Going Fishing

The subject I teach at University is tricky.. I teach students who have come to learn to make films, radio and TV programmes how to write, but with so many creatives on the course, there’s a high proportion of dyslexics and more visual learners, and that combination of impatience to get their hands dirty and the fear of the written word can mean that I can often face a reluctant class. But I tell them that their future lies in their ability to communicate what goes on in their gut rather than their heads, and there’s only one way to do that. They have to leap into the void. And that makes me very scary…

The dive that I ask them to do at the beginning of every class is performed through automatic writing, the practice of putting pen to paper for a specific amount of time without looking up, without stopping, without thinking and gives them – and me - a direct line to their nuggets of gold. It bypasses any notion of surface versus deep learning and takes all of them straight off the edge.

Last year, after a couple of weeks of letting them find their feet (and being rather pleased with what they found in themselves), I cranked up the challenge by telling them that they would be publishing their musings, making public their ramblings as part of their assignment in a blog. What Atherton suggests are the ‘deep learners’ were happy to explore the panoply of new emotions, while the ‘surface learners’ froze, and either posted a few words on neutral issues every now and again, or “forgot” completely.

I’m exploring the findings in a series of articles, and I thought it might be an appropriate way of exploring the academic questions about surface and deep learning (and strategic, but that’s another story). I fully admit that the way the assignment was marked last year couldn’t possibly approach any of the issues that arose with the ‘surface learners’. They simply lost marks for not applying themselves to the task. The success of the project makes me tempted to do it again this year, but how to engage those not so eager to show themselves will be a new challenge.

I’ve adapted the article here to show what happened with the 'deep learners' to see if it can throw up any ideas of how to engage the minority of ‘surface learners’.

..................................................

Automatic writing is for most people over the age of ten, like learning how to play again. And that can be really hard. When I first told my students that they would be unleashing the chaos of their recent dreams, moods, suspicions and fear on to a piece of paper, they looked as blank as their pages. Mostly 18 year-olds fresh from college, these young people were still stuck in the straitjacket of school essay writing. They had never written down their dreams; many of them had never even thought about them. They wanted facts and figures and were wary of a module called “Writing for Media”, preferring to press buttons and make radio programmes. For a generation that doesn’t read, what’s the point of writing?

The tight, write-to-impress language of first year student essays is why. Finding their own voice in automatic writing, they tentatively dare to explore what they really think, a revelation to most coming up for air for the first time since mainstream education. But the loosening of the fingers usually starts with the crossing of the arms. “What are we supposed to write about?” asked a slouching, recalcitrant nay-sayer. “Anything that comes into your head”, I suggested, knowing more than he did that there was something there. A sea of blank, glassy eyes looked back at me. “By the way,” said one distracter pointing to a camera battery pack, “what’s that thing on the table?” “There you go”, I said to the class. “Ten minutes on ‘what’s that thing on the table?’”. The results were extraordinary: The juxtaposition of inappropriate objects; the texture of heavy black plastic; the adventure of a battery pack, forgotten and abandoned by its camera crew.

The students were thrilled at what they had found in their soggy, sleepy brains. Yet when I asked who might like to read their work out to the rest of the class, they froze. The fear of judgement by their peers – and by me – was petrifying. Imagine how they felt then when I told them that as part of their assignment, they would have to splurge their thoughts publicly, that a blog would become their new creative home.

Like most people, they had always thought of blogging as an online Speaker’s Corner, new technology’s vox pops providing fresh meat for newshounds. Blogging is a public space where anyone can comment on your innermost thoughts, see through you, hate you or love you, stalk you or ignore you. It’s a place where most of them would never be seen dead.

But in time, I knew it would become for them what it is for me, a place of solitude in crowded space where no-one notices you getting away with murder. Tip-toeing into the blogosphere, inhibitions secreted in a Harry Potter invisibility cloak can be as exhilarating as walking unnoticed into a Burlesque party where the air is thick with liberation. It’s a playground where the very fact of being published, sharpens your game.

For creatives, there’s nothing like moving into a zone of severe discomfort to get the juice flowing. But as the blog became part of their daily routine, it was more than that. It became a “strange”, “transforming”, “weird world”, “as comforting as a cup of tea”, as they reported in their blogs, and as addictive as a night out; one student wrote how she hadn’t even taken her coat off before settling down to blog at 6am after a particularly wild night on the town. The blog as a landline to her increasingly fluent thoughts had become her best mate in the space of a few posts. Another wrote how, still in dressing gown, he stole into the corridor of his Halls to find a signal on his phone. Holding its precarious position while he painstakingly texted a new post, he refused to be beaten by the failure of his internet connection.


Never really done anything like this before. It seems weird that within this space I can write anything I want... It doesn't have to be cohesive, or make sense... weird. I plan to write on this once a day so long as I can get a chance.


When Williams and Jacobs forecast the potential for blogs as ‘transformational ….learning spaces' for students within higher education (Williams and Jacobs, 2004), they noticed that blogs encourage ‘personal reflection” and give a platform for “students' 'unique voices', empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking”. It has certainly proved to be empowering for one of my students whose identity had always been defined by the panic attacks and behaviour issues linked with spending his childhood in care. Blogging for him has sent his inner demons into head to head combat.


It was gonna end like that.

There's a seething pain I get and it's now starting to really piss me off.

 

Nope matey, that's your gall stones and you just gotta put up with it.

Oh for God’s sake, you're so bloody literal sometimes. All the time. I could be talking about that, sure, but there's a pain that weedles its way in from time to time. It feels like it's getting into every pore of mine. It's taking away who I am, each time moving that little bit faster, working that little bit harder whilst the who or what I am is becoming less.

Jesus Christ, you're fuckin’ odd sometimes. Listen to what it is you're saying. In fact I'm sure I've read that somewhere. Why doesn't that surprise me?

Why should anything surprise you? I'm trying to explain myself and all I get from you is bloody shit.

Why do you feel like you gotta explain yourself? I don't.

No, you don't and look where that's got you.

Brave. Very brave of you

Another, whose first language is not English, used the space to explore his nascent English poet;

And the rims of her eyes are black.

Like slimy balls rolling out of their holes.

Already marked from last night.

They look old.

“50 isn’t old yet.”

Alice mumbles to herself.

And that might be right.

She isn’t old, but she feels like it

while she is listening to the radio:

“…drowned at noon today…”

And this feeling,

this anxiety,

having left behind life’s joys

has led to today’s feeling

that everything goes bad.

And she,

having brought her old body in front of the mirror,

to stare at herself,

is repeating the same question

over and over again:

“Why the fuck is this happening today?!”

Mortensen and Walker in 2002 suggested that a blog ‘forces students to confront their own opinions and contemplate how their views might be interpreted and reflected upon by others’: I suggested my students use their blogs to review films, music, books in the hope that they might drop into each other’s blogs, or even spread the word among their friends that their opinions were up for discussion.

There’s a lyric in a song called "Zero" by the Smashing Pumpkins which reads "Intoxicated with the madness, I’m in love with my sadness". I love the band, and that line makes me think...A lot of people do or at least have at some point in their life been happy to be miserable.. and feel that melancholy feeling, and are almost romanced by the notion of being upset...It is a strong emotion.

Others are cannier. Somehow knowing that the girls are watching silently, anonymously, one of my first years, once that slouching, recalcitrant nay-sayer, used his blog to parade his cerebral plumage as a cleverly seductive ploy.

This exercise has given me a way to vent my frustration, and in some cases, for people to look within my mind. Don't look too closely; it’s a dark, dank place filled with broken dreams and scarred images”.

The girls fell at his feet.

Ferdig and Trammel (2004) believe that blogs are more successful in ‘promoting interactivity that is conversational; a mode of interaction more conducive to improved student and teacher relationships, active learning, higher order thinking, and greater flexibility in teaching and learning more generally”. This interactivity of the blogosphere where friends and strangers can pop in for a look around your psyche is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the blog as tool for creative development. Being seen is scary yet after a while, my students were popping in and out of each other’s blogs, posting pictures and comments as easily as they might into each others room in Halls. Their creative thoughts had become part of who they were as broadcast journalism undergrads.

Will it translate into their projects by the time they graduate? It’s early days, but they’re walking taller in what Brad DeLong of University of California described as an ‘Invisible College’ a place where, ‘thanks to the wide open roads of Cyberspace, you can bump into people who will nudge those opinions and sharpen those brains, internetworking and creating super-contacts’. They’re reflecting, growing into creative, individual thinkers.

And for the former child in care whose panic attacks were part of his signature, blogging has put him out there to explore the infinity of potential.

All is good.

I'm happy.

Contemplative?

A little.

I can remember some things.

The rest is lost somewhere.

Do you really need to remember everything?
Does anyone?

We'll see.

We'll see.