Category: AAD Community

Research Reading: Week 6

 

My Conceptual Framework

This week I designed a conceptual framework for my research based on the new direction my research is going. Here is an explanation for it’s structure: The over-arcing theme is community cultural development. Since taking Bill Flood’s class, I’ve been looking at all organizations under this lens. I am focusing my scope on organizations that fit within community cultural development: asset-based ground-up community collaboration. Since community cultural development is a well-known term, I believe I will be able to use it as way to fit my research within an established field and as a guiding point for all of my research. Plus, I’ve already read many books on the field that will be a great help in crafting my research!

The main topic is on facilitating personal storytelling. By personal, I mean true stories told by and about the storyteller. I don’t think that this term is confusing, but I may have to find a source to provide a proper definition. My focus is on facilitation rather than education, because I am looking at these projects as community cultural development, in which the role of the facilitator is to guide the participants along their own journey rather than providing them a fixed route. By this lens, education is seen as top-down and facilitation as ground-up. This argument will largely be based on a reciprocal learning model (Friere), hence why I am I looking at best practices that foster shared authority and reciprocity.

The venn diagram is a visual representation of my question. I am in interested in finding the best practices for facilitating personal storytelling at the intersection of process and product. I want to look at models and talk to organizations that have worked on this issue and create a compiled list of best practices. The issues I am concerned with involves ensuring a process that (as listed) establishes a safe place, builds upon the storyteller’s creative agency and supports his/her self efficacy. This can be difficult when the facilitator is also working with the storyteller to create a quality product. Furthermore, if the storyteller has to perform or present their story, the pressure for quality is increased. I want to find out how facilitators navigate between process and product to build trust with the storyteller without dominating the process. I have not quite crafted my official question based on this model, but this framework has allowed me to more accurately flush out the areas I want study. I am guessing there will have to be many sub questions in order to cover everything.

The block below the venn diagram demonstrates the foundation for my research. I’m looking at it as a building block for understanding how to examine the organizations listed below. Of course one main component will be my literature review, which will cover areas like reciprocal learning (Friere), teaching creative agency, definitions of community cultural development, and facilitation methods. I will then build upon that knowledge by taking the intensive PYE facilitation training. I still have to apply for the training next year, but it runs Nov-March of next year, which will be perfect timing for my research. The hands-on facilitation training I will get from them will provide me with a better understanding of the facilitator’s role in community arts projects and will definitely answer some of my questions about process. Lastly, I plan to examine the documents from organizations who are working in this field. I have already started collecting documents related to collaborative storytelling projects, specifically codes of ethics. Analyzing these documents will be a great asset for showing how organizations are actively trying to answer my question.

Many of these documents come from the organizations on the final arc. These are the different examples I will use to back-up my findings and demonstrate a collaborative storytelling process. I am hoping that I will be able to talk with key people from each of these organizations, since not all of them have published writing. I do plan to read the CDS’s books this summer (while I’m interning for them) and I’ve already read an article on Scribe. I’ve been in contact with The Moth, though I need to try again soon. While they are very different organizations, they are all using the facilitation process that I want to look at. They will serve to be great real-world examples of community cultural development in collaborative storytelling practices.

 

Story Catchers Practicum: Week 4

This week I mostly worked on the index project. Marsha and I talked and she will be sending me information to catalog over the next month. It was a much faster process since Marsha has been providing me with a short summary, timing of interview and key words. Essentially this new process just requires me to plug the information into the Excel sheet with very few edits. I’ve been trying to make sure all variants of key words are included and that every entry has at least these three key words: Eugene history, Eugene and personal history. The most difficult part is deciding what to put as Organization/Topic, because sometimes there is more than one topic discussed in an interview, but I think it’s important to choose a main theme to be put in the title of the entry. This way people can get a general sense of each interview just be looking at the title. I did have to spend some time editing the older informational sheets, but I suspect that process will be more streamlined from here on out.

I do have some bad news: my audio editing class has been cancelled. This means I will basically have to teach myself. However, I have a friend with some audio software that he promised to let me use. We are meeting up this Thursday and he will show me some basics of the program. Hopefully this will be a good launching point to actually editing a story. My hope is still to edit 2 stories this quarter. Depending on how complicated this editing software is, I think it’s still possible. I’ve been holding off on contacting KLCC till I’ve edited a story. This will have to be a conversation that will continue. Perhaps I will work on editing stories this summer and into next year. Marsha brought up the idea that it might be a good idea to clean up the recordings before archiving them at the library. We’ll have to see when this part of the project can be done.

Story Catchers Practicum: Week 3

This week I listened to the stories that KLCC edited for the radio in order to get a better idea of how I should edit the stories. I was somewhat surprised to hear the interviewer in these stories. I had been imagining cutting out the interviewer in order to weave together a cohesive story. However, KLCC’s pieces were more like short interviews than complete stories. I guess using this style could make the editing process easier, especially since some of the interviewers provide context to the stories or make sounds in the background. This wouldn’t be awkward if I’m editing the stories to be a conversation. However, I still want to try to use my original idea of presenting the audio in one succinct story from the interviewee. This is the style I most appreciate when listening to podcasts and I think it better represents the mission of Story Catchers. However, if this project is to continue, it may be difficult to use this format for all stories. If we want to have a consistent style for all the stories, it may be better to use the conversation format. I will experiment with this in my audio class before coming to a conclusion.

I also officially started the indexing project this week. I got a hold of Nancy from the library who sent me some guidelines for indexing. Marsha and I met to discuss this and decided to put all the basic information in an Excel sheet and send that to the library. I have conferred with Nancy and Marsha and we have decided the basic format and categories of the index. I then spent Saturday typing up information from the written files Marsha gave me. As I’ve told Marsha, that process took longer than I expected because I had to search for information like length of interview or the appropriate keywords. Marsha and I talked about this and we’ve decided that Marsha will type up all the necessary information and send it to me digitally in order to speed up the process. I will be working more on the indexing this weekend and will better be able assess the time necessary for this project with the new system. Depending on this time commitment, I will determine how possible editing multiple stories this term will be. I may be continuing this part of the project into the summer, especially if KLCC is interested. Regardless, we will still meet our goals this term!

Find Your Media Essay

Assignment Description: Based on your personal engagement with a range of media, describe and critically engage a ‘management’ system/approach; one component of your assignment will be connecting this management approach to a professional setting in the arts/culture sectors (IMAGINED or REAL).

Click on PDF below:

Find Your Media Essay

Research Reading: Week 2

In the first 2 weeks of the term I read the book Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound. This book is a collection of essays written by well-known and respected radio producers on how to create storytelling radio. As one of the mediums I am most interested, I felt this book could give me a good overview of the field. It also serves as a selection of best practices in facilitating storytelling, at least in a journalistic context. I will have to spend some more time over the next few week writing up quotes from this book (since it is a library book), but my overall impression is that best practices for creating storytelling radio are very variant. Each producer had their own style and their own opinions on how to approach the process. While this book may provide some great quotes on storytelling, I don’t know if I’ll be able to use it to demonstrate overall best practices. However, once I start copying down the quotes and coding them, some themes might emerge. I will be posting about my findings in this regard in the next post.

That being said, I believe I am already leaning towards one of my questions: best practices for facilitating storytelling. I’ve been thinking about what I’m most interested in, what will help me and my field and what is  feasible. This question seems to fit all those criteria. This realization is partly through reading an article about the Scribe Video Center and their collaborative video projects. They work with community organizations on video advocacy projects and bring facilitators to guide them. The article talked about the difficulties of facilitating these projects and making decision democratically. These discussions brought up a lot of issues for me around how to facilitate in a way that both ensures quality but doesn’t squelch the storyteller’s confidence. This lead me to the question: How do you facilitate storytelling that supports creative agency? I will have to refine this question, but I think this is the new direction my research will take. I would get to research and learn facilitation practices while still looking into creative agency. This also connects to my interest in community cultural development and can be applicable to the whole community arts field. I’m getting really excited about this idea!