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Hunting Seamonsters, Push-ups and the Training Montage

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June 5, 2014
Conferences, Fishscale, Workshops
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At this week’s HEA Arts and Humanities conference, I was able to present an update of the fishscale research. The title of the 90 minute session was ‘Hunting Seamonsters – how to bust the ghosts of academic practice’, a nod to both the conference theme (Heroes and Monsters) and the strand (Ghosts) the abstract had been submitted to.

It was conceived as a ‘training montage from an 80s movie’ (a format suggested by the conference organisers), and this post is about this format rather than the content of the session. (The content was about the Fishscale of Academicness, if you want to know more about that, check the dedicated page on this blog.)

I love the idea of thinking about a presentation or a workshop in terms of a movie. I’ve been doing something similar with my students when talking about framing and structuring their writing, but I hadn’t quite realised this is also what I do when I plan my presenting. When doing my Post-graduate Certificate in Higher and Professional Education, we were told to vary the activities in a session every so often to keep the attention of students. And we were encouraged to plan our sessions in certain blocks, breaking down the different delivery methods and student activities. This was recorded (and planned) on a form, so basically a list. But there is no reason why it shouldn’t be a storyboard.

When putting together the abstract for this conference, the format of the training montage was incredibly helpful. I co-wrote this with a colleague from our School of Education and we wanted to bring in different perspectives of the Fishscale – the initial inspirations, the problem, the context, what other people are doing about this, the fishscale concept itself, the different activities for the students to consolidate the learning, the feedback from students, the feedback from other staff, an analysis of how the fishscale is working, and an idea of the research we are in the process of doing in order to evaluate whether it is actually working. This is a lot of stuff, even if you have 90 minutes to do it. Having the training montage in our heads, it became much clearer that we need to think not about all the content we have (or could have), but about editing it together. This was not going to be a documentary on one specific process, it was about selecting one important image/issue that could represent an area (and I have done a number of presentations that look at just one aspect of the fishscale). We are not shown every push-up that Rocky makes to get in shape, after all.

So in a way, we started planning with the cuts. We wanted a clear change every time we altered the perspective, and we ended up with six sections, alternately delivered, each time also swopping the delivery method – ranging from powerpoint presentation, to prezi, from group activities to discussion with the whole group.

Thinking about this planning as a training montage meant that my thoughts shifted from all the stuff I could have put in to just the most important things: what would give a flavour of this data? what do people need to know about in order to understand the fishscale? – How many push-ups do we need to get a sense that push-ups are being made regularly? How much can you reduce information to convey push-up-ness?

This is not a big shift from planning a session as a list, but I have found that story-boarding mentally can really help to condense and refine your content to make the most impact it can. So I will in future be conceptualising my session planning more as two parallel storyboards – one narrative of what I do as a presenter, and one with what I task my audience to do.

 

P.S.: while the Hunting Seamonster session went well, it had to be replanned last minute because Katy was ill and couldn’t do ‘her’ scenes. But while not all of the ‘cuts’ were as pronounced as they could have been, with me delivering most of them myself (I had another colleague standing in for some bits, but there wasn’t sufficient time for a full brief of everything), the integrity of the montage stayed intact, and this was a very different session than if I had planned it for myself without thinking about the visual of the training montage.

Journeys in Visual Learning

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May 20, 2014
Workshops
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On Thursday, 26th June 2014, the East Midlands Writing-PAD centre will be launched with a one day workshop titled ‘Journeys in Visual Learning’. This event will take place at Kimberlin Library, De Montford University in Leicester between 10.30 and 16.00.
For more information please email Christine Boulter (cmb[at]dmu.ac.uk)

 

East Midlands Writing PAD Centre launch: Journeys in visual learning
Thursday 26th June 2014
Kimberlin Library, De Montfort University, Leicester
Julia Reeve and Kaye Towlson

‘Journeys in visual learning’ offers Academics, Librarians and Learning Developers an opportunity to share experiences and practice in visual & kinaesthetic learning techniques. With the launch of our new East Midlands Writing PAD Centre we also seek to establish local & regional links with other HE institutions. The day will showcase creative and radical approaches to learning and teaching at DMU and elsewhere. Delegates will be encouraged through discussion and activities to reflect upon their own ‘visual learning journeys’ to the day and beyond.

The event offers the chance to:
• Experience visual and kinaesthetic learning techniques
• Hear about the student response and experience of such techniques
• Consider the theoretical underpinning to this type of learning
• Explore visual journeys in a number of contexts
• Take part in group work to encourage putting these methods into practice
• Network across disciplines, professions and institutions.

10:30 – 10:50: Registration and creative activity: Start the day with coffee and a look at displays of techniques plus resources

10:50 – 11:20: Creative activity: mapping your journey using a range of media

11:20-12:00: Our journey: Teacher Fellow research projects, Writing PAD and more: Kaye Towlson, Academic Librarian, DMU (Information Literacy) and Julia Reeve, Senior Lecturer, Contextual Studies for Fashion & East Midlands Writing PAD contact, DMU

12:00-12:40: Navigating the Essay: Making Writing Multi-sensory: Jackie Hatfield, Tina Horsman & Jacqueline Szumko, Specialist Tutors for Students with Specific Learning Differences, Loughborough University

12: 40-1:30: Lunch: in Learning Development Zone, Kimberlin

13:30 -14:10: Contextualised performance with collage: Simon Perril, Subject Leader for Creative Writing, DMU

14:30 – 15:00: Group work: your future visual learning journey – mapping practice, ideas, and experiences

15:00 – 15:20: Group visual learning journey tour and tea

15:20 – 15:45: Group feedback

15:45 – 16:00: Close

Interested? Please book your free place by e-mailing Christine Boulter cmb@dmu.ac.uk giving your name, job title and institution

If you require a parking space on the day, please book one through Christine Boulter (cmb@dmu.ac.uk). Please note parking is limited. DMU is a 10 minute walk from Leicester train station and approximately 15 minutes from Leicester bus station.

Modular Form: Writing in Creative Practice

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February 13, 2014
stuff to check out, Workshops
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Here the details of a workshop some of you might be interested in:

Date: Friday, March 14, 2014, from 10 am to 5 pm

Where: Grove House on the main campus of Roehampton University, London

What: A HEA discipline workshop series focussing on MODULAR FORM: WRITING IN CREATIVE PRACTICE

Focus: ReWrite, the Centre for Research in Creative and Professional Writing at Roehampton University, in conjunction with Writing-PAD and partly funded by the HEA are delighted to hold a one-day symposium on the subject of “modular form.” We have invited practitioners from a diverse range of fields, including digital writing, performance art, curatorial studies, poetry, music, and psychoanalysis, to discuss the deployment of short and/or minimal units of text.

Who is it for and what will attendees get from the day: The event will be of interest to creative writers, post-graduate students, and academics in literary and art-based subjects, and it will provide a forum for the discussion of recent multi- and inter-disciplinary developments in creative writing practice and theory.

Programme: CONTRIBUTORS AND TEXTS (session times TBC)
•J.R. Carpenter, “Seven Short Talks About Islands …And By Islands I Mean Paragraphs.” J.R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, writer, researcher, performer and maker of maps, zines, books, poetry, short fiction, long fiction, non-fiction, and non-linear, intertextual, hypermedia, and computer-generated narratives. She lives in South Devon, England. http://luckysoap.com<http://luckysoap.com/>
•Vincent Dachy, “Free Associations! Or Weaving with the Wind.” Vincent Dachy acts as the spokesperson of VDcollective (www.vdcollective.com<http://www.vdcollective.com/>), a front for Discreet Ventures in art DIY. He also practices and teaches Lacanian psychoanalysis in London.
•James Davies, “Minimalism and Modularity.” James Davies is the author of Plants (Reality Street) and, with Simon Taylor under the moniker Joy as Tiresome Vandalism, Absolute Elsewhere (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press). In 2008 he co-founded The Other Room poetry series in Manchester with Tom Jenks and Scott Thurston. Also in 2008, he set up his poetry press if p then q. He is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Roehampton with a particular focus on minimalist poetry.
•Rupert Loydell and Kingsley Marshall, “CONTROL & SURRENDER. Eno Remixed: Collaboration & Oblique Strategies.” Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Falmouth University. He is particularly interested in process and collaborative writing, and has several books of collaborative poems and poem-sequences in print, as well as volumes of his own solo writing such as his recent volume Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011), Encouraging Signs, a book of interviews and essays (Shearsman 2013) and Ballads of the Alone, a series of poem sequences about specific photographers, seeing, language and being. Kingsley Marshall is the Head of Film & Television at Falmouth University. His academic research primarily orientates around the use of sound (including music and effects) in film, and the cinematic representation of the real, including historical figures and events. He has contributed to two books that consider the representation of US presidents in cinema, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. As a musician, he has recently begun work on the sound design and score for a poetic documentary. Together with Rupert Loydell, he has recently written about collaboration, chance and the Oblique Strategies for Brian Eno: Oblique Music, due for publication through Continuum in 2014.
•Kaja Marczewska, “Modular form as a Curatorial Practice.” Kaja Marczewska is in the final stages of her PhD (hoping to submit in June 2014) at the Department of English at Durham University. Her research, and publications to date, focus on notions of authorship, originality and creativity as influenced by the contemporary digital culture and contemporary modes of information dissemination. Her work is situated at the intersection of cultural theory, avant-garde poetics and aesthetic, and intellectual property law.
•Nathan Walker, “Six Words Short: Textual Instruction Events.” Nathan Walker is an artist, curator and writer. His work and research investigates writing and speaking in performance. He is interested in digital, conceptual and durational writing practices. His artworks exist as live performances, bookworks, online projects, sound poetry and video. He has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, and he is co-director of the performance art organisation OUI Performance.  He is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance at York St John University.

Booking Details: The symposium is free but places are limited, so please book early to avoid disappointment. The event includes a catered lunch. To book a place, please contact Julia Noyes julia.noyce@roehampton.ac.uk

Contact Details: Dr. Peter Jaeger, Director of ReWrite, the Centre for Research in Creative and Professional Writing
p.jaeger@roehampton.ac.uk

Wanted: Academic Mantras

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January 23, 2014
DIYSabbatical, Workshops
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I am currently on research leave taking the Tactile Academia approach to the United States. At the moment I am artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA), where I am team-teaching some classes, and also am doing some professional development for staff. (And I will blog about more details when I have the time, though realistically it might take me until February, when I am back in the UK for a bit.)

Today’s session with staff was built around the idea of the Mantra Card, which Melanie Mowinski, a colleague from MCLA ,often does in the letterpress studio that is part of a teaching and community project she leads. (She even put together a 2014 calendar with monthly mantras, check it out here.)

Melanie recently put together a workshop making academic mantra cards for the Design Principles and Practices conference in Vancouver in January, which I had agreed to help facilitate, although that didn’t actually work out as my own workshop on the Fishscale was scheduled at the same time. As it had been very successful we decided to do this with the folks at MCLA.

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Academic Mantra cards produced at MCLA faculty workshop

In a nutshell an academic mantra is a short saying that you a) say to yourself all the time, b) tell your students all the time, c) is the advice you would give to other academics or d) is an inspirational quote you want to be reminded of. In the workshops we work with packing tape transfers (a really nifty and easy way of getting images from a photocopy to your own card) and hand lettering, and people get the opportunity to play around with stock images and the layout.

And as it was so much fun, we decided that developing this idea further might be a good project for me to fulfill the idea of an artist residency, which comes with an exhibition at the end (while I am only in Massachusetts until the end of January, I will be returning in May to catch up with staff and students, and for said exhibition, of course).

So while I/we will typeset the academic mantras we made this evening, we thought it would also be an idea to collect some more, which we will either make into letterpressed/printed cards or just display around the gallery. They will, of course, be referenced to whoever submits them, if appropriate.

So please, send me your academic mantras, by either commenting on this post or tweeting them #AcademicMantras to me (@alkegw).

Here are some we already have (I will update this list with the new suggestions as they come in):

  • No matter how obvious you think something is, to students it is probably anything but.
  • If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
  • The creative act is not performed by the artist alone (Marcel Duchamp)
  • Try being a student yourself at least once every two years.
  • Deciding how you write is like dressing for the occasion.
  • I can’t answer that for you. Only you can answer that.
  • Good craft like good grammar should be invisible.
  • Always, always, always read your work aloud.
  • Proof read, proof read, proof read!
  • Take time to admire your work.
  • Practice takes practice.
  • Show! Don’t Tell! (submitted by Darren Raven)
  • Show me the evidence!
  • Remember to breath.
  • There’s always a way.
  • I don’t know, try it.
  • Consider craft.
  • YOU can do it.
  • Believe.
  • You can’t create and analyse at the same time.
  • Write now, edit later.
  • Sometimes it is better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.
  • There is a vitality a life force an energy a quickening that is translated through you into action (submitted by Lisa Donovan)
  • Translate – uebersetzen (submitted by Lisa Donovan)
  • We don’t see what we don’t know the names of (submitted by Ben Jacques)
  • the slower you travel, the further you go (submitted by Ben Jacques)
  • Here are two things: (submitted by Michael Dilthey)
  • Legitimate Needs – Deepest Desires – Unique Talents  –  Faith (submitted by Michael Dilthey)
  • Fortune favours the brave (submitted by Susan Ryland)
  • Just do it! (submitted by Sue Challis)
  • Do things for the goodness of your artistic soul (Alex Pacheco)
  • If you have a dream, it might hide a treasure (Luis Mundo)
  • This point needs unpicking further (submitted by Katy Vigurs)
  • Quotations don’t speak for themselves, tell reader what’s significant & why relevant (submitted by Katy Vigurs)
  • Don’t assume a sweeping generalisation is shared by anyone except yourself… (submitted by Louise H Jackson)
  • Once you accept referencing as part of the research process, and make it systematic, it becomes much easier (submitted by Louise H Jackson)
  • Researching Learning & Teaching is Research with a big R, whatever your specialism (submitted by Louise H Jackson)
  • Process work doesn’t get you extra credit. And it shouldn’t.
  • As wonderful as it might be, you’re not here to do what somebody else has already done (Louise H Jackson, as reminded by @RichStubbs89)
  • Learn about the apostrophe or avoid using it (Russel Spink)
  • Writing is the placeholder of thinking (Caroline Cash)
  • Ask Forgiveness, now Permission (submitted by Clare Aitken aka @LibClare)
  • make friends with the gatekeepers
  • Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. (Chuck Close)
  • The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you. (B.B. King)
  • Stop waiting for inspiration (and just write!) (submitted by Meagan Kittle-Autry aka @makautry)
  • Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. (Chinese proverb)
  • Words are loaded pistols. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
  • The best artworks create artists. (James Wallbank)
  • Simplicity is just infinite complexity presented well. (Tim Klapdor aka @timklapdor)
  • Diagrams and quotations do not speak for themselves! (Katy Vigurs)
  • You don’t teach a subject, you teach people!
  • You have failed only when you fail to try
  • Problems: a word often used for opportunities to invent creative solutions or learn more. (Deborah Chandler)
  • Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with the box. (Twyla Tharp)
  • Art can’t be taught, it can only be practised and developed. (Anita, TiPP)
  • Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. (Isaac Asimov)
  • If we mistake ‘unthinkable’ with ‘impossible’ we reduce our options. Just thinking beyond the possible is miraculous. (@metadesigners)
  • Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. (Robert Frost)
  • Patience is also a form of action (Auguste Rodin)
  • Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly. (Alain de Botton)
  • Everything stinks till it’s finished (Dr Seuss)
  • Know the rules so you can break them effectively (Dalai Lama XIV)

You can’t waste time, you can only use it.
Be fascinated by it more than you are frustrated by it.
When ego is lost, limit is lost.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. (Submitted by Jennie Malbon)
Time is inner space. Space is outer time. (Novalis)
There are no facts, only interpretations (Nietzsche)
Your mind is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit. (Rabelais)
You may choose to live in a dream, face reality, or turn one into the other. (Erasmus)
Any straight line is an arc in an infinite circle. (De Cusa)
If you want to truly understand something, try to change it. (Kurt Lewin)
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. ( Maya Angelou)
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. (Erich Fromm)

no drinks beyond the treeline

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December 22, 2013
stuff to check out, Workshops
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Last week I was lucky enought to attend the Happenings & Knowledge Promenades: working cross discipline workshop at the Arts University Bournemouth. It had been promised that the workshop would explore “the value and potential of cross discipline collaborative activities and the dynamism of the Happening and the ‘knowledge promenade’ in learning and teaching”, and it really delivered.

The graphics studio, which was to be our base for the day’s activities, had been overtaken with a large labyrinth on a floor cloth augmented with little electronic tea lights, and we were invited to walk this art work at any time of the day – as long as we didn’t take our beverages further than the christmas tree branches playfully demarking its outer edge (no drinks beyond the treeline).

image

The Labyrinth in the Graphics Studio (and Kirsten in the background)

Hosted by Kirsten Hardie it was introduced by short Pecha Kucha presentations to set us up for a day that was built around four sessions, which explored different aspects of disruption of the traditional methods and spaces of teaching. And while each of the examples was based in a particular discipline, great care and attention was taken to get us participants started to think about the cross disciplinary potential of what we were experiencing.

The order in which I ended up doing the sessions led me from the contemplative to the disruptive, which turned out to be just right for the day.

I started with Labyrinth making and walking facilitated by Jan Sellers. Here we learnt to draw some basic ‘classic’ labyrinth ourselves and thought about the meditative qualities that even the drawing has. We then ventured outside to do a collaborative one with chalk, which we then ran (we didn’t have the time to walk it, and actually that little run was absolutely hilarious). Jan gave us some more reading materials and resources to take home, for example the link for the Labyrinth Society and the Labyrinth Locator

image

Starting the Seed Pattern for our outdoor labyrinth

I then joined Becoming through Music facilitated by Laura Ritchie, where each of the participants found themselves with a cello in one hand and a bow in the other (yes, an actual cello), learning to plug and then play some simple notes. (Note the mnemonic: Active Dreams Give Courage to remember which string is which). In the end I could play an almost recognisable rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Litte Star. But of course the important aspect of the session was to reflect on what it is like to be a learner yourself (something every teacher should be reminded of every once in a while), how sometimes ‘giving it a go’ can be both scary and exhilirating, and how important non-verbal communication can be (we also did some cello playing as a group).

After lunch I joined in Clive Holtham’s session on the Knowledge Promenade – walking and recording, where we explored ‘learning by walking about’ (or the dérive, to give it a more academic sounding term). Again we learned about this more by doing, exploring the campus as small groups who had lost their memories about all knowledge of the nature and workings of a university, trying to make sense of this alien environment. The narrative our group came up with was an intriguing conspiracy of some sort of institution obsessed with the colour red, trying to indoctrinate us (it did make sense in the moment). Again, Clive shared some resources with us to allow us to find out more about this intriguing method of exploration and above all noticing. (In that way quite close to the long short walk I experienced at the HEA conference in Brighton in May.)

My last session of the day was Happening with Gordon Ramsey. Here we shared in groups things we had already done that could be considered disruptive – productively surprising students and introducing a new energy into traditional lecture and seminar settings. When he first briefed this, I though to myself: I haven’t done any of that!, but surprisingly once I started thinking about it, I could come up with a short-ish list… some of the stuff already documented on this blog. We then went on to consider what task we could set students that would be so memorable that they would never forget it – and again there were some interesting ideas thrown about.

Unfortunately the day was over all too soon (as these events so often are). What was particularly valuable was that it allowed an insight into practices from a wide range of disciplines, all of which with the potential to be built into other disciplines (most obvious with Clive’s session, where he also shared how this has already spread from management to health). It was a memorable day that provided food for thought for a long time to come!

Brick Walls, Post-its and a Sprinkling of Seasalt

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July 24, 2013
Workshops
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As already mentioned (and with Susan posting her experience of it recently), after the Making Writing workshop, Pat, Nancy and myself stayed on in Falmouth for a weekend writing retreat. I was especially interested in seeing whether the approach of writing warm-ups and visualisations could be combined with some focused structuring and writing activities in order to produce writing for ourselves – and the gorgeous Cornwall seemed to be just the right place! (So a thank you to Pedare and especially Caroline Cash for hosting us.)

D:DCIM100DICAMDSCI0493.JPGAlthough some of us had been there for the Friday as well, we started off with (re-)making name tags, really an excuse to see what materials were available to use. I thought it would be very important to have a sort-of ‘break out’ space with making materials in case we would be stuck in our writing endeavours and needed what Gauntlett calls the ‘longer stretch of thoughtfulness’.

Then Pat started us off with a writing warm-up to loosen up our creative juices. I then led an exercise in objective setting – thinking about where you are, want to be, what you want to work on and what the specific objective for the weekend was. I suggested using fish as a visualisation (yes, I feel the time has come where I have been working on the fishscale for too long!), but as always with these things there are no wrong ways of doing this. So when we shared what people had come hoping to achieve, we heard about the full backpack that had accumulated throughout the year and now needed to be unpacked, aired, washed and lightened; the experiences that needed to be put into an academic framework; and the reports that simply need to be written up in order to be able to close the door and focus on the light at the end of the tunnel – and many more. It became quite clear that our initial plans for structuring the weekend would be useless as attendees were at very different stages in their planning/writing, so Nancy, Pat and myself, set everybody a little task to crystalise what they were doing (mainly based around abstracts – writing one for the people who hadn’t done one yet and extending or editing it for the people who had), while we went off to formulate a new game plan.

In the end we split up the larger group into three smaller groups depending on the stages that needed to be tackled: Nancy worked with the people who were already very far in their research and mainly needed to make a decision on the audience for their writing piece(s), Pat worked with the people who were trying to fit experiences (their own and others) into an academic framework and I myself worked with the people who needed to develop a clearer focus – and that Pat’s group ended up with only people whose first name began with a P was purely coincidental!

We came together at different points over the two days to share progress and to break up the tasks – while still keeping large chunks of time in which people could work on their own pieces, either with us in one-on-ones or on their own, dotted around the campus.

It became quite clear that the humble sticky note and large wall space are some of the best tools an academic writer has at her disposal as thoughts were sketched and written, stuck and re-stuck, and linked with arrows all over the place.

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evening in Mylor

As it is important to see writing not just as a solitary activity, but also to appreciate the social aspects, there was some shared time away from the keyboard. On Saturday night we went on a little excursion, taking the train to Falmouth and then the water taxi to Mylor where we had a lovely meal followed by delicious ice cream.

On Sunday we started with another writing warm-up, where Pat got us to draw the journey of the day before, reflecting on our progress, and then draw the shape of our writing project. This was an ideal way to think about (and share with the group) what we had achieved so far, and gave a great starting point as to focusing on goal setting for the second day. In order to explore focus, Pat also did an exercise based on the image of a brick wall (with paper that had little brick walls on it, apparently wrapping paper she had found somewhere!): we were first invited to summarise the paper we were working on in two sentences… then one… then three words… then only one. I found this an incredibly useful exercise (and very hard), which really helps you to focus (and possibly question the focus you thought you had already sorted out!). Thus prepped we were ready for our second day of intense writing, broken up only by food and a little excursion to the Seasalt outlet shop, which is but a short walk away (and really it would have been rude not to go and support the cornish economy…)

Overall it was a very enjoyable weekend. And it also seemed quite productive. while I myself didn’t get much work done on my own writing, that probably would have been too much to ask for, as I was busy facilitating, but from my chats with the others it seems like a lot of progress has been made, and I think that the mix of focused time for work and creative loosening up and sharing activities was just right. All the retreaters have been invited as authors onto this blog, so hopefully we will get to read some updates on their work in due course!

 

My beach hut experience

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July 23, 2013
Workshops
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swanpool_beach_huts_cropped
Swanpool beach huts, Falmouth, Cornwall

NancysShed
‘Shed’ as metaphor for the draft article/paper (courtesy Nancy de Freitas)

Coastline_smll_IMAG0811
Coastline view from Pendennis Castle peninsula, Cornwall

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Concertina sketch books and reflective mind-map (Susan Ryland)

NancydeFreitas
Professor Nancy de Freitas, AUT University, New Zealand / Editor-in-Chief: Studies in Material Thinking international journal.

During the Falmouth Writing Retreat (12th – 14th July 2013) I had the privilege of working with Nancy de Freitas, whose enthusiasm and wealth of experience was inspirational.

My task for the weekend was to plan an article, titled: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Art, for a new international Journal of Cognitive Humanities. I had already written an abstract based on my presentation at the inaugural Cognitive Futures of the Humanities conference at Bangor University (UK) in April this year. The first task Nancy and I tackled was turning my abstract into a ‘working abstract’ that would provide a structure for my journal article. We spent time discussing what the central focus of the article would be. This was like running a magnifying glass over the material and choosing which area to enlarge and which parts to retain as background information. The process helped me see how I could shift my focus for different audiences. I liked Nancy’s idea of using ‘signals and signposts’ to provide a guiding structure for the article, such as images/diagrams, keywords, titles and subtitles. It was reassuring to know that it was ‘okay’ to use this approach and made me realised that I was still inhibited by the notion that there was a ‘right way’ to do academic writing.

For me, as a predominantly visual thinker (trained in Fine Art Painting/Printmaking) I find images seem to tap into my subconscious. So, as I was reflecting on the weekend’s events I saw connections between my concertina sketchbooks, Nancy’s metaphor of the cobbled-together ‘shed ’ of an article (the stage when you can invite others to comment on your draft version), and Alke’s metaphor of the academic ‘ocean’. As I stood on the jagged Cornish coastline at Pendennis castle, the pitched roofs of Swanpool beach huts came to mind, and I wondered if the Falmouth experience was about building a ‘beach hut’ (as a variation on the ‘shed’ idea) – a temporary shelter, a place where you can keep your essentials (but not your whole thesis!) and a place where you can look out over the (academic) ocean. The ‘beach hut’ article gets you ‘out there’ in the public domain but not overly exposed to extreme weather events (it’s just an article, not a book!).

So, while metaphorically sitting in my beach hut I can view the (academic) ocean, reflect on my research and art practice and do a bit of snack writing. Perfect!

Susan Ryland (University for the Creative Arts)

The Shed, the Grid and the Patchwork – Making Writing

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July 18, 2013
Workshops
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After our December workshops had gone down quite well, Falmouth University invited Pat and myself back to this time put together a whole day as part of the Writing in Creative Practice series – Making Writing.

We started off with making name tags in order to explore the materials available for reflective bookmaking – and I don’t think we ever had as many feathers to use before!

Pat then started us off with an extended Writing Warm-up, which we used to explore writing on different textures ending up with writing about both objects and photographs. Again, a very rich experience to loosen us up (we didn’t really need to warm up as the weather was absolutely fantastic!).

Nancy de Freitas then shared her expertise of coming to writing from a material studies background, talking about Writing and Materiality (Falmouth_workshop2) – starting us off with blue sky thinking, introducing the importance of having a working abstract when doing any sort of research project, the usefulness of questions to prompt where you are going, the utilisation of images in both abstract ‘writing’ and planning structure as well as the differences between personal and academic writing (yes, there should be one!).

What I particularly loved was her use of the image of a shed to illustrate what a working draft of a piece of writing is like – yes, it might feel cobbled together (and the shed on the image she showed us really was…), but the important thing is that it is holding together! in a way this is the point when writing goes from a solitary to a social activity – now you can show it to somebody else, because it has enough structure to make sense. And from now on it can be worked on, carefully turning the precarious shed into a house with foundations, a solid structure, a roof that doesn’t leak, maybe even a conservatory… No, she didn’t actually mention conservatories, that is just what I was thinking, she did however go on to talk about the importance of editing as a social practice, because writing should work for the ‘other person’ – the reader! (An important fact that my students often don’t seem to be aware of.)

Nancy also shared some interesting thoughts on active documentation, and how that can be used to get students to think about structure and editing.

After lunch Oliver West took over sharing with us his journey of how he developed the Footnotes project out of his own struggle with writing as a dyslexic student and then practcioner. This is based around taking notes on a simple folded grid – allowing visuals to be recorded, annotated and then reordered. And of course we got to have a go – and I saw Nancy’s shed make an appearance on not just my grid!

I ended the official program with a gallop through the visual anaolgies and metaphors I use in order to engage my students with writing and particularly academic practice. Using the ‘mini’ quilt’ developed for the recent School of Education conference as a starting point, I introduced the framing of Kolb’s Experiential Learning cycle and then really briefly talked about The Land- and Seascape of Creative Practice, The Butterfly Challenge, ways of using objects, reflective bookmaking and poetic inquiry, The Dress-up Doll of Formality, visualising introduction/main body and conclusion of an essay as stages in journy planning, The Fishscale of Academicness, The Button Connection and The Winning Hand of Independence. And while I am not convinced all of them made sense with only a few sentences to explain them, I believe the gist of it came across – and I had some interesting feedback at the end of the session.

We ended with a discussion round wondering whether approaches are different for practitioners and teachers, people who see themselves as more comfortable with words rather than images – and how we can make sure to cater for different learning styles of out students.

It was a fantastic day full of interesting sharing, and some fabulous reflective books were made that will hopefully inspire things to come – and I hope that we can do it again sometime. (And then we immediately did with a Writing Retreat the following two days, about which I will blog soon!)