What The Teacher Learned: The Joy of Doing Something with Friends

by JOHN BOUTON

Even though I had taught at ASP for four summers, I was struck by the intensity of teaching the major course. The hours are impressive: three to four hours a day in class, two hours a night of homework, meeting six days a week. As Director Mike Ricard has observed of ASP in Chapel, “The days seem interminable, but the weeks fly by.” I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the time we spent in class, by the amount of hands-on work that studying media allowed us, and by the facility and fluency that our students demonstrated across a variety of media. While there were some challenges and areas that I would like to improve, overall this was an outstanding experience for me as a teacher and learner.

This was a likeable cohort, one that came together quickly. They proved responsive to shifting expectations and responsible in task and project management. Because they appeared to have fun throughout the summer, the work often felt like play. Yes, we did some academic heavy lifting with our texts and needed to become more effective contributors to discussions, Socratic dialogues, and presentations, but overall the class gained knowledge about media's roles and outlets, becoming citizens rather than consumers, an historical continuum of media, and how freedom of expression contributes to a good life.

Unlike the solitary and conference-based work that reflective writing entails, a lot of Mass Media activities were hands-on and learned through trial-and-error. While our work with print reporting taught us to prize clarity and arranging others' ideas and words, much of the course involved creative self-expression, often through visual images and spoken scripts. Again, the group genuinely seemed to enjoy being together, whether it was in room 21 editing sound or on the grounds filming a hockey game in the rink from three angles. The zeitgeist of the course seemed captured in “Last Friday Night,” a music video that took the spirit of our field trips and brought everyone together to sing and dance. Our intern Meagan proved indispensable in managing the creative process and the technical side of production. There would have been no final show without her; indeed, there would have been no class without her! When I recall the entire show, in fact, it is dance that stands out for me – music videos proved a highlight, an apt reading of ASP culture this summer. Another master teacher commented that she appreciated the relative sophistication of the humor that our students displayed in their show. One of my favorite parts about ASP is the public nature of the final demonstrations of knowledge and skill, and the video certainly showed our class' spirit and enduring understandings.

As I explained to the class during one of our opening meetings, ASP was instituted in part to pursue alternative ways of teaching and learning that may find later expression in winter-school classrooms. While I have taught a long time, this course took me far from my own comfort zone and reiterated that the best teaching occurs when energy meets energy. For me the students will always prove more important than the content. To me their enduring understandings will come in the form of self-knowledge, creative self-expression, the ability to work as part of a team, finding their individual voices amidst the tumult of an emerging objective, meeting deadlines, knowing when something is “good enough,” and finding joy in work. The technology will change, but the ability to learn from it and with it has emerged as a twenty-first century skill. We all gained experience with print, radio, broadcast, and digital media and the software and hardware that underlie them; encountered inspiring practitioners making a joyful living in the media; and worked together to create a portfolio of projects that reflects our appreciation of the experience. Leaning into discomfort, seeing conflict as a catalyst for change, letting the game teach one, and embracing a diversity of voices and qualities in production make the most of the technologies that surround us. These values were reaffirmed for me this summer in Mass Media. I loved our time together.