learning curve
I’m learning – always, always learning – to be more aware of why students ask for help understanding tasks during workshops. Sometimes it’s simple: I’ve explained it badly; brain-to-mouth failure.
However, I’ve also realised that – sometimes – students aren’t asking for clarification (what are we supposed to be doing?) but for reassurance (am I doing this thing right?) This dynamic has been most obvious when working with exploratory or open-ended exercises, where the point of the activity is experiential. In those kind of exercises, I’m not asking students to prepare a scene or a physical characterisation (where there’s an outcome to “show” to the rest of the group) but to pay attention to their own process: the sound of their own voice, the movement of their body, the feedback-loop of action to thought.
An example: during a series of workshops on Oedipus Rex, I asked the group to play with different voicings of the chorus – thinking about tempo, volume, emphasis – which triggered in one group a conscious recognition of their own specific and distinct accents (and not a little frustration that they didn’t have total control over their own voices). Others began to hear where the text seemed to demand certain things of their voice: different rhythms and tones.
Not everyone was making those kinds of realisations, though; for some members of the group, the exercise was treated as more rigidly task-based: read the passage aloud and await “official” explanation of value.
Asking students to “try it and see what happens” has a limited shelf-life; it also depends on a rapport of trust which has to be continually renewed and sustained. It’s also not always entirely helpful, and can make a vague-sounding exercise even less clear. What, of all of the things that just happened during that exercise, the student thinks, are the ones that I’m supposed to care about? And if nothing happened, is that okay?
The challenge, then, is to find better ways of describing or framing tasks which are reflexive: where the possible value of doing something is revealed by the action of doing it.