Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. Illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest...Quest stories have at least three facets: memoir, manifesto, and automythology. (the ability to create a larger than life persona for oneself)"
Part 1: The videos I have been influenced by and how I will use them to shape my work.
The Ted talks I have been quite influenced by are some I have viewed before and others that I just discovered including:
Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability
Ann Cuddy: Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are
Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts
Bill T. Jones: The dancer, the singer, the cellist ... and a moment of creative magic
A new video I hadn’t seen which is very creative and makes me feel I can be more creative with this talk is the one by Camile Brown: A Visual History of Social Dance
What I like about each of these talks is that they use the personal narrative to engage the listener. Each surprises me in some unique way and takes me by surprise in some way or another. The first time I heard Ann Cuddy I was impressed by her straightforward analytical style of conveying information. What took my breath away was her personal narrative and how vulnerable she became as she entrusted her audience with very personal parts of her life. From the visual standpoint, she uses photos when they are useful, but they don’t become a distraction. That is critical, in my opinion, to being an effective talk.
Brene Brown, on the other hand, used visuals that were in two forms:
Quotes which affirm the human spirit
Technical data point slides (Brown is a researcher)
My inclination is to use quotes to illustrate my points rather than slides with data, since my style is more toward storyteller and less like a researcher, though I hope to reverse that somewhat in my next semester as a Master’s candidate at Wayne State.
Sir Ken Robinson is a researcher who embodies both realms: creativity and empirical evidence. His personal stories are deeply felt and succinct. His talk comes the closest to what I am hoping to track; creativity and innovation with students leading the way.
Cain finds ways of mining deep into her psyche as she reflects on her personal experiences in the education system:
But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
Susan Cain says what I feel in my heart and what I love about her talk is that she doesn’t use slides. She has one prop and that is something I could incorporate to illustrate my point. Camile Brown and Bill T. Jones embedded in their talk are examples of their creativity and teaching style, which I would love to undertake in the future.
For me, I want to combine a personal narrative (like Cuddy or Cain) facts about the work I have undertaken in my Teaching Artistry; I will intersperse my story with quotes and facts. I am not completely certain what platform to use but I will begin to explore ways of filming and interspersing that narrative with slides and musical transitions. My work will be a personal narrative with a voice for myself as the student (learner) and the innovator. The talk will be geared toward reflection and discovery.