Blogging Pedagogy - performance

Practicing Rhetorical Analysis with Music Videos

Deb Streusand — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 23:24:52 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Screenshot by Deb Streusand from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg, Taylor Swift's video for "Blank Space"

In my Rhetoric of Performance class, we begin each class day by watching and discussing a brief performance a student has brought in to share with the class. Since these performances are supposed to be 3-5 minutes, students frequently bring in music videos. With each performance, we do an informal rhetorical analysis.

First I ask the students what they noticed about the performance while they were watching. They frequently make note of things like symbolism and imagery – in other words, they tend to close read the videos. The goal of my line of questioning after that, however, is to bring them away from that tendency and into the world of rhetorical analysis.

I ask the students what they think the argument of the performance is. The argument of a performance is not like the argument of a written piece. With a good piece of persuasive writing, as a rule, everyone should come away from it with the same general idea of what the argument was. With a performance, it’s not a bad thing if we come away with some disagreement as to what the argument might be. The students often debate what the argument is, or bring in a multiplicity of answers, but they never have trouble finding some argument in the piece, even though music videos aren’t necessarily designed to make and defend a claim. One of the principles I put forth in teaching this class is that every performance has an argument. I believe this is true, but making the claim makes me a little nervous, because defending it is inevitably inductive – I will never conclusively prove that every single performance has an argument. However, each class day, my students add credence to my gradual inductive proof of this claim, because they have never failed to find an argument in any performance we’ve watched.

After we’ve wrangled over the argument for a while, we start talking rhetorical appeals. They don’t know that’s what we’re doing yet, though. We haven’t actually entered the rhetorical analysis unit. But we’ve been doing this all semester, from the second class day. By the time they get to rhetorical analysis, they’re already going to be pros at doing it – all that will be new to them is the terminology.

Every day, I ask them: what kind of persona does the performer present in making this argument? What is the intended audience, and how are they supposed to feel? How is the argument supported? What are the current social conversations to which this argument is contributing? Ethos, pathos, logos, kairos – all in a 4 minute video. My students practice rhetorical analysis 10-15 minutes per class day, all semester long. And because music videos are fun to watch and take apart, they have a great time while they’re doing it.

We don’t always watch music videos. Some students bring in short dance pieces, or political rants, or slam poetry. I mention music videos because they would be easy to incorporate into a non-performance rhetoric class as a warmup for rhetorical analysis. To make it simpler, the professor might choose them instead of having students bring them in, to make sure there’s lots to talk about – I always start the semester with Beyoncé’s video for “Flawless,” which has never failed to spark dialogue. The main point is to get the students used to doing rhetorical analysis while talking about something that’s fun.

YouTube Comments as Performed Pastiche

Deb Streusand — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 22:17:28 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Screenshot by Deb Streusand

For my course on the Rhetoric of Performance, my students are putting together a brief performance of their own. The idea is for them to learn how performance makes arguments by choosing an argument and putting together a performance to make that argument. Inspired by the Ice Bucket Challenge and John Berger’s work on the visual rhetoric of advertising, they’ve chosen to argue that people participate in viral trends because they want other people to envy them. The students decided that they wanted their performance to embody such viral trends as the Harlem Shake and the cups song; in performing these, they would take on the role of the people who wanted others to envy them. From a performance perspective, they chose to do something highly entertaining, but from a rhetorical perspective, there was something missing. How would we position those performances as undertaken for the purpose of provoking envy?

As teacher-cum-director, I suggested that we have part of the class performing while the rest of the class commented on the performance, and then rotate through different groups of performers and commentators. That way, we could get a viewer’s perspective on each performance. Commenting during the performance would also allow us to show the performers’ reaction to envy.

The students had been watching YouTube videos of the trends they were investigating, which meant that I had spent a lot of time looking at YouTube comments over my students’ shoulders as I supervised their work. I suggested that they start collecting some of these comments and proposed that we make a pastiche. Faced with this unknown word at 4:00 pm, several of them at once asked me, “is that a kind of pastry?” Though they were disappointed to discover that it was not, they dove right into the research to make one. They examined the YouTube comments on these videos in detail and selected the ones that they thought demonstrated envy. Googling “envy quotes” and “envy poems,” they added passages associated with envy to their array of comments. They also wrote their own YouTube-style comments to fill in the blanks when they felt that the pastiche material didn’t express what they needed.

Due to having a lot of other things to cover, we’ve only been rehearsing about 15-20 minutes a class period, so we have yet to stage the performances and use the comments we’ve written up. It’ll be interesting to see how the comments sound aloud, and whether there’s something of the effect described by this XKCD comic. As we rehearse, though, I think we’ll be able to filter and shape our pastiche to make the envy argument clear. (In fact, it’ll be probably be more transparent than the argument of most performances, since many performances do not start out with the idea of making an argument per se. One of my contentions in teaching this course has been that every performance has an argument, but they’re certainly easier to spot in some than in others.) It’s my hope that performing the comment pastiche will help my students understand how timing, intonation, and other performative elements contribute to shaping the meaning of the written word.

Experimenting with Democracy/Anarchy and Experiencing Poetry Publicly

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:21:36 +0000

Author:

Bo Jacks

Image Credit:

Psychofox

For as long as I can remember, I've been disturbed by the autocratic necessity of the classroom, and perhaps more so as I began noticing the mystifications attempted to obscure this component--the circular "learning" tables, the walls removed from classrooms (this was in elementary), the countless "cooperative" activities. As I began teaching six years ago at UT, this problem became even more personal: how does one talk about democracy or any kind of radical politics while standing at the front of a mass of students dictating what is expected--what they must do to earn some grade, or make themselves a better person/citizen/subject, or do something for the greater good? Even now, I don't have an answer that is comforting but I am trying different pedagogical tactics to, at the very least, bring this problem to the level of visibility for students, while also recognizing and confessing to them that their instructor is ultimately the sovereign, or the one who decides on their grade and the exceptions.

This semester I had another pedagogical problematic that I hoped to tackle in tandem with the teacher/student or sovereign/multitude problem: poetry memorization. Whenever it was that pedagogy turned from the rote memorization of facts in favor of concepts, some elements of knowledge building were thrown out necessarily--one of them being the mass recitation of poetry in front of an audience. While I find this practice vital to preserving poetic practice and interest in prosody, I didn't want to revert to the older model where students were compelled to memorize Casabianca or Hamlet's soliloquy. Thus, I decided to structure a reward system where memorizing and reciting a poem in class would be done initially for the extra grade bump and later to impress their peers.

The lesson plan is a semester-wide project that asks students to help guide the direction of the course voluntarily and to create content as we proceed. From the first day, I stated that anybody who would come into class and recite a memorized poem or 7lines of a long poem would receive a poker chip worth 1/2, 1, or 2pts toward their final grade. Significant conceptual contributions as well as particularly insightful commentaries on the website forum would be treated similarly. This project was explained to them as a way of bringing poetry back into a public space without making it entirely compulsory. The caveat, however, was that as instructor I ultimately make the decision about what is worth a chip and that cannot be questioned.

Thus far the experiment has led to some very lively discussion and some sweet moments where students shared an outside poem that they otherwise would have kept to themselves. At moments, these recitations have given us the opportunity to reconsider how prosody and thought in general work through different technologies, whether we watched that machine of the brain take in a poem and retool it, used eComma to collectively comment on a poem, or watched the social machine compete for attention in a limited public.

The problem still remains of how to broaden the decisions outward into the classroom, but this small attempt at pulling back from dictation/indoctrination has been helpful in clearing some of the mystification away in this semester of English 314L Reading Poetry.

Here is a link to the lesson plan:

Public Poetry and Democracy in the Classroom

And one cool moment in this experiment where a student spontaneously brought in his guitar to sing/recite a poem not on the syllabus, but related to the previous class: