Making Connections: Reflective Overview — The MACRO Mapping Tool
ABOUT
This map has been developed as a reflective framework through which students can more formally keep track of how their creative individuality is developing, and how this interacts with their everyday life, world events, and their developing professional identity (which includes demands made by the industry). It is one possible way to facilitate students’ engagement with the messy overlaps between training and life, and the tensions (and, eventually, the possibilities) that arise from them.
Although it was invented with students in mind (particularly students in the field of theatre and performance), the map has also been tested and found useful by academics and creative professionals.
The mapping tool gives permission to take the domestic seriously, and to understand the ecology of personal and professional as one organism.
It helps us consider the different, often compartmentalised, parts of ourselves as a Whole, and to recognise the ways in which they are interacting.
Seeing different areas of our lives mapped out in this way, and considering the relationships between them, can help us better understand spaces of tension and our own expressive desires.
We may also see how creativity and our creative tools can act as the mediator between personal and professional, two areas which can otherwise end up in a ‘doer/done-to’ relationship.[1] At the same time, it will help us understand creative activity as not stand-alone, but as a space where both personal and professional necessarily exist, and where both flow into the creative outcomes.
[1] See Jessica Benjamin (2018), Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. London & New York: Routledge.
How the map might be used
Try it out yourself 🙂
Agency is hugely important, and I suggest that students volunteer to trial the map, rather than being made to do so.
You may wish to talk students through the map before they first fill it in. The titles of the various boxes leave room for interpretation — do encourage the students to take ownership of how they want to understand and interpret the boxes; there is no ‘correct’ way to do it.
Dialogue with your students to find a rhythm for using the map (e.g. once a week for 3 weeks; twice a term for a year; 3 times over the course of a module, etc).
There may be productive ways to integrate insights from the map into teaching, however, I would suggest that students are never asked to share their map with teachers/facilitators. They might choose to volunteer information about what they discovered in in-class discussions, but filling in the map should be a private activity, and free from the ‘eye’ of others. They are primarily doing it for themselves.
Think about what activities could follow on from work with the map. Together with colleagues around the world I am currently working on developing an ‘Agency Toolbox’ of resources and exercises that will help with following up on the tensions and expressive desires discovered through using the mapping tool. More information on this will be posted on this page, and if you have ideas/suggestions/things you’ve tried that worked well, we’d love to hear from you! (email r.e.mitchell@kent.ac.uk)
Please fill in the form below to download a copy of the map and receive a one-year license for use.
Use of the map is free — the information on the form will simply help me to track usage and get in touch with you for feedback. See more details in the Terms and Conditions.
