Final Performance Artist/Teacher Statement

            I learned a lot as an artist creating this performance. Previously, I didn’t have much experience creating a performance incorporating media and a physical track. English is more about the text and interpreting the text—something that someone else has already created. Occasionally a teacher assigns a creative project that requires a little more expression and work but it isn’t very frequent. However, this performance has been about creating something from an idea that helps to convey a message to someone else and it becomes their responsibility to interpret it. We’ve had to take some feedback and think deeply about how we want to represent things and how we want the audience to see our performance. This has given me some experience in preparing these and collaborating as a group to create something from a simple idea and a guiding principle.

            As an educator, I’ve learned some about how to guide students in their own creation process. I’ve learned the importance of being clear in expectations and giving them feedback. Sometimes in the creation process, students stray from the original guiding principle or they forget the original basis for the project. That’s why it is so beneficial to give them an opportunity for feedback where there isn’t as much risk and they can get help from their teacher and their peers. This is something that can be applied in any subject matter. It’s important to give students an opportunity to hear feedback for their work and to then have an opportunity to continue work and to revise so that they can improve upon their ideas. It’s a learning experience and a process.

            I contributed to the final product by taking pictures, recording video and audio to contribute to the media. The media helped us to create a script as well as take the ideas as inspiration for our final performance. The ideas from the interviews all were combined and meshed together to convey a specific idea to our audience. I really enjoyed collaborating with my group members in order to create our devised script and incorporate the findings from our interviews and other research. In preparation for our final performance, we also all contributed to the props and the creation of props that we used.

            I was really interested in the idea of devised theater because it was new to me as an English major. I love that we had the opportunity to do interviews and then take inspiration from them to create and incorporate them into a theater piece. I think that this is something that I would enjoy doing with my students. It would be an interesting project from them to interview or examine media that contributes to a specific topic or idea. It would then extend their learning even further to require them to incorporate some of these ideas into a piece of theater or performance. In English, the performance itself wouldn’t necessarily be a demonstration of an understanding of theater, but it would provide students with an opportunity to share their learning with other students.

            Overall this was a performance that I really enjoyed working on and I feel like I learned a whole lot. It was especially informative to be able to work with my classmates who have more experience in theater than I do and more experience in devising a performative work. It gave me a new perspective on the type of creative work that I can have my students do in the classroom. 

Game for Change

Play my Game!

Artist/Teach Statement: This game encourages people to engage with the multitude of difficulties that are associated with illiteracy in the United States. Players are forced to make decisions that many people are faced with on a daily basis that are all connected with their inability to read. The information provided in the game are focused on many of the statistics that help us understand how many people this truly affects in our nation. The Twine story creator seemed an appropriate medium for me to present these choices that people have. I managed to learn a little bit of coding in order to switch up the appearance a little so that I wasn't restricted to the usual fonts and colors created by Twine. As an English teacher, literacy is something that I am really passionate about and I hope that I'll be able to make a difference in the lives of my students so that they don't become one of these statistics.

Sources:

http://literacyprojectfoundation.org/community/statistics/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

https://www.creditdonkey.com/illiteracy-in-america.html

http://www.positivetomorrows.org/ending-homelessness/homeless-cycle-statistics/

https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/futurework/conference/nalsfina/nalsfina.htm

Round Robin

Artist/Teacher Statement: This was a really fun project because it required people to make inferences about what had happened in the previous parts of the story. There was creativity involved as well because we wanted to make the stories interesting and the narrative had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Students would have a fun time doing some creative writing for this or attempting to make a new ending to a story.

Textual Poaching

War Never Changes

Can you spot the difference?

I never in my life thought that I would marry a soldier. I never pictured any part of that as my future life. But then I met Alex, fell in love, and his lifestyle was just another piece of him that I had to accept as part of the whole package. I have never regretted my choice since then but the culture of being an Army wife has become an enormous part of my daily life. I look around at the other Army wives I know and we are such a unique culture because we band together and we support our husbands in a lifestyle that can be so difficult sometimes. I started thinking about how the things that we deal with are the exact same circumstances wives have dealt with for over a hundred years now. I began searching for images that represented the moments that we are most keenly aware of as Army wives...departures, deployments, homecomings, and death. Recently, we received news that my husband is being deployed this year and all of these things point to the fact that war never changes and that is my new reality.

Artist/Teach statement: Above I have pointed out the many correlations between the past images of Army wives and the pictures of my husband and I mixed with images of other current Army families experiencing many of the same life events. We know that the wars that they fight may be with different countries, may be in different places, but they always seem to boil down to the same things and mean the same problems for Army families. I feel that juxtaposing these images makes similarities and differences very clear to those who look. 

This activity could be very beneficial for students in any content area. For an English classroom specifically, students could take a passage of book, poem, or even a film adaptation of literature, and isolate an element of the work that they identify with. Then they can attempt to create a new work of art in response to what they have found. This would give students a way to respond to the literature that we are exploring and make it their own. This will help them build analytical skills for future use. 

Process Piece

Artist/Teacher Statement: For my Process Piece, I chose to take pictures to document the act of human labor and then compile them into a video. This form is slightly different from other videos in that it is made up of individual photos. There is also no sound for this silent video. Each photo represents the individual steps that make up the process of folding the laundry. I began with a very large pile of clean laundry and then ended with it nicely folded in a pile. This is a weekly job for me and felt like a perfect human process to document. The process itself took probably 15-20 minutes but the documented result is just around a minute.

Medium Specificity

Trust Me Poem

Artist Teacher Statement:
In recording my poem, I hoped to explore the unique aspects of audio recordings as a medium. Poetry especially makes for an interesting exploration of specific affordances and limitations of audio recordings. Audio recordings of poetry can be even more expressive than a simple text, especially in the voice of the author because each person would read the text differently and emphasize different portions. This is one of the affordances of audio recordings. However, one of the limitations of audio is that it lacks the visual stimulation of a video. You cannot see what the author looks like or their facial expressions as they read. It is also limited because you cannot view the poem all at once visually like you can a physical representation or picture of the poem. Poetry has always been celebrated visually in form and layout, but people have also created poetry readings, slams, and sharing writing aloud. I felt that it was fitting therefore to represent the auditory element of a poetry reading. Being the creator of this specific poem also lends interesting knowledge as you hear the reading of the poem that wouldn't be known otherwise.

"Ode to an Orange"

After reading Larry Woiwode's "Ode to an Orange," I felt inspired to create a simple collage as my own Ode to an Orange. I used multiple types of paper, mediums, and sought to create a whimsical piece of art that fit the mood and theme of the original short story. I posted this creation, as well as a few lines that particularly spoke to me, on my Instagram account.

A creation by me, inspired by Larry Woiwode's "Ode to an Orange." "There is no proper way to eat an orange...And no matter how carefully you eat one, or bite into a quarter, juice can always fly or slip from a corner of your mouth; this happens to everyone." #odetoanorange #oranges #shortstory

A photo posted by Leah Day Smith (@flowerlkd) on Jan 22, 2017 at 3:21pm PST

This type of project is definitely something that I hope to introduce in my future English classroom. Taking one text and creating a personal adaptation of it is a skill that will be useful to any students who seeks to better understand literature and other texts. I picture myself creating an assignment where students must create their own adaptation (I feel that freedom of expression in this aspect of the project is key to keeping the attention of the students). The largest learning experience, I feel, would come from the sharing of their creations through social media. Not only would they have the opportunity to share their learning with members of their class and share comments about the different adaptations, but they'd also be interacting with people in their online social circles--family, friends, and peers. This helps them to recognize that the knowledge that they gain in their classrooms can and should be shared with others and not just in a reiterative way but in a creative, interpretative way. I'd try to make sure they included literary elements in their adaptations such as theme, characters, symbols, etc so they could demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the text. The social media aspect would need to include hashtags in order to link up with others sharing the similar ideas or other students sharing their work. Adding an edge of competition wouldn't hurt if they were encouraged to share their work online with more people by awarding a prize to whoever had the most likes or shares!