Post Disruption of Master Narratives project:

Some really wonderful and sophisticated work pulling fairy tales apart. The slight difference from the last time I taught this class was having students post the work, but also give a bit of background as to how they approached the project. In many cases the process was as interesting as the product. Leaving the medium open means we had storytelling, poetry, indeterminate game-like structures, sound collages, videos and installations. Not a bad mix for a class of 15. I’m still wrestling with this class jelling, but I felt the follow up conversation today was excellent. We touched on a number of different aspects of storytelling and how we can confront the constructedness of these stories. If I had more time I would re-assign the project with the caveat of incorporating the individual points of view on how these pieces developed.

One of the other things I wrestle with is not providing a critique of the project results. I know, this sounds a bit weird, especially at an arts school where students are critiqued constantly. But, I don’t offer these assignments as a way to judge artistic merit or process or whatever, but to help generate content for the course. They also function as a way of having the students focus on specific ideas. It’s not that the projects are inconsequential, on the contrary, they inform where we are headed, but to evaluate them as successful or not is irrelevant. The answers are the answers, and by exploring them across a number of solutions we can see similar and different approaches.

As we have discussed with our First Year Seminar, I am trying to be a bit more open about the pedagogy and why the course is structured this way. This means that I am also discovering things about the structure. Specifically how one project develops skills that can be taken into the next. I’m trying to gauge this group against the last time I taught the class, are we farther ahead or behind where we were last time. But this is a totally different group with a totally different rhythm, and so I think we are exactly where we should be at this point in the term. Now to pull ideas together with the Hassan reading and watch Monty Python’s Holy Grail before the next project (about space and quotations and stuff).