I'm excited for my presentation today - a dry run of sorts for a project proposal.
This project started out to be a basic proposal to the administrators of the school I work at for a Process Theater workshop. The idea being that process theater is the perfect forum for open discourse and learning around the issue of bullying.
As I was doing the research, the interviews, the document analysis ... a thought occurred to me. During this workshop series there would need to be an arc. Volunteer students would come and we would have to begin with trust exercises and basic improv and discussions about the topic to create and even knowledge base and a safe comfortable space for the students to take risks. The next step would need to be a creative outlet about bullying that allowed students to use other people’s stories to share and build upon. Finally, the goal would be that in this space, they would be able to share their own stories comfortably with the rest of the group through an artistic medium of theater, written word, dance or visual art.
My sticking point was the second step; how to get students to build from the stories of others without repeating or just reiterating. THIS IS WHERE I GET REALLY EXCITED! Like a bolt of lightning I was hit with the idea for a modification of 'magnet poetry' that would fit my needs perfectly. With that I launched an ethnographic project to collect as many personal stories of bullying as I could in the time allotted to complete this project. From that research I pulled quotes such as "I never got an invitation" or "while they were picking on you, they weren’t picking on me" and created magnets with these words on them as well as blank magnet pieces. The goal of tonight’s presentation will be to try out this new format for writing prompts. Each "student" will be given a few pre-printed magnet pieces, a few blank magnets, a permanent marker and 5(ish) minutes to create a poem. In the actual class activity they would have more time, but this test must fit into a 10min presentation.

(Examples of writing prompt magnets)