Post-Presentation Reflection

Were there too many approaches? Was one approach strongest?

In the final feedback questionnaire, gaining feedback on the project overall, the first and last questions gave the strongest results:

These both scored highly, with participants stating they felt an increase in confidence in using their voice creatively and an improvement in mood. In analysing these results, I found that the parallel between them was an amount of control that the participant has themselves over evaluating the impact. Their own creative work is a somewhat controlled environment within which they can experiment further and discover if they feel more confident in using their voice creatively. Similarly, the question on wellbeing is easier to evaluate as it is an individual assessment based on ones own previous experience and ascertaining changes in mood according to their own perception.

The second question did not score so highly and this was partly due to the fact that it was a twofold question on both university life in general and the learning environments:

Have the experimental choir workshops helped you in your day to day life and learning at UAL?

On reflection, I think this was a confusing way to phrase two questions as one and would have been better phrased as two separate questions to relate directly to the aims.

The question and aim on the wider university life and whether there was an increase in confidence in using the voice within this context is too big a question for this project, and scored lower as a result of the scope being too broad and amorphous for this specific project. In the wider university context there are more barriers that are beyond the control of both participants and facilitators. There are too many variables to consider for data analysis to be sufficient to draw conclusions on this, though the theme of creative control which I applied through thematic analysis, would also be a factor here as participants would have decreasing degrees of control over their environment. We can draw an arc of increasing use of voice in parallel with increasing creative control for the participant, as they scored higher on the areas where they have more control: their own creative work and wellbeing.

As educators this poses an interesting problem: we can hold space for participants in our teaching spaces and department, but we can’t hold the space of the entire university. In turn, this points to our own creative control and ability to impact change.

For myself, when working on this project I became very ambitious and found my peers and tutors very encouraging. The energy and stamina required for running co-curricular activities has to be taken into account, and I found the experience very rewarding but also very tiring on top of usual workload. Over the past year there have been a number of life events where I have learnt a lot more about pacing, and if I were to begin this project now I would address the need for pacing and scale the scope of the project to fit this.

However, the scale of this project has allowed me to explore the themes within the research broadly and enabled me to form a PhD proposal. This proposal is based on a by-product of the workshops, where I became aware of the fact that as a neurodivergent facilitator I attract neurodivergent participants and create a neurodivergent friendly performance space. I am proposing a PhD that looks at communication for neurodivergent participants within a performance space. This marks a shift in my work, in fact quite a major pivot, where my own needs which I have previously incorporated into my work as a form of probelm-solving, and thereby framed them a problematic, are now central to the work itself and become a major strength as a researcher and educator.

What themes did you identify in the workshop and in the thematic analysis?

The focus of each workshop was different to reflect Friere’s problem posing approach, with a different problem posed for each workshop, and I gathered data on each of these individual workshops relating to the specific aims of each workshop. At the end of the workshops I gathered data based on the project as a whole through a survey.

Workshop 1 Theme: Gaining confidence and exploring accessibility in voice centered works.

This workshop used a score of text and images by Annea Lockwood to address the needs of accessibility and the success of using alternatives to classical musical notation in scores. In participatory data analysis via a mind map, as a group we analysed the success of using this alternative to musical notation and the discussion in creating the mind map focused on what opportunities it gave for increasing use of the voice. My findings were that the group really struggled with vocabulary to describe the voice and the act of discussing as a group in front of each other posed a confidence issue in itself. It felt like an academic exercise pushed into the end of the more playful vocal exercises.

Workshop 2 Theme: To explore play as a form for vocalising the internal or intangible through gesture and games.

This workshop focused on game play and a score by Pauline Oliveros using partner work and the concept of mind reading as a way to connect with other performers vocally. Through the game form of the exquisite corpse exercise we addressed the theme of verbalising the invisible act of voice, and how we can encourage the confidence in using the voice through the senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing. The anonymous participation provided a bigger response equally from all participants. I changed my method of data analysis a lot based on my findings from workshops one, and used the prompt questions as a way to enable differentiation for different participants to find the vocabulary to describe the spaces and scenarios where they would feel more confident using their voice. In turn, I had to hone my own vocabulary for prompting the responses, and define my own verbalisation in order to facilitate the vocabulary to express the experience. My findings were that participants became very poetic in describing the sense and places that would enable their voice to be heard more. This was an early indicator of the role creative control plays in enabling the voice to be heard, as even in the feedback exercise an increase in comfort through anonymity and differentiation allowed for more creative control as each participant contributed their own line of text to each question. The collaborative effort of composing a text piece gave me the idea for the final feedback to take the form of participatory data art.

Workshop 3 Theme: Expression and sounding of identity through character and gesture.

In this workshop we used the Panda chant score by meredith Monk, along with exercises taught to me by Meredith Monk, to explore character and persona in using the voice. This again incorporated game play as part of the exercises. Each participant designed their own card, to be used like a tarot deck of cards in a similar style to the oblique strategies by Brian Eno, or the Etudes card deck by Sharon Gal. My findings within this feedback exercise were that they became quite abstract as directions, due to the prompts being about where and how the voice could be heard more, what attributes would a space have to make one more confident in suing the voice? What would be needed? I was surprised at the massive range of responses, and the overriding theme of nature that came up in many response without any reference to nature from me. Again, this is an indicator of the importance of creative control, this time over environmental factors, and it was interesting to note that most participants would imagine a space in nature, the distinct opposite to the tower block we were within. In broader terms this theme could be expanded to look at university spaces, but relating this project back to the research methods of Lundy’s model, I want to focus on the voice rather than space, as the curriculum takes place predominantly in the space provided by the university, and another study could examine the potential for spaces in nature in curriculum. In terms of thematic analysis for the purposes of this project, this again points to creative control and perhaps there are elements of nature we can bring into the learning space, or perhaps we can encourage students to bring their own agency to control the environment.

Workshop 4 Theme: Exploring the sonification of data collection and evaluation as a voicing activity.

This workshop had to be cancelled, the exercises couldn’t be completed and the survey containing the overall feedback on the project as a whole was sent out as an online survey.

Overall Survey on the Action Research Project

The final data analysis from the online survey was again Thematic Analysis, but this time I took a different approach. In the first 3 workshops I applied Friere’s problem posing approach, which thereby imposes a theme on the data before collecting data, and a framework within which specific research questions can be posed. As a counterpoint, it also imposes limitations on the scope of the data variables. In the final data collection I didn’t want to impose the theme before collecting the data, so the questions were deliberately aligned with the aims of the Action Research Project, in order to ascertain the levels of impact of each aim, and to draw together themes that appeared in the data with less framing or imposing of my own themes. I did this to allow the participants to fully evaluate the project, rather than myself, and to avoid my voice forming the themes to provide an equity of input from both participants and facilitators in data analysis. In doing this, I benefitted myself as a facilitator by allowing space, unformed by my own mind in as much as is possible when using language to form questions. Within the framing of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the language game, we could consider that the feedback questionnaire, taking place within a specific context following the workshops, form part of a language game where the meaning of vocabulary used is partially informed by the meaning assigned to it within the workshops by myself, as facilitator (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953, Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell).

However, due to the widened area of participant recruitment, the entire screen school, the vocabulary used was surprising to me as it reached beyond my own subject area. I was able to draw together themes I had no envisaged or predicted, and therefore I learnt a lot more from this research than would be prescripted by the limitations of my own mind. One of the main things I love about teaching, is the opportunity to have so many minds in one place and the capacity this allows for discussion beyond the limitations of one mind.

The themes I drew together from the final Thematic Analysis of the data from, the online survey were:

• Creative Control and the role it plays in the impact of Action Research
• Wellbeing and the role it plays in facilitating the confidence to explore the workshops
• Play and the role it plays in co-curricular design to enable participation and communication

Creative Control and the role it plays in the impact of Action Research

Within this theme drawn from thematic analysis of the final survey questions, I noted that the responses became less positive as the scope of impact increased. Where participants had the most creative control, they were able to gain the most impact and benefit from the project. In creative work, where they have the most creative control, they scored the highest impact. Within their subject specific department they scored highly on the impact of the project in class discussions. However, in the wider university context where they have less creative control, the impact of the project scored lower. Participants have more opportunity and creative control to try something new and explore the techniques from the workshops within their projects, and they have the control of being their own editor in terms of how and by whom the results get heard.

Wellbeing and the role it plays in facilitating the confidence to explore the workshops

In turn, this pointed to the theme of wellbeing, as the question on wellbeing scored highly in the impact, and the confidence from increased wellbeing can be utilised where there is creative control to form new learning. We can draw a cyclical relationship between the need for wellbeing to increase confidence, the confidence needed to explore new techniques, within the areas where participants have enough creative control to feel able to explore and experiment.

Play and the role it plays in co-curricular design to enable participation and communication

This theme was drawn from the responses to the prompt fr words, formed together as an anonymous word cloud. I had expected words related to sound specific vocabulary based on the workshop content, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the focus of the words was on enjoyment and playfulness. This reinforced my findings from the data collection processes and my refinement of these as play and game based activities. The importance of a co curricular activity containing activities framed as play is evidenced here, as the association of play and the absence of judgement within play, create the environment necessary for exploring new vocal techniques within a group setting, whilst also tethering the memory, both conscious memory and muscle memory, to be easily accessible for future solo exploration. This ties in with the impact from the questions related to the theme of creative control and wellbeing. These three themes of Creative Control, Wellbeing and Play could form a basis for the co curricular activities within this project to be incorporated into curriculum.

Overall, I produced a large amount of data for analysis and this led to several stages in analysis as well as being slightly overwhelmed by the amount of data to analyse. However, the stages in analysis allowed me to apply several different approaches and phases in data analysis, and I believe this has provided me with an important learning curve in data collection and data analysis, rather than leaving it to the end of the project and only applying one approach to data analysis and collection.

What impact has this project had on my teaching practice going forward?

Student Voice

From the feedback gathered, participants found an improvement in using their voices in their creative projects and in class discussion following the workshops.

Support in department for more workshops

There was warm support in the department for more vocal workshops, many students who had not been able to participate asked i there would be more and the team I work within were keen to have more vocal workshops. There was a suggestion of making them a regular session. However, there is a need to balance the workload, and the long days with the evening workshops were tiring. I may consider running a lunchtime workshop in future as this would not make it a longer day, or incorporating the workshop content more into curriculum.

In curriculum

I have already incorporated some of the exercises from workshops into curriculum, including this session below on voice and text for first year undergraduates. This exercise allowed every voice in the class to be heard as they collaboratively performed a long spoken word piece formed of words relating to each of their own creative interests in sound. I’ve also incorporated my own learning about the nuance involved in verbalising the invisible process of sound, when designing curriculum, and plan to incorporate this into the 3rd year tutorials with students on audio papers and dissertation.

Developing PhD application

I am developing a PhD proposal based on by product of the action research project which I observed. As a neurodivergent facilitator I appeal to neurodivergent participants as I create a neurodivergent friendly space for learning. This proposal will explore the communication difficulties faced by neurodivergent singers when experiencing sensory overwhelm, and the role technology can play in supporting this communication.