Heart of Language: Teamwork as Sociogenesis

Abstract

Inspired by my experiences as a graduate student in the Santa Barbara UC Links program some years ago, I created a new program in Augsburg, Germany. As part of my bilingual ‘Media & Learning Communities/Medien & Lerngemeinschaft’ seminar, the ‘English Media Club’ project connects University of Augsburg faculty, undergraduate students, international Erasmus+ (visiting) students, and local school age children in Augsburg, Germany. In this chapter I describe the crucial, multi-level teamwork of such a Uni-After School partnership, with a focus on language-learning processes, building on John Dewey’s claim that “The heart of language…is the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 179). Such a ‘learning communities’ approach to language, living, and learning has, in fact, profound implications for language learners, affording optimal possibilities for young people as active participants in vibrant, intercultural, technologically enhanced learning communities. In particular, I look up-close at the planning, filming, editing, and presenting of our case study film, ‘Dark Dreams’ where teamwork and social creativity flourished on a daily basis.

Shape clay into a vessel; it is the space that makes it useful.

—Lao Tsu.

Chiara, a 12-year-old girl at the Realschule Neusäß in southern Germany, sits on the floor of her school gym, patiently allowing the Italian Erasmus+ student Ginervra Masciullo to apply zombie make-up (Fig. 4.1). The word gets around, imaginations are ignited, and soon more kids are lining up to join in the fun and become zombies! Fortunately, our Spanish Erasmus+ student, Zita Martinez, quickly learns how to do zombie make-up and, soon, it’s all systems go for our “Zombie Dance” scene, the climax of our short film “Dark Dreams” (December 14, 2021).

Fig. 4.1

International student Ginervra Maciullo applies zombie make-up

Introduction

My bilingual Projektseminar at the University of Augsburg (“Media & Learning Communities/Medien & Lerngemeinschaften”) makes moments like the one described in the opening vignette possible. In the text that follows, I will show the kind of interinstitutional stage setting required for such empowering project work, and delve into the level of detail necessary to form a deeper understanding of creative teamwork as sociogenesis.

Working closely with American Studies, Kunstpädagogik, and Erasmus+ departments at the University of Augsburg, my seminar is inherently interdisciplinary and explores the invigorating contributions that American Pragmatism, jazz aesthetics, multimodality, ethnography, sociology, and feminism make to Participatory Action Research and democracy as a way of life. I podcast all of my lectures to ensure that all university students have the time to go out into the schools and community centers and work with young people. We use “digicampus” (www.digicampus.de), a moodle-like interface, to coordinate ongoing projects, reserve video equipment, share field notes, and openly discuss podcasted lectures and reading materials. Student field notes function both micro-genetically, showing how concrete learning scenarios play out in real time during our project work, and macro-genetically, showing how the projects themselves develop institutionally over comparatively longer stretches of time. Our “Begleitstudium” (literally “accompanying study”) enables students to continue working on the projects for up to three additional semesters after taking the original seminar (thus functioning like an “independent study”). This helps us to form “Site Coordinator” positions for highly motivated university students. Our Facebook group, “5D-Augsburg-San Diego” pools international resources for university students and helped to enable 10 German students to go to California and work with UCSD’s La Clase Mágica, thereby enjoying the full international University-Community Links (UC Links) experience (See https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/ for more information about UC Links programs and the global UC Links network). We look forward to resuming and expanding such international exchanges in the post-COVID-19 context.

Program Context

Engaging Youth in Film and Music Video Production

Our “English Media Club” at the Realschule Neusäß meets after-school and is focused on supporting English language learning through film and music video production. The project consists of 10 or 11 90-minute sessions each Thursday afternoon, capped off by a film and music video party at the end of each semester, where we celebrate our joint creativity with caregivers, teachers, social workers, and school principals (as in Hull & Nelson, 2005). Our typical game plan runs like this: In our first session at the school, university students and kids introduce themselves and then brainstorm about what they want to do. Do you want to make a film or a music video? Who do you want to work with? Do you want to be one of the actors? Or would you rather be the camera person? Or the director? The thing that always works is to work together in small teams, usually five to eight kids working with two or three university students. Then, each team starts to develop a storyline/screenplay on the first day. Most teams are able to finish a usable screenplay by the end of the second session. We try to start filming by the third session, and we make sure to start editing the video by the second to last session, putting the clips in order, and adding transitions, music, text, special effects and credits where appropriate. Everything has to be ready in time for the film and music video party at the end of the semester, of course!

Film and Music Video as Social Praxis

Filmmaking and music video production are great tools for creating vibrant, intercultural, technology-enhanced learning communities for and with kids and university students. The university students are young enough to share a common frame of reference with the kids and to talk about things that they are genuinely interested in, such as the German Rapper Sido. So, throughout the planning, filming, cutting, and showing the films and music videos publically, our top priority is to maintain high levels of teamwork and creativity both at the university and at the schools. Everything else flows from that. The same goes for both university students and younger people at the schools and community centers. If you are not interested in something, you are probably not going to learn anything of much value from it. Sometimes things don’t turn out exactly how you expected. What are you going to do? Are you just going to quit as soon as things get difficult? Or are you going to rise to the challenge, stick with it, and create something that you and your friends can be proud of?

With respect to (English) language learning, the kids in our projects are invited to relax and have fun. If they make a grammatical mistake while filming, we just delete the clip and try it again, no problem! This relaxed attitude is conducive to fits of laughter before the camera, which always makes for entertaining outtakes. Our goal is simply to create more familiarity, confidence, and fluency with spoken and written English, thus complementing the more grammatical approach that the kids get during the regular school hours.

Multimedia Project: “Dark Dreams”

In order to understand the lived emotional experiences, social realities, and human potentials that drive such projects, it is very important to look closely at the processes involved. For this reason, I offer here a description of the making of “Dark Dreams,” a combination horror film and music video by our English Media Club at the Realschule Neusäß, about a ten-minute drive from the University of Augsburg.² In the Summer Semester of 2019, we were blessed with two highly motivated and very creative Erasmus+ students. One such student from Italy, Ginevra Masciollo, had a theater background and was very talented in doing the make-up for the zombie dancers. Our site-coordinator, Anastasiya Tsaregorodtseva, also a talented singer, songwriter, and band leader, brought her abundant music and dance expertise with her. She had already gained the respect and trust of the kids through previous film and music video activities. This became crucial in the final “Zombie Dance” scene, where Anastasiya worked closely with the young people in choreographing basic dance moves which she later enhanced through simple video effects such as slow motion and rewind. She chose the perfect song, “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish, with a kind of creepy vibe and a very danceable groove that was upbeat but not too fast.³

Key Idea: Teamwork as Sociogenesis

There are always multiple levels of teamwork going on simultaneously in the program. The power of kid-to-kid interactions, for example, became apparent right from the beginning in our first brainstorming session. The young people were full of great ideas, expressing themselves passionately (mostly in German), and also listening to each other respectfully and building on each other’s ideas. Many had participated in previous film and music video projects, so they were able to envision exactly where certain scenes could be filmed. The young people were also fully capable of engaging with the university students in conversations about camera perspectives, dialogue, and plot developments. During the brainstorming session, Anastasiya wrote as fast as she could to keep up with the dialogue and posted this field note as our drehplan/screenplay:

The girls participated actively in the process of establishing a story line. After brainstorming about various ideas as a team, we agreed on the following scenes:

• 1st scene: The girls are having a sleepover in the school gym. They are playing cards, eating popcorn, and have a pillow-fight (have to ask for permission to film in the gym).

• 2nd scene: After a while, they fall asleep and start having nightmares.

Inside the Nightmare

• 3rd scene: One person wakes up and notices that someone is missing. She decides to search for that person. She walks around in the school building and gets scared by creepy zombie figures that walk around.

• 4th scene: She runs back to the gym and notices that another girl is missing. She wakes up one of her friends and they search together and meet more scary people (e.g. Vampire, Witch, Psychopath).

• 5th scene: Every time they open another door, there’s something/someone else inside, not just their friends.

• 6th scene: In the end, they open one last door—there is a lot of light and out come all of the zombies and they all dance together.

• 7th scene: This is where the dream ends and all of them wake up and realize that they’ve all had the same dream!

• Gear: Blankets (dark colors), sleeping bags, some furniture to build a blanket fort, snacks (potato chips, popcorn), pajamas, card game, bottle of water, make up.

(May 23, 2019, AT)

At the immediate human-interaction level, in addition to the acting itself and the many face-to-face discussions which surrounded the planning, filming, and editing of the scenes, the activity of practicing and performing a dance together is an extremely powerful example of the social construction of embodied intersubjectivity, that is, coordinating one’s own actions while, at the same time, adjusting one’s actions to fit with the actions of others, or, to use John Dewey’s terms, engaging in a “contemporaneous response to a thing as entering into the other’s behavior, and this upon both sides” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 179). The “thing” involved here, music, is a very special kind of boundary object (Boesche, 1997) where rhythm, harmony, melody, and social energy flow together and function in aesthetically holistic ways (Blackman, 2008; Sullivan, 2001; Turner, 2016). This robust form of intersubjectivity (Underwood et al., 2021), also common in team sports and live musical performance, can be lost in multimedia learning projects if the computer screen itself comes to dominate instead of the human interactions.

We were also very fortunate in having three English teachers at the school helping us out. Diana Bosacki did most of the necessary administrative work on the school side and was always there enjoying the film and music video parties at the end of the semester. Lisa Hinck, a recent graduate of the University of Augsburg, knew the kids on a more personal level and did a great job leading her own group in another film, “Love, Hate and Magic.” Denise Kalde also knew the kids very well and was always there to help out if one of the university students couldn’t make it on a particular day. Denise enjoyed making her own acting debut in a previously made film, “Careers.” She described the project in a very positive way in the School’s yearbook.⁴

Toward the end of the project, the teamwork between university students became crucial as they had to coordinate time schedules and edit all of the video, using Apple’s video editing program Final Cut Pro in our Schnittraum/Cutting Room. The cutting process is always extremely time consuming and always takes more time than we think it will. Which clips do we use? What music and sound effects might enhance certain scenes? Which clips should we select for the outtakes? Do we really have to back everything up all of the time? Anastasiya took the lead again in showing the other students how to cut and enhance the film. Her expertise in cutting the film was a perfect way for the other university students to “learn by doing” as they selected the best clips, arranged them in a narrative order, and then added the transitions, music, special effects, and credits to polish things up for public presentation.

All of the hard work and cooperation paid off in the end. During the public showing of “Dark Dreams” at the school, the kids really enjoyed themselves, eating popcorn and laughing wholeheartedly while seeing themselves on the big screen in front of the classroom. Some of them were a bit nervous at first and peaked out from between their fingers or crouched down and peaked out over their desks! Fortunately, we were able to test the sound and video files on the previous day so everything ran smoothly. Denise used the microwave at the school to make sure that we had enough popcorn to go around.

Through her prior experience, Anastasiya had a keen sense of the film party dynamics, so she crafted attractive credit screens for the kids, with the first name of each participant remaining on the big screen for a while (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2

Screenshot of the of kid-credits

This inspired spontaneous, enthusiastic, rhythmic clapping from the kids, expressing their delight. Come to think of it, such creative moments are pretty normal and to be expected, once we get away from obsessing on a “predict & control” model (Haraway, 1983/1991) and put teamwork and creativity front and center where they belong.

Key Idea: The Heart of Language

Thus, we have a multitude of video evidence confirming that, as Dewey put it, “The heart of language…is the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 179). Just as when one person gives another person a flower, for example, our response to each other “involves contemporaneous response to a thing as entering into the other’s behavior, and this upon both sides” (p. 179). Unlike hens, or marbles in a box, human beings are able to use language as a tool of tools to create, maintain, manage, negotiate, and constantly adjust and readjust their interactions and thereby become co-participants. As a form of anthropological holism then, the heart of language beats and thrives through three interrelated levels:

First Level: Scaffolding Caregivers

At the first level, “language is primarily a mode of action used for the sake of influencing the conduct of others in connection with the speaker” (p. 206). Here and now, human beings weave language into face-to-face interactions to get things done. A child may learn the word “hat,” for example, if they wear a hat when going out for a walk with their caregiver because going out for a walk together “becomes an interest to the child; mother¹ and child not only go out with each other physically, but are concerned in the going out; they enjoy it in common” (Dewey, 1916/1966, p. 15). More recent accounts of scaffolding confirm what every caregiver and school teacher always already knows (See Bruner, 1990). With time and lots of practice, such interactions enable human beings to anticipate each other’s actions, become a learning community, and “see the future in the present” (Vásquez, 2003).

Second Level: Participatory Narrative

The second aspect of the heart of language is participatory narrative, describing human action in a way that participates (Bruner, 1990). Here, Dewey agrees with the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski:

When incidents are told of or discussed among a group of listeners, there is, first, the situation at that moment made up of the respective social, intellectual and emotional attitudes of those present. Within this situation, the narrative creates new bonds and sentiments by the emotional appeal of the words. In every case narrative speech is primarily a mode of social action rather than a mere reflection of thought. (Malinowski, 1921, p. 475)

I think that our field notes are important examples of this kind of participatory description (Underwood et al., 2021). The students are doing much more than just reporting the facts of what happened at the site. They are also, simultaneously, creating their own voices as young researchers and learning to see the importance of “what is right before our eyes” (Wittgenstein, 1953). Isn’t this, in fact, similar to what I am doing right now? I am writing about Dewey and the heart of language and how it relates to our project work, not like the last objectivist telling you “that’s the way it is, Jack” but rather leaning a bit into the future, telling stories in ways that hope to inspire future teamwork and new projects which respond to the enormous sociocultural challenges which we are currently facing as a society.

Third Level: Celebrating Being Together

The heart of language also has an irreducible aesthetic aspect, “an immediate enhancement of life, enjoyed for its own sake” (Dewey, 1916/1966, p. 183). Dewey agrees with Malinowski that “there is in all human beings, the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company” (Malinowski, 1921, p. 476). Or, to put it in Dewey’s words, “Communication is not only a means to common ends but is the sense of community, communion actualized” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 206). Sometimes, as educators, we tend to forget about the importance of this factor. This is a big mistake!

Discussion: From a Pedagogical Point of View

Making sociogenesis <=> the heart of language somewhat explicit:

The heart of language, then, can be seen as human capacities to coordinate action through language, tell each other compelling stories, and simply enjoy being together. How these abilities play out in any one particular project, over the period of an academic semester, are, thankfully, inherently unpredictable to a large extent. Kid–kid interactions, kid–uni student interactions, and uni student–uni student interactions overlap and merge tightly with each other in a vibrant flux of activity, all made possible by the interinstitutional work between the university and the school. “Dark Dreams” turned out to be a unique film and music video that no one person could have ever come up with by themselves, not in a million years. In this way, we learn to rely on each other’s creative teamwork and move on to the next project with renewed energy.

In conclusion, we think that these kinds of film and music video projects are examples of empowering win-win partnerships between universities, schools, and community centers. On the university side, students are constantly saying how much they appreciate the opportunities to connect social learning theory to concrete educational practices. At the schools and community centers, we see a positive transformation of youth motivation levels and forms of engagement through language learning, authentic literacy, media competencies, and learning to work together. We are continually developing the projects at local (www.fill.de), national (www.goethe.de), and international levels (https://wunderbartogether.org/de/), and we look forward to your questions, comments, and also, perhaps, some empowering, open, and sustainable forms of cooperation for the common good.

End Notes

• 1. Erasmus+ is a European student exchange program; see www.erasmusplus.de.

• 2. Augsburg is one of the oldest cities in Europe and has become a model of diversity for German cities with over 50% of its youth coming from immigrant backgrounds. For more information about Augsburg, see www.augsburg.de & www.tuerantuer.de.

• 3. For the school’s perspective, see this article in their yearbook:

Der English Media Club war auch dieses Jahr wieder fleißig!

“Auf die Plätze, los”…or as we say in English “Action”.

We are one our way to having another great year in the EMC! The English Media Club is in its sixth year here at our school and in its third year working with the kids in the Ganztagsbetreuung. Tom Vogt runs the international research project “Participatory Action Research” through Media and American Studies at the University of Augsburg. He has found that media offers a perfect as well as a fun way to integrate individual and team creativity with language learning.

The Club meets once a week, for an hour, on Thursdays in the Ganztagsbetreuung. At the beginning of each semester, the kids, with the help of their group leaders (the university students), get to decide what kind of project they want to make. They can choose to do music videos, films, whatever they want. Together they write the script, in English of course, decide on the music, choose the location, and help with the filming. The University students then cut the film/videos together and add the music, along with any necessary special effects. They then celebrate their “hard work” at the end of each semester with a film party! There, they proudly watch their films or videos, eat popcorn and sweets, and simply have a good time.

The fall semester produced two super films. The first film is called “Career Day.” It’s Career Day at school: the kids have to think about their future! Different careers are highlighted in this comical look at some of the possibilities out there! This short film will hopefully be submitted to the Augsburg Film Contest, Meine Idee! Mein Weg! Mein Ziel! We wish them good luck! The second film is called “The Robbery”. An action-packed thriller about a group of boys who, out of necessity, decide to rob a bank. Full of super stunts, the boys learn the hard way that crime doesn’t pay!

The EMC is really a fun, relaxing way for the kids to learn and practice a new language! Don’t take our word for it. Here is what some of the kids had to say:

• Nick, in his second year in the club, says “It’s fun to film our own ideas! Tom and Omar are cool and the popcorn is very tasty!”

• Selina says, “I love watching all of our bloopers at the end of the film. They’re funny!”

• Gergely says, “It was fun to help with the filming”.

With great projects like these, we really look forward to next year! Having fun while learning and improving our English…sounds perfect!

Denise Kalde, Realschule Neusäß Yearbook, 2019/2020.