5th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts
Thursday morning was spilt into 4 sessions, each about 30 minutes long. Our original plan was to stream the special agents into an upper and a lower ability group, but that didn’t happen in the end (I think mainly because it hadn’t happened the previous afternoon either) so we just kept to the two normal class groups.
The main aim for the day was to produce the song for Skatz to take back to Nednil with him, so the special agents worked to develop the light and shadow vocabulary further, and produced a dictionary of relevant “wow words”. The groups also collaborated to write a verse each and to compose an instrumental section for the song.
We also did some more work to reinforce the activities from the previous day.
Again, I was in a predominantly support role, but this was a much better situation compared to the previous day: Skatz was leading the musical side of things and the teachers were leading the vocabulary-based stuff. As it should be.
As well as being able to spend 1-on-1 time with any special agents who were struggling, I concentrated on documenting the activities. I generally try to give myself a character where it’s perfectly logical for them to always be carrying a camera and taking photos of what’s going on, and this project was no exception.
As well as my stills camera (which I also used to record the video) I also had a digital voice recorder. Things can get a bit side-tracked of you start using things like this to do ad hoc interviews etc during activities – everybody wants a go! – so what I did was to use a pair of binaural microphones (they look like earphones) and pretend that they were ear pieces and that I was listening out in case Agents A or E (Emma, the Creative partnerships agent) tried to contact me.
(Incidentally, I nearly got caught out a couple of times on the Monday, so from the Tuesday I carried a collection of spare batteries, mics and empty memory cards around with me in a camera bag clipped to my belt. I’d also been making quite a big deal of using my notepad to write down everything that we did and found out. This went in the kit bag too, as well as a spare pen!)
Here is a sample of audio taken from first thing in the morning using the binaural mics. (They were looking at their messages to Agent A again.) There’s a lot of background noise and echo, but they do well considering we’re talking in quite hushed voices. Another thing to bear in mind is that audio’s a useful tool because it frees you up from some of the issues of publishing childrens’ photos when it comes to publicising a project.
The downside of all these photos (about 450 on my camera over the 4 days) and all the ambient recording, is the sheer quantity of material produced. It could be a great way for teachers to monitor understanding etc, but realistically I think I’m the only one who trawls through it after the project has finished. Question: is there any merit in making going through the documentation an integral part of the project?
(Just as a guide, it will generally take me at least a day (usually unpaid) to put together something half-way-decent as an overview of what the project was about. How much longer would it take to include evaluation of what’s been documented and does that add enough value to warrant the time spent on it?)
As well as the general as-it-happens documentation, we also had the very specific need to document the song that was the main outcome of the project. This was quite nerve-wracking because, although Skatz had bought a voice recorder too, it was playing up and we couldn’t get it to work. That put the burden of responsibility onto mine and the set-up of the afternoon was that it was a one-shot-only chance to get it recorded correctly. A bit daunting, to say the least, but it worked and I was able to convert it and email a link to the teachers overnight so that they could play it in assembly the next morning.
The afternoon was orientated around Skatz’s farewell. The special agents spent some time rehearsing the song they had written and also a sheet of wow words for Skatz to take home with him. The way the sessions worked out led to an interesting situation where one of the teachers who was not confident with teaching music had to lead her class in rehearsing their instrumental section whilst Skatz was working with the other group. She was quite daunted by the prospect, but had seen Skatz working with her class previously and so was able to use the same techniques that he had used. I don’t now how this has affected her confidence long-term, but this sort of thing is a really simple, basic illustration of good stuff that can come out of these types of projects where teaching is split between visiting professionals and the teachers.
Then it was time for the grand finale…
The original plan (have I used that phrase quite a lot?) was to go back out onto the playground and do another big humming path to open up the inter-dimensional tear that Skatz travelled through, but this idea got rained off. Instead, we gathered in the hall and shut the doors and drew the curtains as before.
There was a round of thank-yous and goodbyes and presentations and then we sang the finished song:
[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/WOW.mp3]
Bring us words to wake up the light,
We can’t go on living in the night.
We need knowledge of the shadows and the sun,
Without help, our world is done.
Help us make and sing our song,
To bring us light and right the wrong.
One last thing we have to tell,
Only wow words break the spell, only wow words break the spell.
Feed the spiders, feed the spiders,
Find out what they need to wake.
They need light, a powerful light:
Energy to help defeat the night.
Feed the spiders, feed the spiders,
Find out more for us to take.
Our experiments show transparent,
Not translucent is what’s right.
Bring us words to wake up the light,
We can’t go on living in the night.
We need knowledge of the shadows and the sun,
Without help, our world is done.
Help us make and sing our song,
To bring us light and right the wrong.
One last thing we have to tell,
Only wow words break the spell, only wow words break the spell.
[dark instrumental]
In the morning, when the sun rise,
Long dark shadows casts to the West.
Then at Midday sun is highest,
Shadows short beneath our feet.
In the evening when the sun sets,
Long dark shadows spread to the East.
Measuring the shadows’ length,
Tells us when to wake and sleep.
Bring us words to wake up the light,
We can’t go on living in the night.
We need knowledge of the shadows and the sun,
Without help, our world is done.
Help us make and sing our song,
To bring us light and right the wrong.
One last thing we have to tell,
Only wow words break the spell, only wow words break the spell.
[light instrumental]
Opaque objects block the light,
Forming shadows dark as night
When the object is translucent,
That’s when shadows start to fade.
When the object is transparent,
It forms a shadow light and bright.
Twisting turning round the object,
Means a stretched out shadow’s made.
Bring us words to wake up the light,
We can’t go on living in the night.
We need knowledge of the shadows and the sun,
Without help, our world is done.
Help us make and sing our song,
To bring us light and right the wrong.
One last thing we have to tell,
Only wow words break the spell, only wow words break the spell.
After the song, we had to somehow dispose of Skatz: something we’d wrestled with all through the project. We felt it was important to have the illusion of him being transported back to his dimension, rather than just going out through the school gate and walking down the road. After allowing the special agents to play freely for a few minutes with the mystery objects/glow sticks from their investigation packs, we gathered them into 2 lines and got them to wear their blindfolds whilst Skatz performed a ceremony that involved him walking up and down the rows beating out a rhythm on a cymbal.
During this process Skatz secretly passed the cymbal to me and crept out of the hall (us having carefully padded the frame at lunch time so it wouldn’t make any noise). Once Skatz was out of the building I dropped the cymbal and we turned the lights on as everybody took their blindfolds off.
The special agents, on discovering Skatz was no longer in the room, all immediately rushed over to the storeroom in the corner where a load of furniture and sports equipment was kept. They were utterly convinced he was in there, despite me having seen that at least half of them were peeking out from underneath their blindfolds as I walked around. Interestingly, not one single child spoke up to say that it had been me on the cymbal. We did a bit of “what happened?” and “where do you think he’s gone?” hunting around and entertaining theories, before gathering everyone together to wrap up.
It was at this point that I realised we had serious misjudged this part of the project.
We had been so intent on making sure the effect was convincing, that we had almost completely omitted to take into consideration the affect it would have on the emotions of the children we were working with. They were all really sad and subdued and it took a lot of work from myself and the teachers to put a positive spin on it and to bring the energy levels back up. Some weeks later when the CP agent went back to the school to get feedback from the pupils, the overwhelming first reaction was that they were hurt that Skatz had left without saying goodbye.
The reality was that we did quite a lot of the goodbye and thank you stuff, it’s just that Skatz had used a little I’ll-sing-you-another-song-after-this-thing-with-the-cymbal sleight of hand to try and discourage peeking and that by far outweighed all the other stuff.
How to wrap up the delivery part of the next project I work on is something I will need to give a lot more thought to. In the Pod in the Quad project, a goodbye was used as a prompt for a golden time session with Paul Conneally discussing themes of saying goodbye, and I think we should probably have included an aspect of this in the Song for Skatz project.
I got lots of hugs from the special agents as they left the room, and then I sorted out some of the remaining equipment, wrote a thank-you-and-I-got-back-safely-and-all-the-lights-came-back letter from Skatz and then that was it. Skatz had gone straight to a gig in Bristol and the teachers were busy with meetings etc. I think I needed a different goodbye too!
I think I’ll leave the issue of evaluation and feedback for the next post…
What we learned
- We spent a lot of time correcting the pupils from saying “small” shadows for when objects were far away from the light source before we realised that they were just trying to express the concept of faint.
- Artists leading activities is good, teachers leading activities is good; teachers being able to observe how artists lead activities can be very good.
- Have a range of methods of documenting – both in terms of media and in terms of ambient vs interview styles.
- When glow sticks are bent too much and crack open they don’t half make a mess and it is human nature to peek out of the gap at the bottom of a blindfold!
- Please do consider relaxing the tightness of the narrative in exchange for a more gentle/discussed goodbye.
5th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts