Thoughts on Catalogue of Critical Creativity Presentation

         With the Book Stack Summary activity, I was thinking about how students could make book spine poems to engage with thematic elements of a text. Perhaps the students could identify a theme in a script or theatrical piece and then develop book spine poems based on those ideas. In so doing, the students would break down and analyze their thoughts on the thematic concepts presented in the “text.” Then, they would synthesize those thoughts to develop a poetic piece that reflects their conclusions, inferences, and ideas. Perhaps an interesting next step could be to have students create short scenes/scripts using book spine poems and then consider how the thematic context with which they were created would affect the production and performance of such pieces. Additionally, perhaps the linguistic or thematic elements of each book spine chosen would influence the written and performed product.

            With the Color Palette activity, I would be curious to have students engage with theme to create a palette that reflects the thematic elements of the text and their individual responses. One application of this activity could be to have students represent how the plot changes with the thematic shifts in the story. At what point does the plot changing coincide with thematic changes. As such, students would utilize different colors to represent the distinct themes, and they would give new, thematically informed names for the colors. Another application could be to create separate color palettes for different characters and consider how the colors are the same or distinct for each character as the story progresses. Then, students could analyze what these shifts in thematic representations manifest for each character and the relationships that they have with each other. (For example, students could ask, “What does the instance of Character A and Character B having the same thematic color at [this point of the text] say about each character and their relationship?”) This would allow students to engage with plot structure, character development, and thematic analysis.

Thank you, 

- Skyler