Final Artist Statement

I have to be honest and say that I was a little skeptical about the final project in the beginning. I wasn’t really sure how it would apply to me as an English teaching major. It seemed to be more geared towards theatre education students. However, throughout the process of collaborating with both theatre ed and English teaching majors to create a media performance, I came to the conclusion that this project was really quite applicable to me as an English major. I learned that creating a performance is kind of like writing a paper, but kinda more fun (am I allowed to say that as an English major??). I wasn’t really able to make that connection in the beginning, but as our project developed and we performed our first “draft” I was able to put together the similarities between working on a performance and writing a paper. First of all, the writing process begins with inquiry/pre-drafting—which we did. The first discussion we had as a group was very productive as we discussed the multiple possibilities for an organizing principle/thesis. It took quite a while, but we were able to come to an agreement on gender norms for kids. The next part of the process was getting interviews, still part of our inquiry/pre-writing stages. After getting awesome information from all of the interviews, we began trying to piece them together. You could say this was the beginning of the drafting process. We took time in class to work on our draft, but it also required quite a bit of time and dedication outside of class. We met multiple times as a group to put our performance together. It then came time to put our draft/performance to the test in what was kind of like a peer-review. We received a lot of helpful feedback, and were able to learn what worked in our draft and where the audience got lost. Our classmates had great suggestions, and we were excited to work with that they had to say. After the peer-review, the revision process began. We met as a group a few more times to revise our performance. Once we felt good about we had, we polished it up by completely running through it a few times, this was the editing process, where we fixed surface level things like transitions, lines, movements etc. We then turned in our final draft by performing our final media performance. Through this process and looking back at it, I realized that what we did was the exact same as the writing process, just with our bodies. We were able to communicate our thesis in a way that writing wouldn’t have been able to fully do. I loved it. But I have to admit, the fact that we were collaborating with theatre students really helped.

So during the pre-writing stage, we divided up the time and tried to plan a scene separately. While trying to come up with my scene I learned that our organizing principal was not clear. We regrouped the next day in class and all felt the same way. After adjusting a few things and reassigning responsibilities we set back out to work. I was mainly responsible for the storybook scene. I put together the slides of the pages, and then I researched to find quotes that we could use that would helps transition smoothly from one scene to the next. As a group we each kind of had our own scene that we were responsible, but the whole project was an equal contribution as we collaborated and incorporated everyone’s ideas. Our group worked very well together.

I would absolutely, most definitely want to do a project like this in my future classroom. I’m not sure how students would feel about doing an actual theatre performance, but how cool would it be to have students collaborate with theatre kids? I also think a project like this would help teach students the writing process. I think it’s important that students get to choose their topics, but it might be a good idea to set some bounds. Maybe this project could be applied to a piece of literature that we as a class would be studying. Say and English class, and a theatre class have both been studying The Crucible. Students could then choose a social issue from the book that is seen in society today. From there it would be the same process that we went through in class. Students could interview people on the issue that they chose and create an organizing principle. Since most students have phones with video cameras, and have access to iMovie etc. they would be able to put something together similar what we did. I think a project like this would be really effective for English students. Yes, it might be pushing them out of their comfort zones a little bit, but it would be teaching them another medium in which they can create, express, and communicate something that is important to them. It totally takes them through the writing process, and I could even have them writing reflections throughout the process, where they are able to express what they learned step by step.

Game Changer

I chose to create a game like/interactive flow chart to address the social issue of feminism. Instead of focusing on the broad aspect of feminism I narrowed it down to feminism specifically within the LDS church. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of members of the church who automatically associate feminism with the extremists, so they often think feminists are a bunch of crazy lady’s that hate men. A Huffington  Post article states that “feminism is not the belief that one gender should be raised in power above another. The very definition of feminism shows a complete opposition to this belief.” In other words, the basic feminist belief is that men and woman are equal, and therefore should be treated equally. That basic belief is part of church doctrine, but gets complicated within the cultural norms of the church. I also used the Family: A Proclamation to the World to get some ideas for some of the question on the flow chart. Basically the goal is to get people to recognize that if you believe that men and woman are equal then that’s feminism. It may not be radical feminism, but it’s feminism nonetheless. There are different levels of feminism. I’m hoping this game helps members of the church think twice before the say that they aren’t feminists. I also took a look at three different examples of 3 Ad Agencies trying to rebrand feminism to help me get ideas for my flow chart.

Round Robin

Textual Poaching

                                                                     

For my textual poaching assignment I chose to identify myself as being a sister. A couple of years ago my sister passed away, and a result of that has been experiencing somewhat of an identity loss. All of my life my sister has been one of the ways that I identified myself, and she still is, but it's in a different way, because she's not here on this earth with me anymore. Going through this experience I have come to realize just how much my siblings are part of who I am, they make up my identity, and I wanted to represent that through this assignment. Pablo Picasso's paintings have always been very interesting to me, and I felt like doing something similar to his art would help portray what I was feeling. I love looking at Picasso's portraits because they express the complexities that make up an individual. It’s almost as if all of the different things that make a person who they are on the inside surface on the outside. Looking at Picasso’s portraits helped inspire the idea to do something along those lines. I started with my face, and added to it using different parts of my sibling’s faces. The parts that are mine are in black and white, and their parts are in color, representing the color that my siblings bring in to my identity. Without them I would not be the same person.

I think that for my future classroom, this assignment would be really cool for students to analyze some of the characters from novels that we would be studying. They could even choose something from the time that the book takes place to inspire them and then make a modern day adaptation/textual poaching to portray one of the characters.

Process Piece

I chose to create an audio piece documenting me learning how to play a song from the movie La La Land. The one minute clip doesn’t document the song in it’s entirety, but it does represent the process of learning the first page. In order to record part of this song, it actually required me learning how to play the song, and that was the act of labor. Recording music is always interesting, because it seems like every time you record the song turns out different in one way or another, so to try and make it more authentic I recorded it once, and used that recording to capture what it actually sounded like after working on learning the piece for a little bit. An audio piece doesn’t actually show the labor going in to learning the song, but it shows the result of the labor that went into learning the song. 

Medium Specificity

Tea Party Prezi Presentation 

Artist/Teacher Statement

I personally think that Prezi presentations are a lot more engaging than regular power point presentations, just because there is so much you can do with them. Like power point presentations, it’s important that Prezi is used effectively, not just a way to use technology for the sake of using technology. I could totally see my future students using prezi for assignments, but it does cost money. I wonder if schools would look into subscribing to allow students to have access. Prezi is a little difficult to navigate if you aren’t familiar with it, but after spending a solid amount of time figuring things out, it became easer and easier. I love food, and I love tea parties, so I thought it would be fun to create a digital recipe book with all the recipes you need to throw a successful tea party. It would be convenient because you could just pull the presentation up on a tablet/laptop and keep it near while preparing all of the food.  Everything is organized and right at your fingertips.  If future students were to use prezi, they could use it for all sorts of different things including book reports, an explanation of a thesis/paper etc. Prezi allows more creative freedom than powerpoint, but there are also outlines to follow if you don’t want to start from scratch. I started from scratch just because I thought it would be more fun, and because it would help me really grasp the skills needed to create a prezi presentation.