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

Stories from settings and characters

Being as it's Christmas, I've been thinking about the Christmas story.  Like most stories, you can construct it from its setting and its characters.  I analysed the Christmas carols we sing at services:

Carol	Setting	Characters	Comment
Once in Royal David’s City	A town, with a cattle shed, stable	Mother, baby,	Nowadays, you are unlikely to find any cattle in a city, but until the beginning of the 20th century, people provided fresh milk in towns and cities by keeping cows in the town. You can find old pictures of cattle grazing on the open spaces. Stables were needed everywhere because of the use of horses for transport.
While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night	Night time,	Shepherds, angels, baby, manger (stable)
The First Nowell	Fields, cold winter’s night	Angel, shepherds, sheep
Little Town of Bethlehem	Silent morning, stars, dark street,	Angels present, and sleeping mortals, but interesting absence of people but with reference mortals sleeping, and God, Christ and Mary.
Silent Night	Bright, silent night, near dawn	Mother, child, shepherds, contrasting noise from a singing ‘heavenly host’
Three Kings	Star, Bethlehem plain	Kings, 3 from the orient, and a fourth born, referred to but otherwise not active.	Notice the use of props (boundary objects) in this carol.  Each gift has a meaning.
Little Donkey	A road, town in sight, star above, cattle shed	Mary, donkey, wise men,
Good King Wenceslas	Deep crisp even snow, bright moon lit night, forest,	King (old man) and page boy, poor man carry fuel (pine logs)
Little Drummer Boy	The setting isn’t stated	Ox, lamb, drummer boy, Mary, baby, “They”	Note the need for the prop (the drum). The “they” refers to people who told the boy to bring gifts.

You see how, knowing characters and settings you can construct a story.  If you have a Christian background, you probably know the story is about the same in most of these carols - they all refer to night time, a clear night and a special star, and they are all about a special baby.  Some of them make this an opportunity to express another sentiment or meaning.  For instance, the "Three Kings" uses the gift of myrrh to forecast the baby's death.  "Once in Royal David's City" admonishes children to be as obedient and good as the baby. "While Shepherds Watched" offers glory to God. 
For the JuxtaLearn project, students need similarly identify settings and characters that unfold a story that expresses a deeper meaning about the STEM subject of interest. 
Happy Christmas.

Engaging and disengaging

"I am writing to inform you that we as a Faculty have discussed the idea further and are not able to contribute to the project."

thus emailed a school contact, disengaging from our project.  I didn't get the marketing right, not for this public for our research.  The gatekeepers are school teachers, the people that would have to orchestrate the classrooms and timetables while the students juxtapose their learning with their own performed ideas. And my targeting email got it wrong. 

However, my colleague, Gill has been working on this and written a one page hand-out that starts:

JuxtaLearn is a large EU-­funded project that aims to help students overcome the barriers presented by Tricky Topics which often cause students to give up a subject. During initial trials, 74% of students showed progression in their quiz results over the course of the day. The JuxtaLearn Workshops can be run as a series of sessions. All sessions and supporting tools are free to schools. The first session is with researchers and teacher(s) and takes place before the student sessions. Student sessions are flexible; they can run over a full school day, or split into smaller sessions with activities taking place pre-­‐workshop following the flipped classroom approach.

Then she outlines the preparatory session for teacher training and professional development.  I particularly like how she shows the radar charts that reveal gaps in student understanding, indicating that teachers will learn to write effective quiz questions that will result in such useful charts.

Links to our videos are

• JuxtaLearn tricky topic tool and quiz: https://vimeo.com/109829640 (2 minutes 56 secs)
• JuxtaLearn workshop (chemistry): https://vimeo.com/109827064 (3 minutes 21 secs)
• Juxtaposing performance and learning :  https://vimeo.com/109331885 (3 minutes)

So we'll try sharing this information with other schools.  Will they engage?

Theatre studies workshop

Theatre studies - now would you say that was a subject full of threshold concepts?  Apparently, it is, the theatre studies teacher at an MK school assures us, and he gave us and his sixth formers an example: the difference between naturalism and realism.

We went into a school on Monday, four researchers, nay, five of us, following nearly a dozen kids as they struggled to understand these 'isms'.  Eleven students, either in year 12 or about to start year 12, came along to the workshop day, most of them having studied their teacher, Gary's, pencasts.  He'd put the pencasts together a day or two earlier, and emailed them to read them.  One student was in the classroom reading a pencast off her mobile device.  Another complained that she couldn't watch it and listen on a mobile device, so I guess they could get only the pdf form.  But they did like these pencasts, and saw them as something to watch, read and study independently, without having to be in the classroom, but also that they liked the familiarity of their teachers' voice, a personality that they knew.

Eleven students made up three groups of two fours and a three.  One group of four was all boys, the group of three was all girls, and the last group was mixed.  The adults included:

• the teacher, 
• our lead researcher, Anne,
• the OU research associate, Gill who'd put together the tricky topic tool, about which more anon,
• Liz who once worked for Catcher Media,
• Canan who felt rotten ill and took notes and films all day,
• Aba-Sah from Birmingham who wanted to provide table top software of the storyboard.

The tricky topic tool is a means for the teacher to analyse the stumbling blocks within a threshold concept (Meyer and Land's idea).  It requires the teacher to open a web page with options to pick and choice topics of interest, and then set up quizzes to test the students' understanding.  I've tried it and it takes ages to do because of the thinking, experience and analysis it requires.  The idea is to test students before and after they've worked on their video idea.  So the first activity of the day was for students to take their starting quiz.  No one worried what the mark gained was, just that we had a base line to compare with at the end of the day. 

Then we gave the run down on what the project was about - that the EU funded it and so on, during which they looked blank, bored or fazed.  To enthuse them, we showed a five minute video on juxtaposing, but it confused not enthused, and needs remaking. A new draft is available already at https://vimeo.com/99420903 with the password 'Juxtaposing', and a further version at https://vimeo.com/101430106.  Students were raring to go, ready to write, and though they didn't need the video but were polite about it, and it did give some of them some ideas. Perhaps theatre studies students see themselves as creative already. 

They sat around in their groups on the floor of what I assume is the drama studio, a dark room with black out blinds on the window - a shame because it was a beautiful day, and perhaps we should have opened the blinds in the morning, though later people were using the room to put their performances together. They sat and talked.  Within half an hour, ideas were flowing, multi-coloured penned words represented abstract ideas on the all-girls paper, biro crossings-out and stick men on other papers.  Then things slowed down, with little more action, apart from the odd late comer, student or researcher arriving. Gary told them they had half an hour more, no - only thirty minutes - and they had to be on to pre-production by then, allocating roles and sourcing assets.  They all groaned, but funnily enough within ten minutes were up and off, each student group with an OU borrowed flip video camera, and some with a tripod.  I suspect they were stuck creatively, and what they need is to do something active, try it out, find it doesn't work and return to the storyboard, which to some extent is what they did, except that they didn't return to the storyboard,  One group rather than spoil the storyboard, wrote on the back of the paper (the prompts were originally on the back - why weren't they?  Wasn't the paper printed double sided?) and kept changes in their heads!

The mixed group of four students (L, J, H and M) went down to the hall to use the stage.  Where Aba-Sah and I sat to observe and record (Aba-Sah's recordings are all up in a dropbox), we couldn't hear the students, not even when they were performing, let alone when they discussed.  I went up on the stage to eavesdrop, setting up my flip video camera.  But actually, a lot of the time they were quiet, thinking, not talking.  J tapped her finger nails.  They were pretty nails as were L's, and tapping drew attention to how pretty they were. Perhaps the tapping represented frustration, a not-knowing what to do.
However, eventually, Gary appeared, talked through with them again on what naturalism and realism was, and suggested they found somewhere quieter to record.  That hour was the students' learning hour, I reckon.  That was the hour when they stumbled and fumbled, realising that they didn't realise. 

Perhaps M didn't realise.  He'd taken charge of the tripod and the camera, and standing off stage wasn't in some of the conversations that the other three had.  Watching the recording of a major discussion, I observe he didn't contribute. Didn't he have a lower score on the second quiz?  That would imply that you need to join in the conversation,  at least be present, if you are going to learn.  M was apart; he wasn't present.

We had a hasty lunch on the floor of the drama studio, observed some more video production, then retired to a room full of OU laptops for the students to edit before doing the second quiz.  Gary promised them that those that scored highly would go on a trip, so there was some tension and angst.  Somewhat to their surprise, students who had struggled most with the concepts, students who felt they didn't have the perfect product, a viewable video, were the ones who'd made the biggest progress.   But that outcome pleased Gary and proves to the researchers that the process improves the learning.