I guess both of my mentor texts got used, which was way exciting and fun for me so maybe I didn’t feel this as much as the other members), which was really, really great. There were also certain parts that made it clear that some of us had different priorities than others: Andrew really wanted seamless transitions, Melissa made sure she was keeping track of ideas, Bayley had these incredible, deeply personal stories, and Abbie’s script choices were some of the most key parts of our whole project. And, as previously mentioned, we used my key texts and that largely informed the visual aspect of our performance. Just because I thought something wasn’t very important does not mean it didn’t end up being a lovely, helpful part of our performance as a whole. I got to eat my words a little bit, which was great because it made our project better! This is just veering more into group project dynamics, sorry about that.

I loved spending time with the mentor texts and translating them into different mediums for our performance. It was amazing how one small piece (specifically Convergenze Divergenze) came to embody so much of what we hoped to communicate. We had the yarn, and then Bayley made the lovely video, and it just evolved into such a lovely thing. We made it three-dimensional and used it to help the audience members be a part of our performance.

I’d really like to do something similar in my own classroom. In fact, in writing a unit plan for another class, I tried to focus the assessment on a visual production—this ended up not really doing a great job of assessing reading, which was the main goal, but #neverthelessshepersisted and I’d really like to do SOMETHING with it. But it could totally work for a writing assessment unit! You do a creative writing piece, then break it apart visually (or aurally, or in food form, or whatever), and put it back together again. This could also be a really lovely way to teach visualization with things like poetry, which are generally more difficult for students to get into. I’m thinking specifically of “Blackberries” by Sylvia Plath. Bon chance!