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Tuesday 20 January 2015

Understanding the creative JuxtaLearn process

First, I’ll outline the JuxtaLearn performance process

Juxta-Learn context
Step #
Action
Who (actors)
Notes
1: diagnosis & feedback
1
Identify the tricky topic (TT)
Teacher
 
2
Identify the stumbling blocks (SB) of the TT
 
3
Create the example teaching activity (ETA)
 
2: creative juxta-positioning
4
Choose a SB to work with
Students
 
5
Find the characters of the ETA
These two steps of finding character & setting can be in either order
6
Find the settings(s) of the ETA
7
Choose a stumbling block
 
8
Explore the storyline of the stumbling block
 
9
Create juxtaposing characters
These two steps of creating character & setting can be in either order
10
Create juxtaposing settings
11
Create a storyline that relates the juxtaposing characters & settings
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hence,
ETA
Juxtaposed performance
Characters
Juxtaposed characters
Setting
Juxtaposed setting
Storyline
Juxtaposed storyline

For example,
ETA
 
Juxtaposed performance
 
Characters
Molecular values of water and carbon dioxide
Juxtaposed characters
Mrs Mole and her blobby friends in  green plasticine
Setting
Laboratory containers
Juxtaposed setting
Bell jars
Storyline
Process of titration or calculation of moles depending on stumbling block
Juxtaposed storyline
Narrative comparison of molecular size and weights

Now the students can plan the story scenes on their storyboard


Sunday 4 January 2015

Public engagement

Although this blog is called Storyboards and Tricky Topics, it started because we are interested in exploring public engagement with the JuxtaLearn research that uses storyboards to learn tricky topics through performance.  Hence, the blogging team's occasional foray into definitions and literature about engagement.  As Andrew made clear here, our interest in engagement is not students engaged with learning, not customers engaged with a product, but is particular to public engagement with research.  Nick Mahoney has written a paper relevant to public engagement available at
https://www.academia.edu/6324835/The_work_of_public_engagement_2013_
Mahoney explores the work needed to engage the public in current research - he calls it 'contemporary'. From the work arise three perspectives on publics:
  1. "emergence-oriented" that attends to mediated and reflexive qualities of publics. He cites work of "art and performance theorist Shannon Jackson", which I find interesting in the context of JuxtaLearn's performance aspect.  Is a community based theatre the sort of thing he means, like https://twitter.com/OpenscriptBucks
  2. a perspective that is more philosophical & normative in approach and emphasis
  3. a perspective that takes the public as a real and pre-existing entity - I see that as a difficulty - define the public (see earlier discussion on public), but if you know who you are targeting then you can quantify, calculate and survey.
All three bodies of work linked to these perspectives offer resources to use to explore public engagement and therefore Mahoney's paper and related research are relevant. 


MAHONEY, N. (2013) The work of public engagement. Comunicazioni sociali, 3, 349-358.