Capturing the aesthetic moment

The more I talk about what the aesthetic moment is, the more I understand it on an intellectual level. Coming first from a very ethereal and touchy feeling place, I understand the moment from an emotional level and a irrational level. I am beginning to identify solid components that I would like to be able to track and record in a drama process.

Having had the moment many times myself both as a student in the classroom and as a drama practitioner, I intuitively know what it is but need to be able to explain it clearly and academically to other people.

That “A-ha!” moment for the student. There is a subtle shift in the dynamics between the student themselves, the other students, the teacher and the group as a whole. I wonder too about the relationship between their present self and future self. It is a moment characterised by a heightened sense of awareness. Penny Bundy talks about connectedness, emotionality and presence. The students connect more fully to the content, the situation, the relationships and also the language being used. I have a hunch an easier way to identify the moments as an observer is through the proximics and pragmatics – there must be a moment where the physical dynamics of the student and teacher’s eye contact, postures, gestures, openness, tonality, - all voice and movement elements – shift subtly. I want to video this interaction and capture these moments.

Once I have identified the moments through the voice and movement, I can then analyse the discourse and the teacher student interaction. How does the discourse change? Register? Tone? Pragmatics. And I will need to look at this systematically in the classroom environment, using systems analysis and Brofenbrenner’s (1993)  nested ecosystem of analysis. There are so many worlds occurring at that moment and leading up to the moment that are interacting like an ecosystem. The student’s inner world, their external world, the groups’ world and the teacher’s inner and external world.

The next step of the video analysis would be determining what are the triggers or lead up events to these moments that the teacher (and student) can take some control over. What do the teachers need to in the classroom to create more of these moments? What do students need to do?

I feel I have an access point and clear method for tapping into the drama side of it – start with the voice and movement and then identify student teacher interactions. I am still fuzzy on the linguistics component. Some areas for research would be the affective domain (Arnold, J), pragmatics, engagement, alignment between real self and future self, psychology of the language learner and motivation, group dynamics, flow and creativity, the mind gym – use of these activities, Multiple intelligences in EFL. I imagine I need to start with the larger context of affective domain, and then narrow it down to group dynamics and notion of self.