Creative Research Practices 2: DEBATE

This week, following on from the speed-geeking activity, we tried another way to undertake research, collate information, edit, organise and disseminate ideas. To do this we used the medium of formal debate.

Students were introduced to the concept through a short powerpoint presentation that explained why this might be a useful activity.

• The Annual Skills and Education Survey suggests that 42% of employers were dissatisfied with the basic use of English by school leavers.“Young people today not only need to have the skills needed to understand the information being presented, they need to have the skills to research through different sources, critically analyse the information presented and form their own conclusions and arguments as a result” (guardianonline)
• Evidence has shown that debating activities can contribute not only to educational achievement, but also to a range of wider outcomes that work towards developing more confident and well rounded individuals.
• Debate combines logical consistency and factual accuracy, with some sort of emotional appeal, as well as using the art of persuasion. These are great skills to be able to use in dissertation research and writing.
• It can be considered a valuable tool to use in almost any class, and help students to engage with subject knowledge in a different way than by just using text books.  The research element in particular helps students to develop library / Internet research skills, self-managed study and time management.

The Year 2 Film group were divided into two large groups who had to decide on a particular debate topic. Group 1 chose "Voting Should be Made Compulsory" and Group 2 chose " Arts Education is a Waste of Time". These larger groups were then divided into "for" and "against", and were tasked to organise a strategy to organise their argument.

The group were free to work in whatever way they wanted to, and it was interesting to note that all the 4 groups (5-6 students in each) kept to the classroom setting, and worked efficiently around their tables. They were free to go to the library, canteen or elsewhere to work but chose to work in the classroom environment, not even sitting around the sofa area to do so!
The level of autonomy was impressive, and all the students contributed to the task. Some removed themselves from their group and worked alone, only coming back together to organise themselves just before the debate started. Others stayed firm in their group of 5/6 and brainstormed ideas, mapping out responses and assigning research tasks to each member.

The debate was quite formally managed with rules, and a clear running order. The debate was organised as shown below:

This was a lively morning. Students engaged with the task and worked in their teams to build up strategies, arguments and case studies. A couple of students chose to work independently but they reconvened with their group before the start of the debate to ensure they had a clearly articulated and joined up case to present.

Interestingly, the initial response when deciding who would be 'for' and who would be 'against' indicated that students thought it would be easier to argue FOR something they believed in.  After the debate, it was agreed that it was in fact much easier to make a case for something you DID NOT believe in - it demanded a much more rigorous approach to research; the participants chose emotive and contentious arguments; they knew what topics to avoid and used smokescreening to try to avoid the obvious.

As an example of research practice, the formal debate had a lot going for it:

• team building activity
• a need for collaboration
• focusing on how to organise information into a cohesive argument
• a requirement to know the other side of the argument in order to respond to it fully
• encouraged listening skills
• encouraged speaking skills
• confidence building

The audience were asked to listen carefully to both sides of the debate, and to then ask questions of both teams. After rebuttals and final summing up, the audience were asked who was the most convincing, and which team had really "won" the debate. There were official 'observers' in the audience for each debate, who focused their attention on strategy, and presentation skills. This too was interesting, and helped to highlight how each team had swayed opinion.

"Creative" Research Practices 1: Speed-Geeking

creative

cre-a-tive

1. having the quality or power of creating.
2. resulting from originality of thought, expression, etc,; imaginative: creative writing
3. originative; productive (usually followed by ofi)
4. facetious.  Using or creating exaggerated or skewed data, information, etc: creative bookkeeping

Creativity in the classroom. This should be easy in an art college right? However, it is proving more difficult than I previously imagined to try to persuade students out of their chairs and away from the disciplined, ordered set-up of the classroom-teacher model.

Moving away from the cutting and pasting workshop method, I tried another technique for research and dissemination which is commonly called speed geeking.

"Speed geeking is a participation process used to quickly view a number of presentations within a fixed period of time. Speed geeking gets its name from speed dating, since they both employ similar techniques."

We used this method to share research about World Cinema in a session with Year 2 Film students.  Each student had been tasked to research a nation, it’s cultural identity, and it’s cinema, thinking about how cinema influences culture and vice-versa.

There was a massive range of countries chosen by the students:

Ireland

Brazil

Iran

Russia

Spain

Sweden

Chile

Saudi Arabia

North Korea

Vietnam

Uzbequistan

Australia

Greece

Finland

Germany

Bulgaria

Mexico

China

India

China

France

Japan

Korea

Canada

Italy

This was an energetic morning! We shifted furniture out of the way and tried to organize ourselves in such a way that we would all have the chance to speak and listen to every other person. Mathematically this was really difficult! But we almost managed it. Students each spoke for 3 minutes then a bell rang and each person moved one place to the left, so they were opposite someone new…

This would have worked beautifully, if we had 10 students doing it. However, we had 18! Mathematically this means that students had to speak their 3 minutes of research 17 times (51 minutes of talking each!) AND more importantly, 51 minutes of ACTIVE LISTENING each!

This was clearly a very tall order, and had it’s pros and cons.

PROS:

• Speed-geeking breaks out of the traditional classroom set-up
• Encourages autonomous leaning, and particularly pushes students towards having to select relevant material from their research, to precis, and organise material.
• It is less formal that the usual "presentation in front of the whole class"
• It can be more dialogic than traditional presentation
• Participants can have some fun with it!
• The repetition of the information means that it is very well 'lodged' in the speaker's brain.
• It encourages active listening

CONS:

• It was an exhausting activity for both speaker and listener. (Students kept asking for the familiar classroom setting.  There were requests to present the information just once, to all students!)
• Active listening is really hard!
• There were too many people for this particular method to work successfully.
• Students could only talk about what they had found out. Using film examples would have really helped to strengthen the dialogue.
• The noise of everyone talking at once could be difficult to manage.

Next time, I would encourage students to form groups of 5 - 6 according to their interests, and to share their research around a table, in turn, to just the others in their group, allowing maybe 10 minutes each. This would take the time pressure off and allow for more meaningful discussion and debate, perhaps also allowing for the use of screen shots / short clips etc.

Although on this particular occasion there were mixed feelings from the group about how well the method itself worked, all students agreed that they had actually quite enjoyed approaching research activity in a different way, and had in fact learned quite a lot from each other.

Second Attempt - Laura Mulvey

Being mindful of how the 'booklet-making' technique benefitted my Year 2 group's understanding of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I decided to try it again with a different student group, and a different key text.

The group I chose are a fairly new first year cohort who are a particularly mixed ability group. They are a combined group of FD and BA Film students. There were a couple of reasons why I tried this:

1. The method allows for plenty of time to move amongst the groups, discussing their work with them, and helping them to find the images / words they are looking for amongst the newspapers and magazines. The group is large so this was a way of identifying who was engaging with the ideas under discussion, as well as how much prior knowledge students had. 
2. I wanted to see how responsive this group would be to using methods outside of their comfort zone.

I have to acknowledge right from the start that in hindsight I should not have attempted this with a first year group in their first term. Although it was not a complete disaster, the differences to when I used this method with year 2 students were incredibly poignant.

To sum this up I would say that the First Year group were not well enough bonded to trust themselves to do this project. There was some resistance from the younger students and I sensed this was due to an almost school-like derision towards "the teacher". (The year 2 group who I had previously worked with had built up a good working relationship with each other and with me, so there was a definite level of trust when we used this technique. They had also had a consistently positive response to the contextual sessions in their first year, and had made creative responses to many ideas that were introduced. These responses were varied but included posters, YouTube mashups, scripts and Marketing campaigns.)

Making use of Tuckman's terminology (1965), my First Year group had not reached the 'norming' stage in their group formation, and therefore could not yet 'perform' to the best of their potential. The group split into quite insular smaller groups, who worked by themselves. Some students worked in a completely isolated way, and did not discuss what they were doing with their peers.

However, this was a great method for the particular texts that we used. Students could choose one of two excerpts from Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Originally Published in Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18). The first excerpt deals with pleasure derived from looking, and the second with male / female representation in cinema.

Students made some interesting responses. We started the session with a 40 minute lecture / seminar that examined some of the key points in the text, so students had a good idea of the terminology used by Mulvey before they even started to read the text. We examined the way Mulvey works with Freud's theories, as well as having a look at some ways that artists have responded to Freud. We concentrating on 'scopophilia', 'voyeurism' and 'narcissism' as our focus points.

Students were then given, or chose, an excerpt to read and on first reading, as before, students identified some issues with having to read an academic text. These included the difficult choice of words, the length of the sentences, and a perceived lack of clarity. 

I then explained the task to the group, and we had an hour to make small booklet responses to the text. The majority of students focused on the task, tried to make meanings from the words, and generally found something interesting to take from the text. 

However, although the choice of Visual Pleasure allowed for some fantastic representational images, the text felt out of date once we had fully analysed it. I would choose something completely different if I use this method again, perhaps something newer and more relevant to everyday life.

More and more it seems that the so-called digital 'revolution' has changed the way that young people think about themselves, their friends and their families. Traditional gender roles are not necessarily important. There may be media academics, political groups and campaigners claiming that Zoo and Nuts put pressure on young women, and their sense of "to-be-looked-at-ness" and on young men to perform in a certain way, but Internet / Social Media identity is built in different ways that are not necessarily as dependent upon gender /body stereotypes. (More exploration of these ideas elsewhere!)

On the whole, the students enjoyed the activity of 'making' in response to theory, with comments that the activity helped to "think creatively" about the text, that it helped with being able to "analyse meaning", and that it was useful to be able to put images with words and therefore "visualise meaning".

It will be really interesting to see the results from everyone else's planned TWOAAMR workshops this Spring term, and to work on ways to develop this technique so that it can be used in different ways. For me there are some Pros and Cons to the technique:

Cons:

• I can't see a group of students wanting to use this technique more than once. So, even students that had great success with these projects, would not need or want to use it again.
• There can be resistance to the idea that this is a childish activity, resulting in some students not engaging fully.
• It needs to be done with groups that are not in the 'forming' and 'storming' stages of group formation. The student group, in my opinion, should be one that is either brand new, or completely at ease, and therefore trusting of each other. 
• Some individuals are unable to relax into this task, because they do not want to feel silly, or let themselves enjoy it.

Pros:

• With the right group this is such a great way to share thoughts, discuss ideas, and gain a greater understanding of a text. The informal creative element of the technique allows for time and space to do this.
• Students feel genuine pride in their creations, and want to share them with each other.
• A tactile approach to reading can genuinely help some people to gain a greater understanding of a text.
• With high levels of dyslexia, and indications of low reading scores in many creative arts undergraduate cohorts, it is essential to find innovative, useful ways that students can engage with theory. I'm sure that this technique can be developed to include making posters, holding poster presentations, pecha kuchas and 'speed-geeking' sessions, amongst other things.

I really look forward to the sharing of creative practices on this blog.