By ADELE BRUNI ASHLEY

​We begin our session with an exercise borrowed from Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Players (our term for students and teachers who are in creative collaboration with each other) disperse throughout the room facing in any direction and are invited to move silently about the room at their own pace without collision, always passing through the center of the room en route to another side (rather than merely circling the periphery). Welcome to the act of milling and seething.
 
The purpose of this introductory activity is twofold: first, to foster an awareness of space. All too often in school, students are aware of neither the classroom as a physical space nor themselves and their peers as bodies coexisting within that space. Milling and seething prompts students to examine the entirety of the classroom space; at points, the facilitator leading the activity claps and says, “Look around. Are there any empty places in the room? When I clap again, move to fill them.” Students thus begin to notice the gaps and spaces within the room at any given time and to understand their responsibility to venture out and fill those gaps and spaces. And because of the mandate that they move through the center of the room as they mill and seethe, students must negotiate encounters with one another. They must become aware of where their individual bodies end and the bodies of others begin.

Second, to ease players into imaginative work without any burden of “performance.” There exists no audience in this exercise; all are players. Players need only follow the directions of the facilitator (“When I clap, pause wherever you are. When I clap again, begin moving.”), and these directions shift subtly as the exercise progresses. While at first, the facilitator might ask players to “speed up (or slow down) by 50%, whatever that means to you,” directions ultimately become more like this one: “Pause. You have somewhere important to be. You’re late. When I clap again, get there.” Even with this simple direction, the players start to move into imaginative worlds. 

Reimagining texts and teaching

The Literacy Unbound initiative, the driving force behind this session, was originally conceived as a grand experiment in teacher education that sought to encourage instructors to consider the power of artistic play as an opportunity to help students develop as critical, collaborative, creative readers. At its core, Literacy Unbound seeks to reinvigorate students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts. Throughout this process, we often witness increased student engagement and the development of a stronger classroom community.

By bringing students and teachers together as creative collaborators, we’re able to reimagine the acts of reading, writing, listening, and speaking through multiple modalities. Though various aspects of this process can change, the core principles always remain the same:

• Begin with movement. Establish a precedent for movement in your classroom early on so students become accustomed to shifting quickly between sitting and walking in the classroom (and pushing desks and tables aside as needed). And be sure that this movement is low stakes. When leading classroom workshops like this one, I often start by saying, “Now, I’m going to ask you to do the most difficult thing I’ll ask you to do all day. When I clap, walk. When I clap again, stop. What questions do you have?” There is laughter when I say this, and students almost instantaneously relax. All they need to do is walk together.

 

• Keep returning to the text. In many classrooms, any kind of movement activity is treated as entirely separate from an “official reading” of the text at hand: one day, we read the text and the next, we do the movement activity (or vice versa). We try to find ways in our classroom workshops of incorporating the text into the movement — of reading with a pen in hand during the same class period in which we mill and seethe. When we ask students to integrate text into their movement in some way, we give them only small pieces with which to work — a word, a phrase, a line. We build larger ideas through an examination of the smaller pieces. 

 

• Compose through movement. All too often, educators use movement to re-present ideas already formed. What we attempt to do in our workshops is craft opportunities for students to discover ideas through movement and then put those ideas into words.

 

• Build the world of the text. As much as possible, we work to “coach students into story,” inviting them into the world of the text in some way. We might approach this by coaching students through guided visualization, or the act of letter writing; in general, we want to offer students sensory details (or sensory questions: What does it smell like? What’s on the walls?) that might help them to step into both textual environments and characters. Prompting students to write in character (or in some other way that makes sense within the given text) then enables them to build that textual world still further.
  
  

Why does this work? 

Through this approach, students get the chance to move — intellectually, physically and emotionally — into the world of the text. So frequently, we talk about text in the classroom. By contrast, our process allows students to talk from within the text; they speak directly from the perspective of one character and then another. They can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible. At Literacy Unbound, we believe strongly that rich meaning-making happens when we find ways to experience literature together in the classroom. 

TAGS: ADELE BRUNI ASHLEY, LITERACY UNBOUND, PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

By G. FAITH LITTLE

If a prompt is like a camera lens, pulling your task into focus, an invitation is like a colorful string you can’t resist pulling to see what happens next. Writing an invitation for the reader to connect with a text can be as simple as choosing a quote and offering ways for the reader to respond, as we did with our One Book, One New York invitations when the city was reading Americanah.

When we send out invitations to our Literacy Unbound players, each day for about a month leading up to our annual Summer Institute, we wait in anticipation to find out which strings they’ll pull and what will happen next. It isn’t magic to create an invitation, though when people respond the results are often magical!

Nathan Blom’s Guide to Crafting Invitations to Create provides guidance on creating “invitations [that] speak to the recipient, enticing them to run with it and see where it leads; [that] open up and spark the creative process; [that] limber up thinking and lead us into meaningful conversations.” Consider playing with all or part of the structure Nathan outlines below and see what happens for you and for your students.

A Guide to Crafting Invitations to Create
Nathan Allan Blom
INSTEP Program Coordinator & Adjunct Instructor, Teachers College, Columbia University
Literacy Unbound Facilitator


Contextualized quote from the text
Choose a “hotspot” within the text. These should be passages of the text which you find worthy of attention, for whatever reason. These hotspots might or might not be the most important passages for the novel’s plot or themes. They should be rich with:
 

• Connections, connotations, and associations
• Character descriptions
• Imagery and details
• Significant settings
• Gaps in the text (for example, is there a character present whose voice isn’t heard?)
• Anything else that seems inspiring

 
Be sure to contextualize the quote and explain where it comes from. Give your recipient an idea of where this passage occurs within the arc of the story events, or within the theme that you want to draw their attention to.
 
Let’s use The Color Purple as an example. The inscription to Chapter 1 states, "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." We can assume these words come from Celie's father, and that he is talking to her about the trauma he inflicts upon her. Celie takes this up and the entirety of the novel results from her letters to God (an "epistolary" is a novel in the form of letters).

Commentary on the quotation
Offer your recipient a brief commentary on the passage, without being heavy-handed. Phrase your commentary as a tentative offering of ideas, not a definitive statement of authority. Or, share the connections that occur to you when you read the passage. Or, explain the questions that arise when you read this passage, and the reasons for those questions.
 
In Chapter 3, while trying to protect her younger sister, Nettie, from their rapist and infant-killing father, Celie says, "But I say I'll take care of you. With God help." Again, she turns to God for psychological and spiritual strength in the face of horrific events. Throughout history, people have sought spiritual refuge in the face of traumatic events, and this refuge often appears in the form of music or art. An example of this phenomenon is the tradition of African-American spirituals.

Connections to other "texts"
Putting texts into conversation with each other allows for deeper understanding. In essence, bringing in other texts is bringing more voices into the conversation. These voices add ideas and perspectives that may be absent if we only heard the single voice of the original text. The new voices complicate and contextualize meanings in unique and powerful ways. Also, sharing creative works is one of the keys to inspiring creative works.
 
What outside media exist that illustrate and/or extend your connections, questions, or ideas? Include them in the Invitation, not as a way of defining what your recipient should do, but instead as a way of showing them what they could do and inspiring them to move further. Look to different media for inspiration:
 

• Works of visual art (illustrations, graphics, paintings, etc.)
• Audio works (instrumental pieces, songs, recordings, etc.)
• Nonfiction texts (websites, articles, poems, quotations, etc.)
• Historical documents
• Videos
• Anything else you can find

 
Here are some links to African-American spirituals and gospels from performers during early 1900s (the time period of The Color Purple), and from more contemporary performers, descendants of the same tradition. There are many more examples out there.
 
Listen and watch and respond to some of this music. Consider the interaction between the meaning of the words, and the emotional color of the music. What is being expressed? Why is it being expressed? Have you ever felt the need to express in a similar manner?

A prompt for creation
​The final part of the Invitation to Create is the actual invitation itself. You must leave your recipient with a call to create. Be thoughtful in how narrowly or broadly you craft your prompting.
 
Do you define a medium they should use (“Represent your ideas visually….”)? Do you leave it open (“Respond in whatever way you see fit….”)? Often times asking someone to move from one medium to another, such as from the written word to the visual image, for example, inspires an act of creation as the recipient tries to imagine how ideas transfer between the two.
 
Do you guide the content of their response (“Create from the perspective of one of the silent characters of this scene….”)?
 
In whatever way seems best to you (poetry, prose, music, art, video, dance, etc.), explore the ideas, emotions, and experiences within these moments of refuge seeking.

Invitation for The Color Purple using this structure
​The inscription to Chapter 1 states, "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." We can assume these words come from Celie's father, and that he is talking to her about the trauma he inflicts upon her. Celie takes this up and the entirety of the novel results from her letters to God (an "epistolary" is a novel in the form of letters).
 
In Chapter 3, while trying to protect her younger sister, Nettie, from their rapist and infant-killing father, says, "But I say I'll take care of you. With God help." Again, she turns to God for psychological and spiritual strength in the face horrific events. Throughout history, people have sought spiritual refuge in the face of traumatic events, and this refuge often appears in the form of music or art. An example of this phenomenon is the tradition of African-American spirituals.
 
Here are some links to African-American spirituals and gospels from performers during early 1900s (the time period of The Color Purple), and from more contemporary performers, descendants of the same tradition. There are many more examples out there.
 
Listen and watch and respond to some of this music. Consider the interaction between the meaning of the words, and the emotional color of the music. What is being expressed? Why is it being expressed? Have you ever felt the need to express in a similar manner?
 
In whatever way seems best to you (poetry, prose, music, art, video, dance, etc.), explore the ideas, emotions, and experiences within these moments of refuge seeking.

Happy practicing! Enjoy the exploration, and if you’re interested in learning more, check out our Literacy Unbound initiative, and upcoming Summer Institute.


TAGS: CREATIVITY, G. FAITH LITTLE, LITERACY UNBOUND, PROJECT-BASED LEARNING