Inspiration

Kelly and I had the opportunity to go see Shane Koyczan live this past Tuesday.  Shane is a powerful spoken word poet who is part of the inspiration for our synergy project.  Going to see his performance brought forward a few questions about the logistics of our own poetry slam we plan to hold as the community share out of our project.  With 60 students participating in our project, one of the main things we need to accommodate is the sheer amount of time it would take for students to present their poetry in front of an audience. One thought is to not have all students present, however, we feel presenting to an authentic audience is a key factor in our project that we are not wanting to give up.  Another proposed solution would be to have the students write their poetry in pairs.  With such a big project (the poem and the video) perhaps students could present together or one student could present while the other works on the video so both students would have ownership.

Another thought that came up when we were at the performance was surrounding the role music will play in our presentations. At Shane Koyczan's performance, the music was live and on stage.  Our original intention was to have students record the music with the ipads and place it in their imovie presentations, which is still what I believe would be the most seamless on stage.  However, this brings about an element of timing which I had not thought of.  Following the idea of design thinking, I believe helping students understand the importance music brings to spoken word poetry, then having them work together to time their presentations will be important.