Deconstructing Benjamin with Students!

So, having done my homework and clued up on why this might be a useful activity for students, as well as having had a go at it myself, I decided to deconstruct Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (TWOAAMR) with my second year group.  This group of students is a combination of 15 Foundation Degree Film and Media Production, and 20 BA (Hons) Film students, so is a fairly large student group to workshop with. The majority of these students make films, and their time at college does not ever involve drawing, cutting and sticking of paper! However, they were keen to have a go!

Firstly I gave them all a copy of an excerpt of Benjamin's work. They have met his work in previous sessions but never fully interrogated it. The section I gave them consisted of the introduction by Paul Valery, and section X, which deals directly with film. There were 6 tables in the room, each with 6 copies of the text, various magazines and newspapers, coloured tissue, scissors and glue sticks stacked up in the middle. Having discussed the context of TWOAAMR, and that of Benjamin himself, I deliberately asked the students to read through the excerpt and to discuss with their table how they found the experience. They were then asked to decide on two words per table to describe the text.

These were the words they came up with. Only 3 of these were considered to be positive - illuminating, metaphorical, high class (although we did discuss why 'high class' could be considered positive and agreed that it might actually be negative). (Those of you with an eye for detail will notice that there are 13 words rather than 12 - illuminating was added by a student who felt that the overall response to this fantastic piece of writing was too negative.)

Using some of the ideas that I pinched from http://tactileacademia.com/ I explained to the students that they should look for parts of the text, either words or sentences, that interested them, and to start to cut these out. They were also to make use of the other magaziness, newspapers etc on the tables to illustrate, expand, think through, the points they had chosen. I have to admit that I was expecting some resistance to this activity but on the whole, this group really engaged with the task, and gained a greater understanding of the text as a result. More about that later...

We had only two hours for this session, and I think an extra one would have been useful. As we cleared up we started to think about how this activity might have helped them to gain a greater understanding of the text. To try to make sense of the experience of 'crafting' in this way, I asked the students to repeat the task of working in their table groups to find a word (or two) to describe how they felt about the text now that they had had the experience of cutting it up in this way. The results were surprisingly positive, as shown in the image below:

Students noted how they could discuss the text whilst selecting / cutting / pasting, and that they could find images and words that were relevant to their understanding of the text. They found the text more approachable, and acknowledged that the activity gave them the time to interrogate the meaning, and to interpret it in a sociable and interactive way. Interestingly a number of students suggested that they  felt that the activity was irreverent, because it felt "wrong" to cut up someone's work to the point where it might be considered unrecognisable. Some students became very precious about what they had made, and others wanted to continue (or even to start again) after the session was finished.

Students have been tasked to find some work on the internet that references TWOAAMR, and to share this with the group next week. I have also challenged them to try to make something that responds to the text in some way, although have not made this a compulsory but an optional task. It will be interesting to see what happens with that!

All in all this was an interesting morning, and from a teaching point of view I found this to be an excellent way to encourage varied readings of a text. 

 I never expected this to work for everyone, and I think it's important to be mindful of how this kind of crafting is, for some students, reminiscent of primary school (it must be the glue sticks!) It worked for this particular Year 2 group because we had already gone through some pretty intense, risk-taking, experimental seminars and discussions in Year 1, and I think there was an element of trust there that allowed them to just go with it. Students were really keen to talk about why they had chosen particular words / images, and we had some excellent discussion about the meaning of Benjamin's work, and how it might be though of in today's context. On the whole, they demonstrated a real understanding of the piece.

Below are some of the beautifully crafted responses to Benjamin's TWOAAMR that they made today.