Our group presentation topic is Formalism. I attempted to contact others in my group through the WebCT, but received no response. I tracked down my fellow group members and found that due to schedule conflicts it was going to be very difficult to get together. I encouraged our group to try to communicate via phone and email. Our presentation date was fast approaching and I was getting nervous. We spoke briefly and arranged a day and time to meet to prepare, but the night before we were to meet I received an email letting me know that the other members of the group were not able to meet because various situations had arisen. There was some exchange of email, but we were having trouble all getting on the same page. We had two very brief meetings after class, that were not wholly productive. I was very uncomfortable with the lack of communication and attempt to organize our presentation. We had some ideas but they didn’t seem to be very fluid or concise. At one point it was suggested that we should just all do our own thing, but I didn’t feel that this was in the spirit of the assignment of collaborating as a group.

We arranged another meeting, everyone was notified but only Tara and I were able to meet. We did We were able to sit down and discuss some ideas about our presentation and an actual activity. We decided I would do a brief introduction, and then we would assign character personas to six of our classmates. Tara was very interested in the idea of carnival and we thought that this might be a way of incorporating and exploring the idea. We would have the students participants take on their persona, and halfway through the demonstration switch their persona to the companion persona, ie from veterinarian to dog trainer. We decided that we could demonstrate three ideas in this manner. Our classmates would be designated as opposing characters like monarch/bum (extremes in social class), scientist/child (extremes in knowledge/education) and veterinarian/animal . These would show different perspectives and the various stratification of language. We would demonstrate the Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, expressing the author’s intent in a different way – a double typed discourse, by offering a statement (authorial intent) and having them demonstrate the different ways that their characters might phrase that same idea in different words. I also suggested that we could use our class participants to help show Schlovsky’s defamiliarization of an object. As in the description of the text, the object will be obscured from the class’s view, and the participants will be asked not to use the name of the object or typical labels to describe the object(s). Then the class could guess what the object is.
We are due to present tomorrow and I must admit that I have some apprehension and uncertainty about our presentation.