My Session Plan : Containers for Meaning
- Take a moment to have a deep breath, and unwind your shoulders.
- Unbox the Chinese New Year gift I was given from a student. Take turns to pass it round – one stage of unwrapping per person, with each layer laid out on the table. Contextualise in relation to my own positionality and not having a deep knowledge of Chinese New Year and it’s cultural resonances but finding the experience of receiving this gift very affective, especially context of my ongoing interest in creating containers for meaning.
- Discussion : What did you feel as we unboxed that together?
- The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction : Introduce the text briefly. Handout copies so everyone has one. A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is 1986 essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which she sets out her approach to writing – her theory of fiction. She starts by telling a story about prehistoric human interactions and how the main human activity would be gathering, and hence how the first cultural objects were containers. She reflects on what impact this version of prehistory has, and what possibilities it opens up in contrast to the version where the ‘Hero’ slays the mammoth.
- Read together an extract, again passing the text around the group one sentence at a time. The sentences vary in length and we will adhere to the punctuation so we may have very short sentences or very lengthy ones.
- Construct a container out of plasticene – inspired perhaps by one of the objects on the table
- As we work on these together – discuss together the text and the questions it raises.
- If time, pass the plasticene objects around and work on top of someone elses’
- Finish by in your imagination sealing a word into the container.
- Closing moment where people can choose to share this if they wish.
References:
Le Guin, U.K. (1986). Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction. S.L.: Ignota Books. Download avaliable: https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Le_Guin_Ursula_K_1986_1989_The_Carrier_Bag_Theory_of_Fiction.pdf
Reflections on my microteaching session:
My peers were really struck by reading the text together and most had not done this before. This surprised me, probably because it is a core part of my my own teaching practice and a weekly feature in the intersectional feminist reading group I run. Most of the discussion centred around this, rather than the content of the text itself which I did not anticipate.
Reflections on my peers’ microteaching sessions:
Antonia led a beautiful session on block printing, reflecting on her own practice of printing and graphic design and providing us each with handcut stamps she had made. I made the print on fabric below and found this a very meditative exercise. Everyone responded to this activity in their own way, responding to the context of their own disciplines too, so the person teaching on fashion covered the whole fabric as if it was a seamless fabric design, whereas mine functions more as an art object.
Other peers led workshops pm:
using polaroid photography to rethink portraiture
abstract perspex shapes to create fashion designs. Note: I found the stylished female bodies quite difficult to work with so used my design to obliterate or hid the body – see below.
creating museums of the future using found objects and fictional writing
using a section from Macbeth which we staged as an improv reading
It was genuinely inspiring to see so many different types of teaching practice and I felt like I left with a great deal of ideas to try out with my own students.
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