Another Year Beckons

Adieu, 2010, and salut, 2011. The year was packed with several academic accomplishments. I leaped onto the treadmill of dissertation writing, hitherto a much longed-for state. Now, I'm decidedly less sure if it's the magical playground I had so desired, just like Narnia is to Lucy and Edmund. The thought of reading Lewis' Chronicles stirs up greater excitement in me. Perchance I might move past this fog I seem to be suspended in? The drudgery of it all is that I have to distill exactly what I'm studying, yet again (Urrgh, another round of it. But I am not a quitter). As a few of you know, I had to change supervisors and for a spell, this setback nearly quashed the fire in my belly. When this holiday break ends, I hope to recoup lost ground and direct my energies into whipping out that "spectacular" second proposal (still related to creativity from a different angle). Meanwhile, I shall enjoy the guilty pleasures that a holiday merrymaker deserves -- rest, culinary pleasures, and the renewing of friendships. Here's to a radiant new year filled with much love and joy! Sail on, Dawn Treader.

Performance Studies in the Electronic Age

I came across this conference call for paper through a Twitterer I follow:

Internet Research 12.0 - Performance and Participation is the 12th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), an international association for students and scholars in any discipline in the field of of Internet studies. 

Internet Research 12.0: Performance and Participation will provide a space for interdisciplinary researchers to reflect on, describe, interrogate, challenge, and stake new claims to various performance and participation issues, including:
* Creative performances and digital arts
* Participatory culture and participatory design
* Critical performance and political participation
* Identity performance
* Exclusion from participation
* Economic performance of Internet-related industries
* Game performance
* Performance expectations (as workers, citizens, etc.)
* Ritual performances and communal participation

Paulo Freire, Boal, hooks...

More names to get acquainted with. Wish I know how to speed-read! Just lugged 10 books back from the Bird Lib. The librarian even placed them in a bag for me. Wow! The library is spiffing up not just physically.

R sent me a paper she had co-authored on a title I had envisioned for a possible project. But of course, my research will extend their study. I will develop a new perspective to the topic as an instructional design research student doing interdisciplinary work. She also sent me links and a contact person who is going to be doing a TO workshop. Ruminating about participating. Hrm!

P.S. hooks is deliberately spelled with a lower-case h because that's how bell hooks wishes to represent herself -- as in the book, Teaching to transgress.

Teacher, how art thou?

The Gates Foundation's preliminary findings on the measures of effective teaching is out. The study is based on the premise that teachers matter, highlighting the major role of teachers in effecting learning. Herein lies my conflict with the philosophy of instructional design: no matter what blueprint you may have, it may not achieve results because you cannot be sure how a teacher implements the plan in the classroom or virtually. I've seen that with my own eyes, and been there myself as a teacher for years. I've watched great teachers in action, and they are not trained in instructional design. Richard Clark mentioned this before at AECT 2010 that we are humbled by what we don't know about learning (or something to that effect) because much of how people learn is a result of automaticity (citing Bargh's studies on priming).

A Community-Based Theatre Experience

Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo. Storch Theatre, Syracuse Stage (SS). Last night, I was fortunate to be invited by one of my committee members to watch the poignant documentary-theater, public workshop performance, community-based play (?) about the Congolese refugees now located in Syracuse. It was co-written by Ping Chong and SS dramaturg, Kyle Bass. True, I have used multiple labels in an effort to describe what it is. Still, they are inadequate at conveying what I perceived. Methinks it is a bit of CBP (Jan Cohen-Cruz's model), with a tad more professional input. Cohen-Cruz (2005?) had raised the issue of when the subjects' stories might become the "objects" when reshaped by the playwright. Is it more grassroots or more professionally crafted to make it more appealing to an audience? Nevertheless, this performance was commissioned and developed at short notice. Kudos for using this medium to present compelling stories that might never get heard. This collective action heralds the process for healing and peacemaking.

I had cast those memories out of my mind for some time. Media reports of the horrific Tutsi-Hutu strife were headline news in the mid 90s. These memories were thrust into the forefront tonight. Theatre has a moving way to connect and rouse people's emotions. I was reminded of the significance of my research.

Image source: http://bit.ly/cWDkz3; fleeing the Congo

"Knowing" "creativity" the way I do, I am unabashed to call out creativity when I see it: the use of songs (hymns), gestures (claps), language (French), and people/cast (Belgian-Tutsi lady). All thrown together in a matter of a few months or days (8 rehearsal days to be exact). The talk-back session was curiously bland (cf Boal's style), except when the actors spoke! Only two did and I cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like for them to have to recall the savageness, the barbarism. "Human heads chopped off and stuck in the soil. "Mommy, there is a man growing out of the soil in the field". "They cut the babies out of the women's wombs and made them beat their babies to death" "They cooked those human beings!" Oppressive fear of further unimaginable atrocities had the Tutsis fettered. And all these fueled by boundless human greed for the rich mineral resources of this country - 10% of the world's copper, 30% of the world's cobalt, and a wealth of other derivative metals for consumer products like coltan for cellphone production.

"Hate comes because of fear; my child, just pray to God!" one actor recalled his mom's words to him. Indeed, so many unkind words spoken by people  arise out of insecurity, ignorance and bitterness. John Maxwell wrote that one of the major tests of relationship building is the ability to rejoice and celebrate with others when they triumph. A persistent challenge.

Emotional Connection

Affective development, affect-sensitive learning environments, affective experiences. These are huge research areas, but specifically for now, I'm interested in emotional engagement because knowledge (and/or cognitive potential) alone is inadequate at producing change in behaviors or attitudes. In conceptualizing my dissertation, now and before, emotional engagement has always been one of the areas I am interested in exploring.

I stumbled upon Chris Koch's posting on building emotional engagement for B2B marketing. It added a layer to my thinking about my dissertation. My earlier posts had indicated that I'm conceptualizing the use of an instructional intervention to facilitate engagement among major stakeholders on a complex issue. To effect change, I need to craft a solution beyond a knowledge intervention. Merrill has often been quoted as saying, "Information is not instruction." Casting more information to a highly educated audience -- would that be effective? How do I engage them emotionally? That determines the type of instructional intervention we will settle on eventually. Koch's response to Sean Tierney's comment on "[c]onnecting through things that people value in their lives" hits the nail on the head (e.g. music, friends, family, aspirations, opportunity, memories).

Storytelling has always been powerful, and continues to be. People are interested in compelling stories. If these stories are connected to them in some way, I'm thinking they will have an effect on their lives. We want to connect people with other people; to help them relate to each other in major ways through narratives enacted in performance, and healthcare is a major concern of everyone's life. If each side can learn a bit better about each other through their stories, how wonderful it would be?

(Image source: www.emoticonsbox.com)

Funneling Down

I feel like I'm plunging deeper into the funnel, from a broad topic to an increasingly narrower focus (I think this metaphor came from Sari Biklen's book on writing a qual research dissertation). What a blessing in disguise not doing my original topic is! I realize I'm a pretty intuitive person. I sensed from writing that 10-11 pages of my first proposal (a lot of hard work it was) that something was not going right. Abandoning it was hard. Not having support after thinking I had it was even harder. I mourned those "wasted" time of reading copious amounts of literature on creativity. But on reflection, nothing is ever lost. Whatever I have read stays with me, a precious knowledge treasure that informs my future steps. Forsaking my earlier writing freed me in new ways. I am immersed in the process of creativity. I am no longer bound to doing an instructional design study in a classroom setting or to think in parochial ways. There are other real life issues to study. And I'm fortunate to get to study one.

(Image source: http://bit.ly/i3YXvt)

Creative Problem-Solving in Reality

(Image Source: Tashi Mannox website: http://bit.ly/f8jkfN) 
Note: I learned about these clouds through Dr. Julia Marshall's presentation. Beautiful and iconic -- representing nature, energy, heaven. And I stumbled upon Tashi Mannox by accident. Gorgeous design!

I feel like an instructional designer with a complex problem that requires a novel solution! How ironic! I am studying myself constantly, because 1. I have read up a LOT on creativity, and 2. never tire of learning about it. When someone told me he was interested in studying innovation but not creativity, I am perplexed. How can a person be interested in one (outcome) and not the other (process and means) when they are intricately linked? Why bother? What for?

With my earlier dissertation topic, I knew I wanted to study creativity and sought to match it with the instructional design field because I wanted to extend knowledge in both fields. Now, I have this complex and very important real-life problem I want to solve and I'm figuring out how to craft the most creative and valuable solution. I find this approach to be more engaging and authentic, a tad easier than problem-finding. Maybe the real creative challenge is in finding a problem, which I think Mark Runco wrote about somewhere. I'm really really grateful to be a part of a team that is seeking to solve this complex problem. Kudos to the Access team: Mj, Mi and R and my wonderful friends Mm and EY!

Expert Advice on Community-Based Arts

I'm having a lot of fun right now learning and conceptualizing my yes, new study! I've attended a talk on art-based research (See Nov 30 posting). Today, I had the honor to talk to Dr. Jan Cohen-Cruz, Director, Imagining America, author and expert on community-based performance (CBP). That is, on an unforgettable day of rain and snow, making the walk to Tolley Building a wet and slushy one. Nevertheless, still memorable.:)

Marj had recommended I read her book(s). I've started with Local Acts. It documents the historical origins, establishes the field and introduces the principles, methodology and performance structures of CBP. As an amateur in theater productions in Singapore, it's never crossed my mind before how theater/arts can be such a collective grassroots, hyphenated and cultural event, (possibly guided by a professional) at the same time.

Her book engrosses me in many parts. Reading about her positionality(?) vis-a-vis CBP fascinated me. I could make a similar comparison with myself. An avid arts lover and coordinator in a high school, producing amateur productions for national youth competitions, a first encounter with a Deaf student, then my HOH niece going profoundly Deaf, learning ASL in Singapore and Syracuse, and then being on this Access project. I see several parts of my life connecting me to this dissertation interest.  

Dr. Cohen-Cruz was amazing. She shared many website links, names of people to contact and stuff to read up. How incredibly helpful!

Resources to explore:
Project Muse database (I'd always been using Web of Science!)
www.communityarts.net (archived resources, but on Facebook as CAN, which I'd already "liked")
CAN writer John Sullivan
Linda Frye Burnham
Society for the Arts in Healthcare
Center on Age and Community, Anne Basting, U Wisc-Milwaukee
forgetmemory.org
ESTA, Elders Share The Arts, Susan Perlstein, founder
National Center for Creative Aging

So here I go, again, deep diving into new literature! *SSS-PLASH*

Deaf Coffee 11-26-2010

How long has it been that I haven't seen BB, my Deaf ASL instructor? I took 2 ASL classes with her and then practiced sometimes with her at my corporate office. But we kept in touch via email and with Facebook, socializing became a cinch, a matter of clicking buttons and pressing keys.

Thanksgiving break was a good time to meet up; everyone was relaxed. There were more people at Panera's that night. BB was already there when I arrived, looking beautiful, unravaged by time. Straight blond hair, pinned up simply.

I signed "Hi, nice to see you again!" Then I stopped. I wanted to say "I'll go get some food. I'm hungry", but what's the sign for hungry? BB gestured. Aah!

K introduced himself after me. I tried to converse with him, to ask what work he does. It became a pretty laborious process because I couldn't read his signs fast enough and I couldn't recall enough signs to interpret his message. It ended up with him, and BB helping out, telling me how often he worked and what he does for a job. At least I think so! :)

Others drifted in after 7pm. S, C and wife, D; A, and husband, G. There was another lady with a hearing husband. A hearing guy named T came and left early. He even interpreted for R who came with his friend, D (both hearing).

I tried to chat/sign as much as I could, but my signing was rusty and I couldn't follow everyone very much. C told me about his work in the army, how he used to be in Hawaii and there was an earthquake then. He was scared. I am just grateful how patient everyone was with my atrocious signing. They fingerspelled slowly so I could catch up with them.

C baked small loaves of mango bread and handed out a couple to everyone. Wonderful!

I'd love to go there every week but I have another weekly group meeting that conflicts with it. Must find another opportunity to practice my signing! I love it.

What struck me most was how difficult it would be for this group of signers to communicate with other non-signing people if they don't know anything about the culture of signing or deafness at all!

For myself, I taught a deaf student in 1998 and since then have become familiar with the d/Deaf culture over time, through formal learning and with a deaf niece. How would any hearing physician who diagnoses patients mainly through what they say, treat a d/Deaf patient appropriately if they don't know what ails them because of language difficulties???