Event Management
What | arts & activism festival
Audience | undergraduate & graduate students & the local community
Problem | lack of depth & breadth in students’ exposure to diverse artistic sensibilities, disciplines, & processes, need for increased campus connection to the community & vice versa: community connection to the campus
Words In Action was an undergraduate conference that offered professional training for a writing or writing-adjacent career, with a focus on the intersections of art-making, activism, and community-building. The theme for our third annual festival was Eco-Art & Digital Storytelling.
Under the supervision of community literacy activist and story worker Brooke Hessler, literary organizer, queer memoirist, and podcaster Michelle Tea, multi-disciplinary theater artist and performance curator Elizabeth Doud, and game designer and author Rick Dakan, student artists learn skills for raising awareness about the issues that matter to them via a range of analog and digital storytelling practices: video games, micro videos, live performances, and podcasts. Each workshop meets for two 2.5-hour sessions, and each workshop is tied to one of our Spring courses. Students learn in the first session, practice in the second session, and co-teach their peers and their professors during the spring term. We use these skills to co-create multi-modal digital stories for an Eco-Art feature on the New College’s Nul Set, a gorgeous online emporium that was built by a visiting writer and is waiting to be populated with student work.
Accomplishment | interdisciplinary design
This conference illustrates my creativity and ingenuity when designing educational experiences and thinking beyond the conventional curricular format to spark unexpected interdisciplinary connections and collaborations and create opportunities for student artists to create public-facing work, grow “real-world” skills, make art about the issues that matter to them, and build up their belief in creating art that has an impact.
Words In Action
Words In Action
What This Project Exemplifies
This was our fourth annual Words in Action. The first two were hosted online due to COVID-19 and involved collaborations with Joanna Fox, Booker Middle School Language Arts teacher & founder of the Dragonfly Cafe.
The first festival (2020) was thrown online at the last minute when we first went into lockdown in Spring 2020.
The second festival (2021) started with a term-long collaboration called Extraordinary Correspondences. In this multimedia character development and letter-writing workshop, New College students created characters and corresponded from the point of view of their characters (impersonating their characters, so to speak, in epistolary form) with a student from the Dragonfly Poetry Café at Booker Middle School, who was also writing from an imagined character’s POV.
Like pen pals, for imaginary friends!
After corresponding via the post for 14 weeks, New College and Booker Middle Students met for a virtual “show & tell” and public celebration of their extraordinary collaboration!
The third festival (2022) incorporated 10 events across 7 days and featured nationally-renowned professional practitioners alongside student collaborators.
In 2023, I re-envisioned the festival as a conference, featuring four hands-on workshops in digital storytelling, video game design, ecoperformance, and podcasting. Because two workshops are running concurrently, and students have to choose between digital storytelling and ecoperformance and video game design and podcasting, student participants return to their spring classes and teach each other. After the conference, they are “experts” in two specific subjects and they master the skills they learned by teaching them to their peers.
Adult Learning Theory: Learn | Practice | Reflect | Teach | LPRT
The flow of this conference—from the classroom to the public event and back to the classroom and finally to an online emporium—was designed to help young adults transition into self-directing adult learners, who accept shared responsibility for planning and operating the learning experience, who discover gaps for themselves (between where they are as apprentice artists and where they want to be), and who engage in a highly dynamic and high stakes learning experience.
My Learn | Practice | Reflect | Teach (LPRT) model maps onto several adult learning theories—like ADDIE, ACCEL, FFAC, and ARC's. Each workshop met for 2.5 hours in the morning and 2.5 hours in the afternoon. In the morning the students learned and in the afternoon they practiced. When they prepared for small group teaching, they reflected. When they taught, they took shared responsibility for their own and their peers' education.
