Final Digital Media Performance
A copy of the final script can be found here.
REACTION:
I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment, and was impressed by the way it turned out! Having never devised a script before, I wasn't sure at all what this process would be like. It was helpful to have theater education majors in our group, because they were much more familiar with devising and performing than I was. However, I still felt that each member of our group was able to contribute something unique and beneficial. We worked well together and got each other's creative juices flowing as we explored a range of possibilities for our performance.
I was grateful that the workload was divided specifically by class periods; I felt that this was an excellent model of scaffolding and taught me quite a bit about how to structure projects for my future classes. First, we determined what stories were important to us, and what stories we felt a drive to tell. Having done that, we went home and each took time to select potential primary and secondary texts that we felt connected with our ideas. It was during this time that I thought of using T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a personal favorite of mien. Then, we shared our own stories and came up with questions to ask other people. We then went out and recorded interviews with other people, and these stories became the meat of our script. By this point, we had a great deal of material--too much, in fact. This was good because it gave us plenty of room to explore the structure we wanted our play to have. As soon as we determined that we wanted to do a sort of verbatim theater-type play, we were able to select which quotes, lines, images, audio, and video we felt would best contribute to our overall creation. I was initially overwhelmed by this stage, but when we focused on just one thing for each class period (audio OR visual OR script writing OR movement), it became much more doable.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS:
I participated through every step of this process by contributing stories, texts, ideas, suggestions, audio clips, images, and feedback to the script. While most of our time was spent working in a group, we did occasionally branch off with different responsibilities; for example, during one class period, the theater and and film majors created choreography for our opening sequence while the English majors added to and formatted the script. By the end of the period, our script was ordered correctly and had many notes about sound cues and movement, but it was still in a confusing format. I took it home and reformatted it into a more traditional script style, adding color markers to indicate whose line was whose. This helped us during rehearsals (and during the final performance) to quickly note where our lines were. For the final performance, we all brought a copy of the script attached to the pages of a cookbook, as well as cookies or some other type of snack. I made chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, of which my husband and I ate way too many at home.
USE IN MY FUTURE CLASSROOM
I had never before considered using this type of project in an English classroom, but I've changed my mind after analyzing the pedagogical benefits of devising a play. While this exact assignment wouldn't work in a middle school classroom, I could modify it to make it effective. In our particular play, we used the Prufrock poem as a primary text. This poem is complex and deals with very abstract ideas of connection, anxiety, and relationships, but we as a group were able to find lines that connected with stories and emotions that we or others had experienced. This grew my understanding of the poem, and helped me to connect with it more firmly. I imagine teaching a poem or abstract text in my classroom one day by having students identify core ideas and then interview family and friends about their correlating experiences. This also builds empathy, which is a goal I have for my future classroom. I also see potential in having my students devise a script based off of a novel we read in class; perhaps they could create tableau performance for assigned chapters. This project's use of visual media along with the spoken word reminded me of the Japanese "Pecha Kucha" presentation style, in which presenters create a slideshow with images that automatically transition every 20 seconds. This keeps the speakers on time, as well as allowing images to contribute to the meaning of their words. I would love to use this in my classroom, even potentially adding audio aspects to the presentation. Finally, I love the use of multimedia in this assignment, and I want to use media in a variety of ways in my future classroom. Students will create soundscapes, use movement, analyze film clips, and explore different genres of literacy: all tiny parts of what we did with this final project.
833 words
REACTION:
I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment, and was impressed by the way it turned out! Having never devised a script before, I wasn't sure at all what this process would be like. It was helpful to have theater education majors in our group, because they were much more familiar with devising and performing than I was. However, I still felt that each member of our group was able to contribute something unique and beneficial. We worked well together and got each other's creative juices flowing as we explored a range of possibilities for our performance.
I was grateful that the workload was divided specifically by class periods; I felt that this was an excellent model of scaffolding and taught me quite a bit about how to structure projects for my future classes. First, we determined what stories were important to us, and what stories we felt a drive to tell. Having done that, we went home and each took time to select potential primary and secondary texts that we felt connected with our ideas. It was during this time that I thought of using T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a personal favorite of mien. Then, we shared our own stories and came up with questions to ask other people. We then went out and recorded interviews with other people, and these stories became the meat of our script. By this point, we had a great deal of material--too much, in fact. This was good because it gave us plenty of room to explore the structure we wanted our play to have. As soon as we determined that we wanted to do a sort of verbatim theater-type play, we were able to select which quotes, lines, images, audio, and video we felt would best contribute to our overall creation. I was initially overwhelmed by this stage, but when we focused on just one thing for each class period (audio OR visual OR script writing OR movement), it became much more doable.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS:
I participated through every step of this process by contributing stories, texts, ideas, suggestions, audio clips, images, and feedback to the script. While most of our time was spent working in a group, we did occasionally branch off with different responsibilities; for example, during one class period, the theater and and film majors created choreography for our opening sequence while the English majors added to and formatted the script. By the end of the period, our script was ordered correctly and had many notes about sound cues and movement, but it was still in a confusing format. I took it home and reformatted it into a more traditional script style, adding color markers to indicate whose line was whose. This helped us during rehearsals (and during the final performance) to quickly note where our lines were. For the final performance, we all brought a copy of the script attached to the pages of a cookbook, as well as cookies or some other type of snack. I made chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, of which my husband and I ate way too many at home.
USE IN MY FUTURE CLASSROOM
I had never before considered using this type of project in an English classroom, but I've changed my mind after analyzing the pedagogical benefits of devising a play. While this exact assignment wouldn't work in a middle school classroom, I could modify it to make it effective. In our particular play, we used the Prufrock poem as a primary text. This poem is complex and deals with very abstract ideas of connection, anxiety, and relationships, but we as a group were able to find lines that connected with stories and emotions that we or others had experienced. This grew my understanding of the poem, and helped me to connect with it more firmly. I imagine teaching a poem or abstract text in my classroom one day by having students identify core ideas and then interview family and friends about their correlating experiences. This also builds empathy, which is a goal I have for my future classroom. I also see potential in having my students devise a script based off of a novel we read in class; perhaps they could create tableau performance for assigned chapters. This project's use of visual media along with the spoken word reminded me of the Japanese "Pecha Kucha" presentation style, in which presenters create a slideshow with images that automatically transition every 20 seconds. This keeps the speakers on time, as well as allowing images to contribute to the meaning of their words. I would love to use this in my classroom, even potentially adding audio aspects to the presentation. Finally, I love the use of multimedia in this assignment, and I want to use media in a variety of ways in my future classroom. Students will create soundscapes, use movement, analyze film clips, and explore different genres of literacy: all tiny parts of what we did with this final project.
833 words
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