Making Film into a Productive Teaching Tool

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“The puffballs. When the puffballs come, then winter is almost gone.”

Thus begins Amarcord, Fellini’s autobiographical film, a brilliant tribute to his birthplace Rimini. I’ve been replaying its opening scene in my mind for the last few days, desperately wishing for some signs of spring in NYC.

This weekend I finally sat down and watched Amarcord in full again. The last time I watched it this closely was several years ago when I was constructing a writing assignment around it for my composition class. Naively, I thought my students would immediately share my fascination with the colorful characters and the sheer surreal beauty of some of the scenes: a boy encountering a white bull in the fog or a gorgeous peacock appearing out of nowhere in the midst of snow. To say the least, my students were not engaged when I showed the film. I was willing to connect their reaction, rather lack thereof, to anything – non-linear narrative, symbolism, unrealistic characters, insufficient introduction to Fellini on my part – but subtitles. Really, I was very surprised to learn that a small inconvenience to read short notes while watching a scene would be met with such intense resistance.

Watching the film again, I wondered how subtitles could be made into a useful tool in the classroom. If the film is in English, subtitles can work to the advantage of English language learners, or to their detriment: relying on the written text, they may turn off their listening. I did some additional searching online and found an extensive list of practices aiming to develop linguistic and cultural literacies through film as described by Anthony Helm in the post “Teaching Language Through Film” on the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) blog. Helm reports how two foreign language instructors use film to create teaching resources. A Russian instructor Alfia Rakova “develop[ed] teaching materials (readers and exercise books) from the scripts of four films. Film scripts are not regularly published, however, so it meant watching and re-watching the film countless times in order to extract a working script. From there, she could build vocabulary lists, identify parts of the film that serve to demonstrate grammatical points that she wants her students to work with and understand, and highlight language exchanges between characters that serve to model real-world interactions.” A Japanese instructor Mayumi Ishida focuses, among other things, on how “films excel at presenting clear demonstrations of non-verbal communications, which textbooks may only be able to describe.” I find the whole post illuminating when thinking about the place of film in the classroom across disciplines and encourage those interested in the subject to take a look.

Filed Under: ESL, Media, Pedagogy

Sharing stories, expanding worlds

October 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I was recently introduced to the work of a wonderful British singer/songwriter  Catherine Paver. Her self-introduction reads: “I write storytelling songs in an acoustic/Americana style. I love deserts, rivers and dusty little towns full of stories. I am a London-based singer/songwriter and accompany myself on guitar and keyboards.” At the midpoint of the semester, when you’re swamped with work and terrified by deadlines, the expansive spaces of the American West and Southern Africa in her photographs are dangerously inviting, as are the touching stories told in her lyrical songs, as you can tell from their titles: “The Fire of the West,” “River Song,” “Thunder Gold.”

On Paver’s website, you can find mesmerizing photos of the places that have inspired her songs. Many of them feature proverbs and aphorisms originating in those places along with the lines from her songs. One saying stood out to me, mainly because it managed to express my dissertation thesis with the clarity, precision, and suggestiveness I could never hope to achieve in my writing: “People are people through other people” (Xhosa proverb).

I was also tempted to read this in connection to our last Great Works faculty roundtable that centered on the different uses of student writing in the classroom: modeling, peer reviews, blogging, writing workshops, collaborative writing (i.e., wiki). One faculty member voiced a very common concern that students are not always ready to give each other constructive criticism in peer reviews. One could add that more often than not the recipients of their peers’ feedback tend to ignore it, jumping to the professor’s comments for obvious reasons. Yet, we still try to find ways to encourage students to open doors into each other’s writing, and through that into each other’s experiential realities and thinking paradigms. Isn’t it, in the long run, about helping them grow as people through other people (other than the authority figure of their professor)? David Ignatow says it better than I ever could in his poem “My Place”:

I am good to talk to,

you feel in my speech

a location, an expectation

and all said to me in reply

is to reinforce this feeling

because all said is towards

my place and the speaker

too grows his

from which he speaks to mine

having located himself

through my place.

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Feedback, Music

Guilty Pleasures

October 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

I think Cacophony now generates telepathy in the characteristically uncanny way. Thinking about a possible subject for my post, I was fixated on the idea of sharing a few random photos I got at a London book fair a couple of weeks ago. I sat down to read recent posts, hoping to be swayed away from my non-academic topic, and of course saw that Zohra has recently explored so gracefully the experience of (re)discovering archival treasures. Now I feel a bit less guilty to talk about my discovery.

The Bloomsbury Book Fair took place at a hotel where a large hall was transformed, probably overnight or in the course of early morning hours, into a very natural habitat for a great number of book dealers and their collectibles: books, photographs, maps, manuscripts and the like. As its numerous virtual counterparts dealing with found photos and paintings, this physical place exuded the air of an orphanage, urging you to adopt abandoned beings. Once you did, however, you immediately felt unimaginable pangs of shame and discomfort one feels when intruding upon someone’s privacy, claiming possessions of another, and depriving something of its independent existence, albeit in a box. I wonder if the physicality of both the place and its ‘orphans’ can evoke these feelings more powerfully than ‘orphan’ websites can.

However, the book fair also had a regal aura, proudly hosting a procession of respectable relics: first editions; dusty, yellow-paged books, cleverly and warmly inscribed; glowing surviving maps of the Chinese Empire, etc. It was my first time at such a strangely honorable gathering, so I had to be slowly introduced to the protocol. Those who frequent such book fairs explained that I could put aside the things I liked and come back to them. I also learned, to my embarrassment, that a person “manning photography” would not direct me to American letters, as this was not a store where books were classified neatly on the shelves.

All I could do was quickly embrace the exuberant promise of accidental finds!

I was drawn to a box brimming with photographs. And, here are some of my black and white picks: a 1929 photo of “sea nymphs at play on the rocks at Dinard, before taking a swim,” as the inscription reads; an undated wedding photo of two people who look alike before even starting to live together; a copyright protected photo (oops) of charming chimps, the property of the Gibraltar Tourist Office; the image of a solitary gentleman who in his solemn elegance doesn’t seem to know what to do with the boundless, breathtaking landscape behind him (except to make a picture perhaps and  meditate later on the meaning of life).

Virginia Woolf would call these “moments of being”; Milan Kundera may see occasions for character creation (as he famously reflected on the birth of his charactes, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. …[C]haracters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about”);  Joseph Cornell would be tempted to construct a new existential context for them in a shadow box.

I’m also thinking of Baudelaire, in particular his prose poem “Windows,” in which the speaker is more passionate about looking into a closed window than out of an open one:

A man looking out of an open window never sees as much as the same man looking directly at a closed window. There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming….

To me, looking at an unknown photo epitomizes the same kind of promise as looking through a closed window does to Baudelaire: it is a promise of simultaneously discovering and creating a life (if you’re thinking this is my way of redeeming my fetishism, you’re probably right ), and, if we are lucky with the visual or written cues, a life in history.

Filed Under: Art, To Ponder

Flowery Writing

March 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I had big writing plans for the weekend, including my Cacophony post. After spending the whole Sunday drafting a conference abstract and having no topic in mind for my blog post, I ventured out into the rain. Around 11 pm I found myself buying flowers at a local grocery store. I always confuse florists when I randomly pick up individual stems rather than completed bouquets. And then I usually say no to the easy filler of Baby’s breath. No such fluffy nonsense in my Ikebana!

Photo credit Ikebana Arts Studio

Ikebana is a form of Japanese floral art whose major premises are minimalism, symmetry, and organic composition. The stems must be positioned at designated angles, and they must be visible, not hidden in a vase. For this purpose, Ikebana arrangements are made in a kenzan, a flower holder consisting of many closely positioned spikes upon and between which the stems and twigs are placed. If kenzan is not a part of a larger container, it can be placed in one that is best suited for the given arrangement.

Ikebana has a very rich history and philosophy that I have never had a chance to study; for instance, in the most basic composition three stems are slanted in certain ways to symbolize the relationship between heaven, earth, and human being. When I work on my flower arrangements, I don’t usually think about these higher meanings. But I do enjoy every step of the process from selecting flowers to finding the right surface and background in my apartment for the finished arrangements. I wish I could say the same about writing.

And yet last night Ikebana taught me something really valuable about writing: concentration and discipline cannot fully preempt chaos. There was a moment when my major stems were in place, but the arrangement wasn’t appealing. It didn’t express what I intended it to express. Usually by the end of process, I’m pleasantly surprised that the final composition is more exact and beautiful than I imagined it to be. This was not the case yesterday!

I was upset, but then reminded myself that I wasn’t fully done, that there were several small flowers and leaves I could add to reshape the arrangement. Not really having faith in my actions, I cut my remaining thin stems and began sticking them into the kenzan. Magically, my unbalanced composition was transformed into a (not exactly minimalist) cascade of yellow daisies!

Now I have to go back to my conference abstract, and I so hope it will be transformed in the same way.

Filed Under: Process, Revision

Literature Becomes Electric

October 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

“Everyone is reading short-form text. Literature has not made that jump.” This is a key line from a recent NYT article “Serving Literature by the Tweet” which concerns a new literary magazine Electric Literature. The name of the magazine startled me at first, as I’m a big believer in the old fashioned way of reading literature: precisely as a long-form text printed on a page where I can make notes in the margins. The editors of this new magazine, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, make their texts available in multiple mediums: print, Kindle, e-book, iPhone, Twitter, and even audio books. They publish such well-known authors as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard.

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqOy2rvfqM[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJieivqFQs[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg[/youtube]

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, and everywhere we go. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasiveness of the electronic world, I must admit that it can effectively create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

Filed Under: literature, Media, Resources, Technology, Twitter

Writing Spaces

May 15, 2009 By 6 Comments

From where I sit
Creative Commons License photo credit: Olivander

Aside from its main mission to establish a relationship between academic and business discourses, this year’s Symposium has, in my view, peripherally addressed another notorious bifurcation of academic and creative writing. Perhaps Peter Elbow’s proposition to ignore audience for some time can be hard to grasp in the context of business letter writing. It does, however, resonate fully with our experience with more expressive writing forms, those that convey a personal voice and in turn strike personal notes in the audience.

Listening to Elbow, I recalled a Q&A session with Orhan Pamuk. To my question whom he imagines as his audience when drafting his autobiography, he quickly responded “myself.” He explained that thinking about potentially disapproving readers would hamper his authenticity and creative effort. Another writer, whose personal journals have been a subject of my scrupulous analysis these days, connected his inability to write truthfully about his life to his typewriter, seeing it as his immediate audience.

But a self-invitation into a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf has famously called it, is something we seek also when working on projects less posh than a poetic autobiography (though a psychologist can easily make a case that a dissertation is a piece of autobiography); I’m referring to such prosaic items of academic life as seminar papers, articles, and dissertations. For me, an important take-away from Elbow’s speech was that the process of composition happens in very similar ways for writers engaged in creative and academic projects. Whether one is working on a novel or dissertation, the vocabulary to describe the writing process would be the same, ranging from such romantic concepts as exploration to such terrifying buzz words as writer’s block.

In both cases, receiving effective feedback from, alas, audience, at later stages of the composition process becomes essential as well!

Filed Under: Audience, Feedback, Process

Uncultured Oafs?

April 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A recent NYT Op-Ed piece addresses a curious issue of what it means to be perceived and self-perceived as an intellectual, and the expectations and anxieties associated with it. The author, Calvin Trillin, a graduate of a prestigious university, is concerned about “whether or not [he is] an uncultured oaf.” He has found a good way to evaluate his intellectual and cultural inclinations: by comparing his likes and dislikes to those of his highly respected intellectual friend James. He was particularly glad to learn that James shared his admiration for a recent dance performance. BUT the reviewer of the performance “implied, without using these precise words, that the program had been designed to make modern dance palatable to, well, uncultured oafs.” He concludes the article, pondering, “What did that say about me? What, for that matter did it say about James? Is it possible that I’m such an uncultured oaf that the person I’d always considered the most cultured person I know is also an uncultured oaf?”

Surely, once we receive a particular degree or become a part of a particular profession, we immediately set expectations and become anxiously self-conscious about fulfilling them. In various ways, academic settings tend to enhance our sensitivity to whether we come across to our audiences – and to ourselves – as uncultured oafs. The article brought back memories of my first year in graduate school when I felt like a total impostor in a circle of aspiring young scholars. I was also reminded of the eagerness with which beginning graduate students sometimes imitate the convoluted and often incomprehensible academic prose they read.

Trillin wants to do away with the very label of uncultured oafs, it seems to me, as most of us want to do away with the bifurcation of high and popular culture, or academic and real worlds. Have we all been successful?

Filed Under: Audience, To Ponder

Missing Connections

March 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

Continuing with my subway theme and in light of our next Symposium topic, I found myself feeling very self-conscious of my eavesdropping on a conversation on the F train last night. What never fails to grab my attention in public places is Russian speech.   So there they were – a couple, in their thirties, discussing … and this is where I get tongue-tied because I couldn’t quite get the context of their conversation. I heard, “She goes to all the popular places in Moscow. … Why they’re together is a mystery to his parents, and to hers as well!” And then, oh how I hoped the guy would repeat the subject of “was the biggest mistake of my life. It was, really was the biggest mistake.” My curiosity about what my comrades residing in the parallel universe of Russian Federation consider their biggest mistakes in life wasn’t fulfilled. But, I was reminded of a wonderful passage from Rachel Cohen’s essay “Lost Cities”:

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?

Filed Under: Audience, Fun, Internet, New York

A Subway Rendezvous

March 4, 2009 By 1 Comment

Like most of us, I commute to Manhattan almost every day. Usually, the fiery F train doesn’t keep me waiting for more than 10 minutes. Not too long ago, I was at the 57th Street station. It was late evening and most people on the platform looked tired. My favorite violinist started playing Ave Maria. He usually has something resembling a stereo at his feet that provides accompaniment to his melody. I admire his playing, always with the same glow on his face, regardless of whether it’s stifling hot or freezing at the platform.

That evening there was a guest appearance. Another subway violinist, (this one was “off duty” and seemed to be doing the same thing we were — waiting for the train) greeted him and sat down to listen. In a moment, he turned to his friend and suggested, “Let’s play Chardish together and they’ll give us money.” I had seen each of them many times before, but they had never performed together. And now they played in complete unison, as if they had rehearsed in advance. Every note of one violin was perfectly doubled and amplified by that of another. Perfect harmony and no train on either side of the platform!

They finished and we all applauded! But there was the expression of confusion on people’s faces: there was only one hat to throw money in. Most of us hesitated, partly because we read hesitation in the faces of others, and suppressed the impulse to give anything.

We all have exceptional subway stories to tell. This impromptu performance is one of mine, beautiful in its spontaneity and sad in its outcome. One of the things that struck me was that no words were needed for an exceptionally balanced performance to take place- the musicians did not say a word to each other as they were playing, most likely for the first time together. At the same time, unspoken language could destroy — right there, in a mere moment — our basic instinct to express gratitude.

Filed Under: New York, To Ponder

How do we deal with writer’s block again?

February 10, 2009 By 2 Comments

Students often approach me to get advice on how to overcome this writing disaster. I got bored with my old explanations and ‘googled’ it only to find an extensive and impressive list of solutions on Wikipedia. “Challenging negative thoughts about one’s skill or ability to write” – isn’t this a good one? This ‘challenging’ can be immeasurably difficult if one’s experience with writing hasn’t been very positive in the past. Let’s rethink again the amount of red ink we spend on each paper and the tone of our comments!

The last thing I want to do in this post is pretend that I never question my writing abilities. What can and in my case does effectively dissolve this negative thinking is reading. Somehow, as I move from sentence to sentence, even in the most familiar of pages, I’m made aware of my skill to think, to feel, and to formulate my thoughts and feelings in language. Once I’ve consciously gone through this process, I feel inspired to write.

The Wikipedia page includes a list of “dramatic depictions of writer’s block,” among them Shakespeare in Love and Stranger than Fiction. I’d add another list – literary depictions of writer’s block. And, perhaps, one more – professional writers’ strategies for overcoming writer’s block. Here is how it goes for Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” How is this for a first-day low-stakes writing activity?

Filed Under: Feedback, Language, literature, Low-Stakes Writing, Writing Instruction
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