The third make cycle from #clmooc 2015 asks a lot of us!  After being "offline" for a few days, I'm trying to catch up with all the possibilities and am a bit distracted by the games I can play while I ponder the games I could make. In the middle of this cycle, I'm thinking about a post I wrote during last year's #clmooc about "Playing Games" in my speech/drama classroom and am considering a report from the front about my favorite game, debate!

The Trip There is Beautiful: A "Make" for Make Cycle #2

Last summer, my husband and I took a trip through the American Southwest.  Over 17 days and 4,000 miles, we sampled some of the most beautiful, and most desolate, landscapes from El Paso to Santa Monica and back to our home here in northeast Oklahoma. There was never one destination in mind; we were on a road trip. Sure, we stopped and marveled at the snowy sand outside Alamogordo, paused to mark the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica, crossed Donner Pass in the middle of the night, found ourselves on America's loneliest road across Nevada.  But the journey itself was really what it was all about.

My make for this week was like that journey. I started out to build something, and I did...but the trip to get there was fraught with detours and notable sights.  I knew what I wanted the result to look like, but I didn't know what I wanted to say, and when I finally put it all together, I realized the process taught me something.

This week's invitation, Make Cycle #2: Re(media)te With Me, asked us to "consider how we communicate and interpret". I thought I'd take something static and turn it into video, showing the transition from the analog me to the digital me.

My planning page for this week's make.

Starting with the picture I used for my "un"troduction in Make Cycle #1, I realized the picture had already been (re)mediated.

The class picture from my kindergarten graduation many years ago had been scanned and cropped to reveal just my face. I took the resulting picture and used an online photo editing site to "Warhol"-ize it, then another to alter the exposure. So before I even started (re)mediating, I had (re)mediated.

Mind blown, I thought about how I wanted to make a video that showed a clearing focus, maybe with some television static and noise, until the final image was clear.  I used a variety of tools to try to mimic the rolling images from a TV just out of range of a decent signal (familiar from my childhood, practically unknown today).  The blog post about the cycle had some links to online video tools, and Stupeflix seemed easy to use, so I started there. The site allowed me to upload the pictures after I'd "glitched" them with the online glitch generator I'd learned about in make cycle #1.  

 

From the Image Glitch Experiment

I found some copyright-free television static footage and added that at the beginning and end.  Added music from the library on the website.  Watched. Rearranged, duplicated, watched. Watched.

I was happy with the video, but there weren't any words. Shouldn't there be words?

Detoured into an experiment with Sheri Edwards 6 word challenge, an experience I documented here. 

Found the words. The words I couldn't make work the way I wanted to in the challenge were the words that fit my make.

Went back, played with adding definitions, adjusting the timing, adding my words. Watched. Rearranged, deleted, watched. Watched.

Felt something.

I spend a lot of time telling the student actors I work with that the point of performing is to make someone feel something. Watching my video, I felt...something. The music was not the murmuring chorus of voices I'd first imagined, but it was unsettling in its own way.

I had to stop and reflect, so  I uploaded it to YouTube and shared it in the #clmooc Google+ community so I wouldn't mess around with it anymore.

And then I thought.  And what I thought was: I felt a deep sense of creative flow in making the video. I saw myself working on it the way I work on directing a play; I 'saw' something I wanted to create and then I set about creating it.  In the process, I learned from the missteps I took and got something better than I had. The images came before the words, but the images said something before I laid in the words.

Total communication.  I think of theater as total art. It brings together sound, movement, visual arts, and literature to communicate something we can't merely speak.  My make feels the same way to me.

Playing the "Oops" Card

Art Credit: Terry Elliott

One of the beautiful parts of #clmooc is the often overwhelming chances to connect with other people by creating with them. During the first make cycle, Sheri Edwards created a "make" and invited people to contribute.  In short, the challenge was to choose 6 words that could be arranged to read both horizontally and vertically.  Her challenge, and some beautiful responses to it, can be found at this link.

I am playing my "Oops!" card because while I tried to meet the challenge by coming up with six words and creating a slide to contribute, I failed, but I feel as though I'm still in the game.

Let me explain.

I started brainstorming about what matters to me as a teacher and director.  What do I want my students to achieve?  While I was thinking about it, I read Stephanie Loomis' great post about (re)mediating a photo of her hydrangeas.  Really, though, the post is about the educator and the garden of students in our classroom.  She inspired me. These are the six words I came up with:

Empower Agency

Encourage Presence

Enable Creativity

I think these six words express what I want to achieve in my classroom and in my student's performance: help them be masters of their own work and actions, help them "be here now" and focus on the task at hand, and offer them the chance to express themselves with words and performance.

Great. But in trying to make the six words read vertically, I came to a standstill.  The first three words are all verbs. That's not a sentence.  The second three are all nouns. Again, not a sentence.  I tinkered with synonyms and tenses. Not happy.  I'd looked at the work of others and was trying to make mine like theirs and, as a result, I was stymied.

I finally created a slide that read:

Encouraging Agency

Presence Enables

Empowers Creatives

Encouraging Presence Empowers

Agency Enables Creatives

Although I'm not happy with the first six words because they seem to lack the power of my original phrasing, I think the two sentences at the end express something powerful: encouraging students to be present empowers them, and giving them their own agency allows them to create.

The slide looked rather plain, so I looked around for some clip art to enhance it. I had a vision, but nothing I could find really expressed it. Finally, I saved the slide and decided to turn my attention to something else. This post.

I have not succeeded at the challenge I set out to complete.  But I did clearly express something that I had heretofore only vaguely thought. As a Lincoln-Douglas debate coach, I spend a lot of time talking with students about how the value we choose for debate case construction reflects how, in our own lives, we act on what we value, whether we speak those values aloud.  So I know that my actions in my speech/drama/debate classroom are based on those three beliefs. I just haven't put them so explicitly before.

One "oops" card played, one game still ongoing.