Artist/Educator Statement

 The power of collaboration was reaffirmed to me as I and each of my group members freely contributed our ideas to the performance piece. I can’t say that any one person was the primary creator of this performance piece. We genuinely each played a significant role in creating the final product. I think that’s not only because we were each willing to bring our ideas to the table and felt a sense of ownership and responsibility of the product, but also because we were all committed to listening to and thoughtfully considering each other’s ideas. That came quite naturally for our group, but in the future, I think beginning by articulating those collaborative expectations is important to succeeding as equals on a team. In the coming years, when I will be a student teacher or new teacher in PLC groups or the new teacher in a school’s subject area, I can anticipate not feeling equally valuable as a team member due to lack of experience. I wonder how I can still be communicative about my hope to be heard out as well as bold in sharing my thoughts. 

Like I said in my “intention” email to Amy, I think there are a lot of moving parts in this final performance project that are directly applicable to an English class setting. The English discipline is centered on analysis, interpretation, expression, and creation. This project required text-to-text and text-to-self connection, development and analysis of the larger theme, selecting imagery to represent a larger concept, determining pacing for impact, revising and editing content, authentic inquiry, and writing in a specific genre, among other elements. In my own future classes, this project could take the shape of taking a theme and crafting a personal narrative that incorporates digital medias and performing it. It could look like compiling a whole portfolio of work—written words and images and songs, etc.—that centers on a question or concept important in each student’s life at that time. It could look like a podcast that consists of interviews conducted my students that also focus on a key theme. 

Perhaps my most major contribution to the final product was my idea to use the chairs. In one of our earlier meetings, I suggested having a stack of chairs set up in the corner and each person picking up a chair and setting it down when they started their speaking. That idea then evolved into using the chairs to physicalize key moments from certain monologues throughout the piece as well as the support group structure our group ultimately settled on embodying as the performance neared the end. Each person was primarily responsible for the development of their own monologues, including choosing any meaningful images and a song to represent that storyline (although I did find the spooky Dairy Queen for Emma’s storyline, which I was proud of, haha). That means that for my storyline, I went through a series of pictures of my cousin and I and chose the two that ended up in the piece based on the relevance I felt they had to my story.