Catalogue of Critical Creativity Presentation

Creating with words (122-149)

Potent Quotables: The students are given a few different quotes (three is suggested) and given the tools on how to find Creative Commons Zero images online to enhance the quote.  They should be instructed in how to make an impact with their image composition. In a theatre classroom, we could use this activity for advertisement for student productions.  The students can select an impactful quote from the show and then an image to go with it.

Creating with images (153-177)

Two Images, One Question: Students use images to represent their research and then pose a question to encourage further inquiry. This could be used in character development.  The students could find two fair use images to describe their character of choice, and then a question to help find a deeper understanding or level of that character.

Creating with Sounds (181-206)

Soundtracking the Moment: Students create an alternative soundtrack for a film clip that transforms the tone, mood, and atmosphere of the film. Students need to be able to identify these elements in an example so they can intentionally use it in their own work. In a theatre classroom, this activity could be used in a play writing unit.  The teacher can select a clip, mute the original, and have students select different pieces of music to go with the clip, playing the clip multiple times to different types of music.  After a few viewings, the students then write a short story based off one of the film/sound combinations that had been used.

Creating with the Body (209-231)

Humojis: Students create their own emojis with pictures of themselves.  These images are then used in student responses and in analyzing text. In a theatre classroom, you can use these humojis to create a story.  It can be their own story, like for a play writing unit, or it can be to depict a play the class is reading, so a humoji for major parts of the play.

Creating with stuff (235-263)

Oreo Challenge: Create a visual representation of a concept from the course using any available materials and a single Oreo cookie. I liked the idea in the book about how you can use this activity as an advertisement for the class to other students or to the own parents.  I’d love to explore the idea of having the students create an image or 30-second video that advertises the class to their parents and depicts some of the favorite things they’ve learned thus far in the year.

Creating with Social Media (269-295)

One Word to Rule Them All: Distill something complex into a single word.  It would be useful to use this activity after reading a play or to figure out character objectives in a scene.  It’s effective because it simplifies both of these things down to a word that is powerful and understandable to the student.

Textual Poaching: An Identity Remix

I chose to make a commentary on the identity of motherhood. Above, you have the original painting that shows the classic view of motherhood.  There's a mother with six or seven kids, lovingly making dinner while the father is away.  The kids are well attended to, and it seems she's learned everything she can from her own mother who sits nearby. In the second image, there are a few more modern things. The mother is now expected to be educated, not have as many children, the kids need to be up to date with technology, the mother might not have time to make a fancy meal from scratch, but she should still provide some kind of dinner... She is still expected to be in the home, but she's also expected to help provide for the family. There's a list of societal expectations for the woman that take up the image, and while every one of them is an expectation, some of them are complete opposites of each other.  It's impossible to be the perfect wife and mother according to the standards of society.   You're loved if you're traditional in your conduct (stay at home, lots of kids, great cook and keep a house), but you're weak if you go this route.  However, if you are the modern woman (have a great career, little to no kids, enjoy being independent) then you are too bold and radical.  Women can't win. This is a complicated identity. For me, I love the traditional way of motherhood. I love making meals from scratch, look forward to taking care of my own kids, and would love to stay home and raise a family.  However, since I don't have a child yet, I'm expected to gain an education, be independent, yet still clean, cook, and do typical household chores on top of it all as well. Oh, and we have to look good while doing it, because we're girls. By creating the second image, I hope to depict just how unrealistic societal expectations are.  They take up the whole picture, and we somehow let them. There needs to be a way to combat these expectations and be confident in the things we do as women.

I think it's important to help students create their own mixed media.  It opens their eyes to issues they are passionate about and can contribute to changing if a change needs to happen. A teacher has the ability to introduce a topic, and guide a student through their exploration of that topic.  From our reading, I liked that the students got to choose their own topic to expand on. It encourages critical thinking, especially as the teacher asks followup questions.  In my own process, I was able to identify a topic, research images that depicted it, then explore a new editing software to achieve what I wanted to do.  I researched the societal expectations of women and incorporated general ideas with my own in the image.  It was more than just a simple edit and took thought and effort.  I think students would benefit from doing similar projects.  It's a great way to mix the more traditional things with modern things they easily relate to. 

Metaphorical Fashion

While it's popular to binge watch and keep up to date with all the new series, the reality of it is that we waste away our lives and relationships with others.

In Class Seat Assignment

Red

Grandma

Wolf

In class today (context), use the pictures above (content) to act out (material) the story of Little Red Riding Hood in one minute or less (process constraint) from the perspective (form) of Red, Grandma, and the Wolf separately. 

Process Piece

Preggo Routine

I've come to realize that my morning routine takes a lot longer than I thought. For this video, I wanted to show my breakfast routine from a first-person point of view. To prepare, I researched the best way to angle my camera in order to get this perspective and tried out a few different ways of holding my phone until I had the desired result. I then coordinated with my husband and taught him how to hold the camera at my eye-level and move around with me so it looked about right. We had to take things fairly slow to keep the right angle, so I'm sure we were quite the sight as we slowly shuffled around the kitchen.  In the end, I was surprised to find that we finished the video at 11 minutes. I had purposefully filmed the video as a normal video, intending to use iMovie to speed it up and take out the audio because I thought the process would be too short to do a time-lapse.  I had planned beforehand what I would do, mapping out what kind of oatmeal I would make, the fact I'd film myself gathering all of the supplies, taking my supplements, then taking the first bite of my breakfast, yet it still took longer than expected.  The iMovie app could only speed up my video to twice its original speed, so I would have still had a five and a half minute video. There were a few things that still didn't go according to plan that ended up lengthening the planned out process. These little oversights, like the fact that the almond butter I used for my oatmeal was new and needed to be opened while the filming was taking place, lengthened the video to the point where I needed to just cut out the oatmeal process completely and simply focus on the supplement part of things instead so I could keep to the required time frame for this assignment. It still meets the requirement for the assignment, it just had to be adjusted from what my original plan was.

I appreciate what Barney says about assessing student work and how we need to focus on the content rather than the creativity of it. I can't say my video will win any kind of award with how amazingly advanced my filming is, but it meets the requirements of showing a human process, beginning, middle, and end, within the time limits of 1-2 minutes. There's also an increase in its quality because I knew that fellow classmates would be seeing it and providing feedback. I also love that I have the chance to look back on it (ponder) and think about the process of everything as well as how I could have improved the product.

I think it's important for students to have the chance to share their work with others. It helps them put thought into what they're doing because they know they'll be accountable for it to people other than a teacher. I also love that it helps build an online presence.  We can help our students have a meaningful presence, something they can be proud of in the future.  I think this is especially important for people who want to continue doing theatre because it can be easily referenced to in the future.  Plays the student has written, videos of monologues or scenes they've done, and so forth can showcase their talent and passion for their work.  It can also help them improve in their craft or see improvement as they continue to look back on it and reevaluate the work they've done.  I love the idea that it isn't a throw-away project anymore, but something that can be useful at the time as well as through the years.

Medium Specificity

For this assignment, I created a mosaic. This particular mosaic is a potential gift to my husband filled with pictures of us from the time we met to where we are now as we're weeks away from starting a new journey with a baby.  It was a lot more time-consuming than I imagined! Selecting pictures took the longest, and involved several pitfalls of selecting over 100 pictures, then something would crash and I'd have to reselect everything, or try to create a new folder so I could just "select folder" instead, but then the folder wouldn't upload... technical difficulties at its finest. So maybe it was just time consuming for me and it usually wouldn't be an issue.  I had to try out two different ways of creating this mosaic. At first, I tried to create it on the computer. The uploading time for pictures to be transferred from my Google Photos took forever, and then it crashed. But I liked that I had the option to upload pictures from Google Photos, Instagram, my computer, Facebook, or a few other places.  However, when my computer didn't work, I switched to selecting images off my phone.  This was SO much easier! I used an app, the app had access to my google photos (and I still had the option to use the other sites from before), and I could scroll through and select pictures without the slow upload time of the computer. 

My thought process in doing this mosaic was that it could be used as a creative assignment in the classroom.  My immediate ideas were to use it as a get to know you activity where the student fills the individual picture cells with pictures of themselves or things that describe themselves, or it could be used as a final for a unit where the student fills the cells with visual connections they made.  For example, say we finished reading a play. The students would then be assigned to create a mosaic filled with pictures that describe the play from their own perspective. 

The great thing about a mosaic is that you can have a range of pictures to help describe one bigger picture. You could have anywhere from 25 repeated pictures to 7,500 individual pictures. This can be nice because it doesn't necessarily limit students to one thing and they can express a lot of different thoughts. Another positive is that it's visual, which is generally more engaging for students. Also, students can pull their pictures from multiple sources.  They can use their own images, or they can find things like stock photos that help showcase their thoughts.

Limitations would be that these are still pictures, so those with a strength in other things like film might not have full creative power. Unless they did a stop-motion like idea across the mosaic to tell their story... that would be cool. Another limitation is that they most likely wouldn't be able to draw their own images into this mosaic, unless they took a picture of it and then uploaded it.

As a teacher evaluates a mosaic assignment, they might sit down with the student and ask about individual pictures that make up the mosaic as well as the general big picture.  Why did the student pick a particular image? What does it say about the subject being described? Did they find 150 pictures? What is the general theme of the mosaic? For example, if they're depicting a play, what part of the play are they truly focusing on and why? I think the best thing about this idea is that students can use countless images to help them describe a single thing, so they can get pretty detailed in their descriptions. Also, the students have to be intentional with each image.  They can't just pull out random things and think it'll look cool. Each image has purpose to create the whole.