Hampstead Downstairs. 5 second-year BA-DATE students in attendance.
Collaborative Outreach work group. One group present who have been working together all term. S is offering advice for an upcoming presentation, after having viewed their work in Manchester a few weeks ago.
Roundtable discussion. No notebooks. Nothing in hands. The students are captivated.
Until I arrived all were gathered 'round, on level. They are all teachers here.
Active thinking. Sylvan is doing most of the talking but there is ample room to interrupt. He responds to faces that look inquisitive, as though they are containing something to say.
Vocabulary is jargon-heavy, very academic. No one requires definitions or clarification--shorthand is comfortable. Literary references likewise feel well-ingrained.
S's hand movement is constant, for punctuation and emphasis--it does not significantly contribute to content.
"I've blathered about a lot of stuff" "Whoop, I'm on my toes today!"-- humility and humour regularly highlighted. He appears to want to not be taken too seriously, but the students definitely want to take him seriously.
His delivery is stream-of-consciousness, but riddled with concrete and documentary examples. The research is ready in the forefront of his mind. He's effectively citing his research in a spoken essay. Neat. Do the students appreciate this multi-layered delivery style? It is so well-integrated it is elegant.
"Does that make sense?" with eye contact with the question-asker, to round off a line of discussion. The question is genuine, not just punctuation, but do the students ever say no? He is a person, a teacher, they not only want to please, but want to appear clever and worldly for. But this isn't a cocktail party: they need to let him know if they are lost!
"Tie a flag to that. A red ribbon. A yellow ribbon. Any ribbon. Pick a colour. Flag your ability to do it justice. I don't know if I can describe it fully or fairly. Maybe it didn't even happen. Poof! Mind blown!" --ways of playfully encouraging the students to honestly reflect on what they believe happened in the sessions they ran, versus what they can quantify.
"Work out what you're worth." This is not a declaration of "you're great!" but a reasonable assessment. Very human. S gives regular insights into his feelings, which are normal, mere-mortal feelings: I get the impression that he fights the academic tendency to maintain emotional distance. His feelings resonate with the students. He easily maintains their trust and energy while speaking in a low tone. Not monotone, but he just rambles along and they're highly attuned.
Memories invoked--collective reminders of what we've all experienced this term. Remember what we did. Remember why we did it.
Group Googling: S spells out names clearly so a phrase can be looked up in the moment, but also so that the student who is recording this on her phone can look it up later. Phones! Effective use of modern technology in the classroom! Weird. She uses AirDrop for Mac, as all of her group own iPhones, and they all share each lecture and discussion through this service.
Recommendations for reading that are just bubbling to the surface: "Ooh, I want to tell you about..." Writing and thinking prompts which are taken as direct questions to be answered in the moment. Not quite what he meant, I think, but listened to.
What really is the impact of forum theatre?
Recommended reading: no one goes for the phones until he begins to spell the author's name. Subtle? Not really. "Sara Ahmed is worth looking into." beat. "That's Sara, no h." Phones are grabbed. Implied "no really, this is useful, it will be good to remember this before we carry on and you forget."
Saturday, July 28, 2018
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