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.