Day 6

Today I continued to mull over the performance aspect of the writing classroom.  The tableaux this morning was truly awesome.  I loved how we each performed our own thing but were inspired by others and were connected to them physically, through touch.  We had some parameters, but otherwise, it was mainly open to our interpretation of the word Lacy gave us.

The weight of assessment was really heavy as we performed our tableaux.  I know I was concerned about how to assess, and the idea of being assessed weighed heavily on me as we started to work on our portfolio yesterday.  We composed this picture of what assessment looked like to each of us individually, but also corporately, and I could feel the energy in the room.

Again, the performative quality of the writing comes through and the performative quality of teaching shines.  There is so much we have to perform each day and there is power in the choices that we make as teachers, writers, and performers.

Also, I'm very excited about our collaborative final portfolio.  I am really connected to the idea that we each get to write our individual reflection, detailing the specific ways we feel as though we have grown in our writerly identities.  But also, I love the idea that people could talk back to us about our reflections and just about our journeys together.  I could imagine that on this corporate website, we each have a page labeled with our name in a menu on the side.  Each page would then have two parts:  My reflection about me and then everyone's response to the learning that this person has been a part of with them.  For instance on my page, I'm envisioning a "Carrie about Carrie" page and then a section entitled "SIers talk back/about Carrie."  We could also have pages for the different sections ("analytical thinker" "questioners" etc) which we could post under and respond to each other.  Make sense?

The Page of the Stage

So, as my inquiry is developing over these two weeks, I'm thinking more and more about the links between theater performance and writing instruction.  So much of what we do in school is a performance--we are performing for grades, for teachers, for parents, etc.  This was part of my reaction yesterday whenever we started talking about our portfolios.  Though I know it's an attitude of positive excitement here, it still feels like school, and school can be scary.

I am wondering about the performativity of the classroom and the way this links with theater.  Many of the warm-ups that we have been doing this week are very similar to improv theater games.  In theater you use your body and your mind to interpret and create a story, and I have been enjoying how we have been doing the same in our SI.

Both theater and writing are creative acts. You write from yourself, writing yourself into being, constructing an identity.  From theater you create this character, who, in some way, is partly you.  The character can be as different from you as night and day, but you are pulling from your life experiences and the people you know, so you are writing another part of your life/story through that character.  You're writing selves.

A major portion of the construction on stage has to do with it's performative nature.  Think about all the different inflections of voice.  With the theater, you have lines written for you, but how you interpret them is very different.  For instance, we do a theater activity where we are given a simple sentence.  Then we ask students to accent the words differently each time they read it and to examine the different meanings.  Like as follows:

I didn't say that you said that. (But Sarah said you did)
I didn't say that you said that. (I really didn't!)
I didn't say that you said that. (But I thought it!)
I didn't say that you said that. (I said something else)
I didn't say that you said that. (I said that Rachel said it)
I didn't say that you said that. (But I think you were thinking it)
I didn't say that you said that.  (I said that you said this)

Each of these variations obviously has different meanings (some of which I interpreted after the sentence).  Much is also made of how the body is used to present the information as well.  Body language is a huge part of theater.

I'm also thinking about the parameters placed on both. With writing in school, we often have a prompt or a form that we're supposed to write in.  On stage there's a script that you're constrained by.  However, in both writing and theater, there's license for interpretation.  Writers construct their lives and their worlds through their writing on the stage.  Teacher and director both oversee what is going on and help to define the parameters of the show/piece.

Just a few connections I'm drawing.