GEEX Forum

I've had some success having students do a 3 page "brain dump" before they write anything (inspired by Julia Cameron's morning pages ). This process becomes generative and students are accessing ideas that they often have a hard time articulating/sketching/verbalizing. I feel like they're more comfortable generating ideas this way than sketching. It seems important to create a non-precious space, and students tend to have a hard time giving themselves permission to just dump all the good and bad ideas.

As part of the Glass Flux project, I had students write their own Fluxus scores. I felt this project was successful and opened them up to the power of the written word and it's ability to inform studio practice. There are a lot of good resources here for Fluxus scores, Surrealist Games, ect.

I think I'll be relying on writing more this year, since the hybrid model gives more opportunities for written interaction. Though I'm also very conscious of my many dyslexic students that find writing very challenging and time consuming.

Hey Kim!

Anne West's Mapping the Intelligence of Artistic Work has been very helpful to me at various times over the past several years. It contains a variety of writing prompts for free-writing exercises that sort of culminate in a mapping exercise that pulls key words from the writings. Pretty great. There's some other good stuff in there as well. I'm currently planning to use it as a text for a Graduate Seminar I'll be teaching next semester, which is stacked with 3 years of grads. But I believe it would be very beneficial to undergraduates as well in mapping out their work.