As a public school educator I am often asked to rethink ideas, modify lessons, and attend professional development that, ideally, helps me on this journey. However, I am rarely given time to do so. One of the advantages of the masters in Education Technology program at MSU, is the time I have been given time to think critically and creatively about my professional role. Being an English teacher, you would think that I would be confident with creativity, and practice it frequently, yet I, like many, rarely think of myself as a creative person. I think we all need to start to respect the type of creativity that we participate in everyday. From solving common problems around the house using an odd solution, composing an email to our boss, or simply breaking out a quick dance when no one is looking, we all take some time to be a bit creative. While these past two weeks have seen me dabble in creativity from a variety of lenses, abstraction felt like I was back at home in my classroom. According to Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, abstraction is isolating your focus to one view while ignoring its other properties, thus focusing on one feature that is of importance (2001, p. 72-73). By looking at themes, settings, characters, etc. we use abstraction in the ELA classroom often. However, with more time to play, I was able to abstract ideas and then combine them with my personal interests, hobbies, and context to come up with deeply personal abstractions that connect myself to the content. For example, I took my love of board games, and combined it with my intention to revise my Macbeth unit, to create a Macbeth card game. Abstractly, this looks at the component parts of a stage production. Players take cards to put together the best stage show. Please see my video for more details: After leveraging my interests and combining them with Macbeth, I had a newfound interest in stage production. I continued to think about how I could abstractly “score” various components of a stage in a way that made sense and even spent some time reading about how theater performances are put together. Connecting the content to my real life saw me more inspired to find out more. I can only hope that my students can make similar connections and find themselves interested in learning more. Abstraction also works as we detect symbols throughout the pieces of literature we discuss. To students, symbolism can feel like cruel and unusual punishment. It seems like a puzzle that English teachers have put together just to torment them, but again, these abstract concepts are what connect us to literature. Symbols connect literature to the real world. Similarly, themes connect us to ideas that guide who we are. I often tell my students that themes and symbols are why they love a book. When they find an aspect of themselves in ideas or objects with symbolic representation, they connect with the story. To play with this, I used Craiyon, an AI that can generate original art based on text prompts. I started plugging in specific ideas from Macbeth, but quickly dove back into abstraction, and started to move away from the tangible to intangible ideas. The creations were magnificent, eerie, and evocative. Craiyon still has a permanent tab on my phone’s web browser, and I frequently dump large text prompts in it to see what new horrors it bestows upon the world. After playing with it, I immediately put together a draft assignment so that my students could explore how this AI “paints” their abstract ideas, and then write about where they see the connections and what surprised them. I hope writing and thinking about these ideas, and even discussing how on Earth a computer can do that, will stoke the same interest it did for me. I think the reason abstraction excites me is that, to me, it requires empathy. It requires you to break things apart in the same way we can get into the minds of others, and experience the context of their life that makes them who they are. I can’t think of a more valuable skill as an educator than to break something into its component parts or ideas, and then reassemble them, with a fresh understanding and respect of their nuance and complexity. By abstracting, we better understand our material, but more importantly, our students. References
McGregor, D (2022, July 19). Macbeth Abstraction [Images]. McGregor, D. (2022, July 18). Stage Production Card Game. [Video]. YouTube https://youtu.be/QzWp0duWiNc Root-Bernstein, R. S., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2001). Sparks of genius: The thirteen thinking tools of the world's most creative people. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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David McGregorI am an English teacher and cat lover from Genesee County, Michigan who is eager to learn new things. Archives
August 2022
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