"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.