Watching about Christine Sun Kim is an interesting experience. The way she descripted the notion of the ‘ownership of sound’ is very inspiring. I think often we reply too much on the verbal and vocal expressions. In letters, tutorials, seminars, and crit sessions, we often see verbal communication is the only way of providing feedback and presenting. If a student doesn’t see verbal communication as the most comfortable way for expression himself/herself, he or she may easily be perceived as not capable of doing so.
In Christine’s case, being able to see sound and music in a physical and visceral way, as well as deeply relating it with the issues of social justice, are definitely her strengths and inspiration.
In my upcoming teaching, I think it’s important that I always allow other ways of communication; for examples written languages or even body languages. Moreover, it’s important the criteria of judging, especially the criterion of communication, would not only include verbal communication.
Moving forward, I think the fashion industry is also a very verbal communication-dominated industry. An effort to make it less able-biased would be necessary.
“If a student doesn’t see verbal communication as the most comfortable way for expression himself/herself, he or she may easily be perceived as not capable of doing so.”
This is an incredibly important point. I personally find writing a lot easier than speaking – I know what I want to say, but somewhere between my brain and mouth it gets jumbled up and comes out as a bit of a mess. It’s easier to keep track of my points with writing.
I’m trying to remember what I commented on before somehow everyone’s comments got deleted. I linked you to this video: https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much?language=en (There is a transcript available too), which I think is worth a watch. Even though Christine is an artist and we can see how she interprets sound in her work, I’d probably be cautious about using the words “inspire” or “inspiring”, mainly because it’s so frequently used when describing disabled people just going about their lives and it can be viewed quite patronisingly, even if it’s inadvertent.
I, too, had never thought about the ownership of sound before watching that video!
I’m interested to hear more about your thoughts on fashion being a verbal communication-dominated industry. I’m currently working at LCF, and that’s an angle I’d never thought about before – particularly important as so many of our students have dyslexia or English as a second (or third!) language.