Some Music and Writing Sessions

We have just had a great discussion on the www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen list about Writing Retreats – that developed into thoughts on Music workshops. So here are our ideas from this day in May 2014 – it would be great if you could share your own creative strategies for getting students to write – or just getting them to be with each other in engaged and engaging ways. This post looks at Sing-Write; Rich Writing; Make music like Mozart; Free writing prompts; Academic free writing.

Sing-Write and find your voice – from John Hilsdon: 

“I’m planning a ‘sing-write’ (finding your voice) event for the Plymouth Writing Café in the autumn - and the warm-up we will do is this: 

All stand in a circle

Breathe together, in through nose and out through mouth in time with the leader for about 30 secs

Shake arms

Shake legs

Shake head

Relax all muscles and shake whole body

All say brrrrr (as if it’s cold!) and make the lips vibrate! If they won’t put a finger lightly on each cheek and try again

Make the brrrrr go all the way up to the highest note you can then all the way down to the lowest note

Repeat!

All sing the sound ‘ng’ like in the ‘dong’ of a bell – (leader leads with the note to sing this together)

Repeat - different notes - following the leader

All say “blah blah blah” and start to wander around the room in any direction saying this continually – try different notes and changing the ‘tune’ whilst still saying blah blah blah!

All sit and close eyes

Have one minute of silence with eyes closed

Take pen/paper and free write whatever comes to mind for 3 minutes.”

Be with for an hour: Rich writing: A variation on the sit in silence for a minute:

On our Art History MOOC - one rich writing activity that we had to do was to sit with an art work for an hour. We had to find a piece that was interesting or meaningful for us and then be with it - we could make notes or anything - but we had to quietly be with it for a whole hour. We then had to write 300 words on the artwork. 

I chose to sit with the picture of my mum (on the wall in the photo below) - and found the exercise both moving and really useful. After the hour I had more notes than I could use in a 300-word write up. It was a really rich experience.

More Music - From Craig Whittaker: Make music like Mozart 

Ask your delegates to think of a sound that they can make. If they claim to be having difficulty, then examples of sounds could be clapping, popping, shrieking, humming etc.

Have them all make their sound as they walk around the room, and just enjoy the noise.

Encourage them to play with the sound - to change it or make it louder, or more unusual.

After a couple of minutes of this, ask them to stop, and to think what colour and shape the sound is. (Provide plenty of coloured markers and a white-board or flip-chart for this.)

Then invite someone to draw their sound on the board, and to repeat it at regular intervals across the board. This will form the base-line around which the rest of the composition will be built. Have them make the sound to illustrate what it will sound like.

Repeat the process with other volunteers until you have a composition of around five to seven sounds.

Now appoint a conductor who will cue the performers when to begin. The resulting sounds should pleasantly surprise the delegates, and illustrate the principle of synaesthesia.

Even more Music:

For those whose interest in MUSIC have been piqued: when we had a music session led by Dave Griffiths of our CELT with our students he developed our music as follows:

• initial sound-making – with voice or rudimentary instruments or real instruments
• call and response
• round singing (London's burning)
• into groups composing music in response to a picture - and performing for each other.
• A finale activity was to choose the audience before whom we had to perform - we chose Glastonbury - it was fabulous!!!

 More Free Writing

* Choose a postcard sight unseen from a pack – turn over – see picture – write

* Choose an object from a sack – write

* Have two pieces of paper in front of you – focus on something you can see, hear, feel, smell – write… If you stop writing, write the reason for stopping on the second piece of paper. Reflect on the activity.

Academic Free writing workshop

Set up a session of one to one and a half hours long.

Ask students to have two sheets of paper in front of them - one for writing and one for writing why they are not writing.

After reassuring the students that their writing will not be marked - put up a relevant assignment question (either one that they have been set - or a relevant one that they might have been set) - ask them to write without stopping for ten minutes on the question - and to write the reason why they have stopped (for they will) on the second sheet.

After ten minutes structure three reflections:

* What was your reaction to that process?

* Why did you stop writing?

* What can you take from this process into your other academic writing?

What is interesting is that whilst for academics the writing issue often is: 'Students can't write - their spelling, punctuation and grammar are awful.' The issue for students is overcoming a fear of writing - so space to discuss their feelings about writing can be the freeing activity.

YOUR TURN!!

#LiveArtHistory W4: World Making

This week we explored ‘world making’ – where art both constructs worlds and creates a narrative or commentary about the world. We saw different ways of tackling the 2D aspects of flat planes to imply 3D space – with geometry, lines and grids in the Renaissance and with oil paints creating light to solidify subjects bursting out of 2D space, in the Baroque. We considered Mondrian’s refusal to accept this melody and illusion; stripping away shape and shading and texture in favour of flat paint in primary collars. Reality squared. Pollack’s definitely 2D dripped paint canvas, however, draws the viewer into the implied 3D, immersing in a something, an ‘other’, to experience. And thus we see how the artists create specific conversations with their ‘public’ – engaging – challenging – puzzling – distancing - immersing…The conversation created as much a revelation of the world view as the paint and light and canvas.

This week – Drum Roll - First Compulsory Assignments

The courses offers a Track A option – to produce an artwork; or B – writing; or both. In each case the whole assignment requires the preparation and submission of the piece PLUS peer review of three other pieces. If you do both A and B, you will have to peer review six other pieces in total. I chose to do both assignments. Both options were taken from Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of assignment (New York; Paper Monument, 2012). MUST GET THAT BOOK!!

Track B: Thick Description - required us to spend an hour with a work of art – being with it – recording thoughts and perceptions not just of the artwork but of its surroundings… After an hour we were required to organise our thoughts and write a 300-400 word essay, list or narrative.

Mostly it’s brown paper: spending an hour with a primitive portrait of my mother

I live half the week in the country not able to get to a real gallery till Monday, when I hope to see Hannah Hoch’s collages in the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, UK. I wanted to do this exercise with a real picture and not an image on the screen. I wanted to be with a real picture – and to see and feel that experience: to learn to really see a picture by being with it. So I chose a primitive portrait of my mother that I have hanging in the front room – and that was drawn by a friend of the family who is a self-taught artist. I thought that the sitting with the picture would be a meditation experience and that I would learn a lot from it… but again – only if it were a real thing. So even though this picture might not be classified as art by many – it is art to me – and it is real – so this is what I did.

The thick description:

The picture is about 12 X 6 inches on heavy cheap brown paper. It is pasted onto white paper and set within pale yellow card within a light wood simple frame. It is a head and shoulders portrait of Jeanne Marie Victorine Dierrieckx Sinfield – my mother. This picture seems to have captured her at about the age of 69 (1995) – but it is unsigned and un-dated – although I know the artist was Anita Melloche. 

The outline is sketched in with heavy soft black pencil which thickens as the hair is sketched in: unruly as if just back from working in the garden. The pencil outline is filled in with only three colours; water colour crayons of red, brown and white – they sketch in the hair, face, eyes and a red and white striped top. 

My mother would have hated the picture as un-flattering and not life-like; but whilst it is not exactly what she ever looked like – it really is ‘her’. It has captured her eyebrows – those slightly fine, thin eyebrows of old age. The eyes below are a bit doe-like, a bit cartoonish – not ‘real’ at all – but they have her direct gaze – and are somehow brave, strong – full of character. 

The character is also there in the closed mouth, the calm. The face is slightly at an angle looking to the right of the frame, her left. The left side of the portrait feels more three dimensional than any other bit of the picture – due to the white highlights that bring shape and substance – and push out that side of the face from the two dimensional plane. 

Mostly the whole picture is created by the brown paper; the very few bits of black, red, white and brown crayon create the illusion of the head, hair, face, shoulders and top by laying very few lines on the brown paper: carving the face from the paper. 

The background is simply brown paper; no contextual setting. The most in-filled sections are the hair and the top – but even there – brown paper peeks through adding another colour and another dimension to the portrait. The most amazing thing for me was seeing for the first time how much brown paper makes up the face – and I thought: it is mostly brown paper – and it is my mother. 

Ways of seeing

To spend this hour with a painting was both moving and illuminating. I definitely saw it differently by spending this quiet focused hour with it. At first I just sat and looked and looked – describing things to myself. After 30-minutes I started to sketch the picture and annotate. After that, I painted the sketch – using that painting as another way of analysing the painting itself. Then I free wrote a response – briefly looking at my notes. I could not get in all the information that I had noted down. When it was as edited as possible, I pasted it into the Module Box – and found that it was still 200 words too long. I managed in the end to get it down to 399 words! Dead chuffed with this – and I hope I take these eyes to the Whitechapel Gallery on Monday.

Track A: World in a Box: Using any means, materials or style – we were asked to put together a collection of objects and a means of displaying them. We could operate in 2D as well as 3D – we could make the objects or find them – we could create a narrative or not – it could just be what it is. We had to think about how to display them – and then how to frame them in the photograph.

I like to create spaces around the cottage that are curations or artworks designed to tease or please the eye – to create a look or feel or experience… So I thought that I would photograph and present one of these small spaces. Unfortunately I could not cut the photographs that I initially wanted to up-load (technologically challenged) – and so was only getting a third of whatever world I wanted to share. In the end I worked with this limitation, uploading a picture that would be de facto cut in the Module Box – to create the frame I was after:

Schwitter’s Bedroom: The Buddhist Temple

Schwitter treated his studio as a collaged art spaced – bit like my approach to my home – so a cool title was born. The submitted piece is just the left side of the above picture - just over a third and just under a half of the total width. This cut emphasised the contrast between the Buddhism trail up the bookcase - and the bloody detective fiction that frames it.

End: The Assignments this week were really engaging and thought-provoking. I learned a lot about looking, seeing – and really seeing. Activities that I want to bring into my real world teaching… (Oh and I got 14/15 for the quiz – and I DO KNOW what Baroque is – but obviously did not describe it well enough on the day L )

#rhizo14 – week 2: Seeding independent learning: wrestling with writing

Lots of wrestling in FB this week with what could be argued to be an essential ‘issue’ with MOOCs – they are open – free – out there… surely this is thus egalitarian learning at its very best? But no – some are still silenced – some are still feeling the pain of not being good enough – that ‘fish out of water’ feeling that is the experience of so many non-traditional students in the traditional classroom.

We have some strategies that work here to overcome this: say hello – be welcoming – comment – reply – extend a welcoming hand to other students. In doing this we ARE the community, all of us, everyone who does this friendly human thing in this strange and potentially impersonal world.

I blogged about this before – how doing the MOOCs really reinforced the need to bring the human back into the physical classroom. To make time for students to get to know each other – to bond – to feel that it is okay to speak – to listen to and be with their fellow students.

This year we found that role plays and simulations in the trad ‘lecture’ time really helped this to happen. We had a Post-apocalypse scenario running over several weeks:

Who would you keep in your bunker and why?

What education system would you build – immediately on leaving the bunker; five years later; ten years on…

What cultural activities would you save and why – and how would you build a sense of self-efficacy in future students?

The students were puzzled at this strange ‘lecture’ programme at first – but leapt into the discussions and found their voices – and found that they could speak to and with their fellow class mates. I think they formed a ‘cohort identity’ (BLAH) – and the classes definitely FEEL different.

We are also using creative techniques: drawing, collage, poetry… to help us all to think differently – to find our voices in different ways and in different media… And we are asking the students to blog about their learning hoping that this semi-academic space which is open for their colonizing develops their voices in powerful ways.

At the same time, they are going to have to wrestle with the slow, painful and iterative process that is academic writing.

How can we encourage and support our students in this struggle? How do we keep the flow going – and hopefully the joy – when this mountain does have to be climbed?

It’s really hard because writing is hard and the fear of failure is so PRESENT. That fear of making a fool of yourself – of not getting it right – of making your own ignorance visible to the world – of being judged. (Yes folks – let’s check out our FB page – we fear it too – you know!)

Especially when this fear is manifest in a vision and practice of writing that seems to tell students that they must get it right first go. That writing is the pouring out of perfectly formed, pre-digested learning - rather than the stuff and process of learning – and anything else is just pure visible, recorded proof of personal inadequacy and failure.

Below is what I have just sent to a student who has already written her Project – all of it: the proposal part is not due in till W19 (this is W15) and the final report part of it is not due in till W30. She is engaged. She is a motivated student. She has started early. It’s a great first draft – yet I fear that any feedback that suggests that it needs revision will wound.

So this is what I wrote:

I can see that you are going to be a tortured perfectionist! Apart from the pain (!!!) - this will make sure that you do get a wonderful degree. But you are going to have to give yourself permission to write stuff which will not be perfect first go (and nor should it be!) - and then go over it a few times to knock it into shape.

So, yes, there are some bits of the writing that need a little 'smoothing' - some bits are better than others - but there is a project sitting there - waiting to be 'emerged' through a revision process.

This is one reason we *try* to get students to write early (but most of them never do!). When you first write something it is great and so are you! After a little while, because your brain has continued to wrestle with your ideas, you go back over your piece, you see that it is not perfect - and you start to tidy it up. 

You change a bit here and there... you realise that those two longish sentences can be cut down into one short sentence that actually makes your point in an even better way... 

This is the struggle to write - and it is what we all should do to get our ideas across. It is a brilliant, slow and sometimes painful process - but it is the writing process. 

We have to give ourselves permission to write something - and then to change it. So - give yourself a couple of days - then go through your writing again yourself. Try to be shorter (we always need to be shorter!) - make sure you are saying exactly what you mean - change it a bit... Remember to *Save As* the versions: v1, v2, v3 and so on (we often go through 17 or more versions to get to something we are happy with). It is great to keep all the versions - especially as sometimes we delete whole sections of our writing - and then think that it was really important and needs to be in the piece after all...

We need to learn that this IS proper academic writing: this PROCESS is... (and also - it will give you data for future auto-ethnographic studies!). Most people think writing should be 'right first go' - or that if they have to change something - then they are a 'bad person' or a 'poor student' - but no - this is the necessary process of writing. 

Think of it as having a structured academic conversation with yourself.

This is the hardest thing for us tutors to get students to do. It is also hard to get other academics to realise that THIS is what we need to help students to do. It's not about shouting about spelling, punctuation and grammar - important as they are - but making time and space for this slow and thoughtful process to happen - especially when our students do not want to do this. It all feels too slow and painful.

Anyway - once you have improved it a bit yourself - print all of that off - and bring it to the class on Wednesday. We can give you feedback and hopefully help you to the next step!

But these are just words!

When I was a first year student we had no high stakes assessment that I can remember. All the first year stuff was designed to get us to think – to engage – to learn… It was brilliant – it was a bit like… a MOOC!!

Since I went through HE, ‘they’ broke it a bit more – made it harder – more formal – with more opportunities to fail – and then they let a few more non-traditional students in – and started to blame them for their failure or their fears – or their ‘fragility’ – instead of trying to fix the problem of education…

And now I don’t know how to get these bullied students to embrace this horrible and beautiful struggle with writing….

I am enjoying #rhizo14 so much – and as the community is the curriculum – this is the issue I thought I’d pop out there this week. I do hope for some Comments here folks. I need your thoughts!