Hassan’s list:

Today as a follow up to the conversation about the Master Narrative projects we dove into the Hassan essay. This is really the first deep dive into postmodern theory. The Postmodernism book provided a good road map, but this essay is on a different level. I’d been thinking for some time that we needed to change our relationship to the space. Students tend to come into the room and plop down in the first available seat near the door. I was delighted to find all the chairs sort of scattered at odd angles in the middle of the space. Something I would have done if I had been able to get there before the students. I didn’t but they assumed I had anyway. Quite fortuitous. So – we started the day with an Olipo game in which you take a sentence and remove all the vowels and create a new sentence. Always fun. For the first time a group created a sentence of nonsense words – great choice.

After that we settled down and I asked each student to articulate one thing that caught their eye in the reading – about 2/3rds had something to share, the other 1/3^rd hadn’t done the reading. It was nine pages. What I like about this is not just calling out people who aren’t participating – it is often the students who seem disengaged – go figure – but that students often see things in the reading I didn’t. It opens the conversation up to a wider range of ideas than just what is in my notes. Then we moved on to chat about the Self, Society, and Cosmos ideas and how they relate to postmodernism. Some great observations about authority and truth and how postmodernism needs modernism to have something to push against. The one question that caught me off guard was about the relationship of postmodernism to religion. Since SSC carries with it a fairly high concentration of religious ideas students seemed perplexed that the same conversation didn’t continue into this class. It was honestly the first time that has come up in teaching this subject for more than a decade. It will require some research, thinking, and perhaps posing students more questions. Seems interesting that we are set to watch Monty Python’s Holy Grail – which takes on one of the most canonical Christian stories of all time. Perhaps we can touch on how Python approaches it in the follow up conversation. If only I had decided to use Life of Brian instead.

Post Master Narrative Project:

Hmm – I find that something just isn’t clicking with this class this time. I made some adjustments to the syllabus from the last time I taught it – some I am happy with, others not. For some reason I feel like the Master Narrative project – where they tear apart fairy tales – seemed to happen too soon. It is without question a more complex project than the first few, but not too complicated. The bulk of the projects were quite interesting, using a variety of way to tear apart and reassemble the pieces of the story. Bob and I has students do a similar project in the Gen Art class after we had discussed systems – so I wonder if that is what I am comparing this proves to.

One thing that seems to be nagging is I don’t feel like we have gelled together as a group. That may be because I have done far too few group activities this term – a lot of individual presentation stuff – but few group projects. I’ll have some time to develop this more in the second half of the term. I’m also struggling with the number of students in the class – 25 – now 24 – is just too many for this type of class. I have no idea how I did this with 30 the first time through the dissonance class. Ideally 15-20 is the best number – 12 actually seems too few.

That aside I think we have discussed and developed a good list of terms and ideas so far. Having all of these ideas defined out of the projects should mean that there are good clear examples of each. But, we will need to revisit them from time to time. I also need to get the students to start working with these ideas in the writing prompts. What I have seen so far in the two prompts has been great, but I think they can start to work on refining these ideas. I have yet to see any student express complete confusion – some frustrations – but everyone seems to be picking up on at least some of these ideas. My hope is as we take them into the Hassan essay and then into the Holy Grail movie the students will be able to synthesize this material a bit more. Then we take them into the second half of the term and touch on specific topics and ideas.

I’ve assigned them the ironic museum project – which seemed to work quite  well last time I taught the class. A couple of questions after the assignment went out have me already excited to see the results.  Since so much of the work so far has been performative  this project requires students to build something outside of themselves. It will give us an opportunity to reflect on each piece as we discuss them. I should probably photograph each one  so we can cycle back on the discussion.

One thing I need to keep in mind is that I do trust this process. I have had doubts every time I have taught a project-based class and then seen the results in the final few weeks of the term. Knowledge with this type of structure seems to accrue much more slowly than in lecture-based classes. So, I suspect I doubt around this point in the term every time I teach this way.

New Class that apparently I suck at keeping a record of

It is hard to believe that we are three weeks into the term and this is my first chronicling. It might make sense to chop this up into smaller chunks. First off – we lost a day due to snow. This totally disrupted the rhythm of how the class was structured. My decision to drop the first project on modernism was, in retrospect, a mistake. I should have kept the beginning of the class the same and dropped something later on. I can chat with the students about modernist ideas – and the book we have covers them fairly well, but they are poor substitutes for having objects and conversations to point to as examples of unified, complete, whole, well-designed items. So, we did the intro day and then just jumped right into project #2 about reappropriation. I love the project and it produced some really interesting answers, but without the counter it doesn’t work as well. There may be other opportunities to swing back around – possible with the mater narratives project.

With 25 students we really needed to spread the presentations of the reappropriation projects across two days – and they took the full two days. Part of the reason to take the time with them is to really dig in an ask basic questions about what students see and what how those elements fit together. Some really unique solutions that have given us a great deal to discuss. The answers to the project gave us a good solid list of terms and ideas to start the term with.

I moved where we discuss the Postmodern book sooner in the term this time – it is really mean to lay out specific ideas and direction based on what the students saw in the book. I must admit that the conversation started at a fairly high theoretical level – which works well with this material – but I also fear students being left out of the conversation that either didn’t read the book or didn’t process the information the same way. Circling back to discuss these ideas over and over may be the best approach.

Third project – which was really the second project – was about movement. The task to execute an everyday movement actually became about a wide range of movement possibilities. Mainly this is near the start of the term since each student has to get up I front of the class and do something a little silly, a little odd. We then mixed these into groups and I whispered instructions to watch the movements as dance, music, theatre, and kinetic sculpture. Again – 25 students in the class is a huge difference from the 20 last time.

We started the next class with defining the terms we have so far and then splitting up into groups to work on using them. Some interesting results. Working to connect the movements to where we were headed I did some connective tissue on Duchamp and Cage. We will dig a bit deeper into Cage later in the term as well as do an exercise on indeterminacy next class.

Today was about postmodern dance – so a brief history from Graham to Cunningham to Judson and we were ready to dive more deeply into Solo olos. It was clear that not everyone had watched the video – so I brought up rehearsal videos and we discussed the structure. Some had seen it in Spring Dance last year and this was the first time they had to talk about it and understand how it was put together. This worked incredibly well as the first clear example we have explored. So far the term has been project heavy at the start – so now we will settle down into digging into the theory a bit. A long way to go and a short time to get there.