Community
Outreach Summary
In reading Adrian
Piper’s Notes on Funk and hearing her engagement with her community she
mentioned an important insight. She
recalled how she and the people she was dancing with were “LISTENING by
DANCING” in other words it was a literal embodiment of the active engagement
we’re looking to achieve in our communities.
Ideally neither party is passive and that’s just what she achieved and
what I believe I achieved in my outreach.
I’ll
admit I haven’t been keeping up on my blog throughout the semester and had I
been diligent about recording my experience during my community outreach it
might still be fresh in my mind. But I
didn’t and I can only hope that the time away has given me some distance and
perhaps a fresh perspective to look back and reflect on my time there. My placement for the semester was at my old
high school with my former English teacher Ms. Fyke. Ms. Fyke is one of my favorite teachers of
all time and was one the first to give me some simple tools so that I might
better understand an author and gain a deeper understanding of the characters
and to their relationship to the work as a whole. The high school years are formative years for
most American youths and it certainly was for me. It seemed I should return the favor to the
school that gave me so much inspiration and material to draw upon as a writer.
My
function for my outreach project over the semester was to assist Ms. Fyke and
the students in any way I could and to lend my expertise and advice whenever it
added to the classroom. The students
were mostly freshman English students and one class of sophomores. This time in a student’s literary development
is a lot about fundamentals, getting to know the basic and various rhetorical
and thematic devices an author might employ.
What I love about Ms. Fyke and as a teacher now is that she does this in
a way that engages the students. Rather
than memorization of definitions or using disembodied prose ripped from context
to illustrate a specific rhetorical device she draws their attention to
something she is required by the state to teach as occurs while we’re engaging
the text. She asks questions and invites
a conversation about how the author is employing a certain device and for what
effect. In my spare time I consider
myself an amateur philosopher and so her method of teaching reminds me of a
Socratic dialogue. The ancients believed
a teacher should not be made indispensible in the acquisition of knowledge only
a tool in acquiring it. A compass to
guide the way, the students should take the steps.
The
bulk of my time spent in class was during the month of October which meant as
an engagement with various authors of gothic and horror fiction to show
students the diverse manifestations these themes have taken on in literature
and poetry and how they might use them for their culminating short stories at
the end of the month.
My
first interaction with the students was to guide them through a reading of
Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. The only real challenge was familiarizing the
students with some of the language of the time.
We read through the story and then examined it more closely and I tried
to tease them out areas of interest rather than highlighting and mapping them. Asking questions lead to awareness and
conclusions. Students discovered the
“unreliable narrator” and effect this might have on a reader. It’s a simple thing but hadn’t occurred to
them that an author might lie to them.
This gave students an awareness of how perspective has been used and
might be used to serve the purposes of their short stories.
I’d
heard that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else and
before this outreach project I’d never really had the chance to apply that
wisdom but now I know how true it is.
Some of the students who saw that I might be a resource came to me for
advice and I tried to help them by inviting them to ask the right
questions. What kind of story are you
trying to tell? What do you want to
communicate in your story? How do you
plan on doing that? I thought of the
relationship as a traveler and a guide.
The traveler knows where he wants to go but I know the terrain and it’s
my job to guide him there safely. My job
was to show them a way and it was up to them to take the path.
The
frustrating part was when a student would come to me asking for advice on how
to tell a story that when they gave me a brief synopsis I’d felt I’d heard
before. This was a point of conflict
because I felt conflicted about whether I might be being bias and forcefully
trying to guide them away from cliché and convention or whether I was just
pushing my own sense of aesthetic onto them.
Do I try to push them into doing something they’re not passionate about
squashing any desire to pursue creative expression further? It’s a conflict I run into all the time and
unfortunately it wasn’t any easier here.
A lot of the girls returned to old material like vampires or lovers
beyond the grave or from different worlds.
The boys went with derivations of campfire stories, gory murders, or
gory campfire stories. A few students
started with unique ideas and some had unique twists to these old ideas and
that was the least I was looking for. I
wasn’t expecting to see the spark of a young Faulkner in every students eye or
any students eye but I wanted them to at least attempt to complicate convention
if not do it very well. I was personally
proud of a few students final products, they’d worked hard on them and they
were good stories for high school freshmen.
The others I was glad I was able to help them achieve what they wanted
to do with their work. If someone isn’t
passionate about the work their making then what’s the point? I felt accomplished in keeping their spark to
write something, anything alive.
If
this class has done anything for me it’s been a prompt in and of itself that’s
called me to question how the work I plan on doing in the future will engage
the community and culture at large. I’d
like to write and direct films professionally and I know at least that some of
my work will have controversial material in it.
I plan on making a film that will have a lot of violence in it so I’ve
been thinking about how I’ll use it in a way that doesn’t glorify it or at
least undermines it. How will the
audience know that this isn’t violence for the sake of violence? Also my films will often be very personal,
abstractions of real thoughts and experiences made allegorical. Will the film make too easy of a connection
to me and my life? Do I own this
experience when I’m trying to communicate the context and emotional state of
characters to the actors during pre-production and production? The films will be consciously and
unconsciously addressing different ideologies and religions. Do I distance myself from the message I’m
trying to convey in order to allow the viewer to come to it engage it on their
own terms. Would expressing my own
personal views constrain future interpretation of the film and constrain
interpretation through the film through some ideological lens (as an atheist writer/director,
theist writer/director, Catholic writer/director, socialist writer/director)?
This
experience has really ground an old lesson into me about art appreciation. The old adage “you can bring a horse to water
but you can’t make it drink”. You can
show students the inner-workings of an author, show them methods and avenues
they’d never seen before but if they’re not interested there’s nothing you can
do to make them interested. Unless you
assign it to them and require that they’re work fulfill certain criteria,
there’s no way to make them any or all of the things they’ve learned. I learned an important distinction between an
artist and a student-artist. The
student-artist has to adopt a sense of aesthetic other than their own and
employ methods they otherwise would not, as exercises to grow. The artist has to pursue his passions however
they might manifest themselves for him or her.
Otherwise, what’s the point of saying something if it’s not something
you’d care to hear?
Within
this is a lesson I learned about the students and how writing can reach out as
a communal experience. Perhaps we need
to make an inversion of our writing emphasis for students. Rather than asking what students do for
writing? We should be asking ourselves
what writing can do for our students.
Some of the students who approached me with their stories made it clear
that these were stories that were trying to communicate something about their
authors or that their authors needed to get out. In one instance I maintained a professional
distance but the student made it clear that she was wrestling with something
related to herself through her work.
This approach and mindset is something I’ll come away from this
experience. That the welfare of the
writer comes before the welfare of the writing and that if we as writers and
those in our community aren’t putting pen to paper in a way that betters
ourselves, why are we doing it?
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