For my community workshop section of the project, I was in a group with Finlay McTaggart and Ant Henderson. As a group, we decided to combine our strengths and produce a ‘Rap Songwriting & Recording Workshop’.
Mock Workshop:
We were told we had to give the workshop within the next two weeks, to a group of people who struggle with things like Autism, Down Syndrome, etcetera, meaning we would have to try and tailor the workshop around their needs, whilst also trying to make sure that we helped them learn something from, and enjoy our workshop.
We were then told that we couldn’t present our workshops with Mind The Gap, and so I didn’t bring my gear that I would have needed. However we were going to present to each other. So because of my lack of preparedness, we had to slightly improvise and just have the group perform to each other after they had written their raps.
Unfortunately, because of the short time frame to rehearse for the workshop, none of us did. This meant that we were hindered when it came to us presenting our mock workshops as we didn’t really know what we were doing off by heart, even though we had a proper plan laid out, we regularly had to check the plan to remember what we were doing.
Other than that, the group seemed to enjoy what we had done, mostly thanks to Finlay’s great improvisational skills and confidence when speaking to groups. He really helped to pull the group we were working with together and get them interested and focused.
What I gained most from the feedback was that group liked the fact that we moved around so that everybody got the expertise off of each of us, but they would rather us not have to switch between the group as it left some of the group stuck for lyrical content when with me as I’m not the best at writing lyrics, but I am good at helping to get them to flow and work rhythmically.
What we needed to work on most was being prepared for the workshop, having everything we need, and knowing what we were doing and having easy access to what we were doing as well, like on a small card for example.
Final Workshop:
For our final workshop, we were told to finalise our plans using the feedback we had got from the groups and our own thoughts on how the mock went.
We decided, as well as the changes to the original plan, that we would split the group we would be working with into 2 preferably, so that we could assign me and Finlay to one group, and Ant to the other, as he is already well versed in rap songwriting, and me and Finlay have both the major skills that we were focusing on between us, as I had the rhythmical skill, whilst Finlay had the lyrical skill. We did this in response to the groups feedback as it would mean both groups would have everything they needed to learn what we wanted them to.
We were once again, however, told that our workshop at couldn’t happen outside of college, thanks to risk assessment reasons and safety. This meant that we would be giving our workshop to the level 2 students from our course. This meant that we would definitely have a small group, and we could just split the group in 2 and focus on helping them much more than we would with a larger group. Also, I believe that Finlay knows some of the group and he was therefore already confident speaking to them, and I’d seen them around the department and I was relatively comfortable with them even though I hadn’t spoken to them before. Also, because we were giving the workshop in college with a smaller group, we decided to cut out the recording aspect entirely and just go with performing as it would get the group much more engaged in the tasks, I also only had to bring my Mac Book and the little sheets on which was our shortened plan to use as a reminder if needed.
This made it much easier to give the workshop in my opinion, and because of this, I believe we managed to give an effective workshop. I asked the group at the end if they had enjoyed it and if they’d learnt anything and they said yes.
There was, however, some weaknesses to our workshop. For example, Ant didn’t feel as confident as us, and whilst giving the workshop we didn’t notice that Ant had fallen back on his role a bit and didn’t engage with his group as much as us, however he still managed to help them get to a final product that worked for them. He also tried to engage in leading the final cool down activity but then forgot to check his sheet to remember what he was doing so Finlay took over. Also, the cool down activity was more of a warm up activity and didn’t have the exact desired purpose we had intended.