Welcome Ripon College!

Today, I am presenting the work of TEAM to a group of Education students from Ripon College in Wisconsin.  Below is the outline and overview of the workshop.

Goals

• Share the story of TEAM
• Walk through Convergence 
• Reflect on how digital media integration impacts learning

The Story of TEAM

Convergence Workshop: Images of the City

Reading an Image

Via VivianMaier.com

ORID Critique:

Observe: What do you see?

Reflect: What does it make you feel?  What does it remind you of?

Interpret: What's going on here?  Why was this image made?

Decide: What photography techniques will you try? What would you have done differently as the photographer?  

Big Question: What would you title this photograph?

City as Text: Making Images, Remixing Words
Each participant will get a line of text and a digital camera.  You have 15 minutes to go out into the world and compose an image that illustrates your line.  (You may take multiple images, but when you return, you must have only one image on your camera.)

When you return, you will find word tiles at your seat.  Treating them like magnetic poetry, use these words to compose a single line of a poem that connects (even abstractly) to your image.  Once you've composed your line, glue them to the colored strip of paper.

Using Google Drive Presentation, we will combine everyone's images together into a slideshow.  While the slideshow is playing, photographers will read their remixed line aloud when they see their own image.  The finished product can be seen HERE.

(Text is taken from the essay "Poetry's Urban Landscape" by Brian Turner, for Guernica Magazine.)

If we had more time, we could:

• Create an audio slideshow with voice recordings of participants reading their remixed lines and publish to Vimeo
• Publish individual photos and poems to Cowbird
• Map our photos on Panoramio, with our poems as the descriptions

Reflection: 

• What did we do today?
• What literacy skills were supported?
• How did the art and media impact learning?
• What other ways might you use these activities with students?

Critiquing ourselves and artist intent...

SCAVENGER HUNT PHOTOS

Class 6: Critique of Scavenger Hunt and a Graphic Novel Adaptation of “Working”

After our usual five minutes of pass the clap I briefly discussed the rule of thirds. After that brief lecture we then critiqued selects from our Scavenger Hunt exercise where I assigned the students to find different shot sizes and camera angles but also various emotions and ideas like “lonely,” “friendship,” “strong,” etc.  For every photograph I asked the class what they saw followed by what they felt. Then I asked the group to identify the type of shot and then asked the photographer about his/her intention. The amount of discrepancy between what the photographer was going for and what the audience saw showed whether the photograph was successful in communicating the photographer’s desired message. There weren’t many varying opinions on the technical prompts but the intention versus execution discussion was more interesting for the ambiguous and subjective emotion/idea shots. Many of the students were able to identify which specific shot sizes and camera angles would illicit specific emotions.  They were also very quickly able to recognize the rule of thirds and frame within a frame in several of the photographs.  I called on students to draw out lines to represent the rule of thirds on several of the photos with the aid of the classroom Promethean.  Once the activity got a little long I just went through the photos quickly and had them call out the shot size. I enjoyed seeing how accurate they were and how comfortable they have become in the film terms I have introduced.

After the critique, Dina started reading aloud from an excerpt of the graphic novel based on Studs Terkel’s “Working.” Last year the students seemed to really connect with the story of the farm worker and his journey of becoming a union organizer. I felt like that story had many examples of empathy versus oppression so I thought it would be good to go over that for this class. Dina prompted them with several questions related to empathy versus oppression and also referred back to the reading we had done about Persepolis. Liz, TEAM project leader, had suggested that a good way to cover this material was to have groups act out different sections from the reading. My plan is to do this activity with the “Working” story when we return from winter break. We will also be starting pre-production for our final project. Very exciting!

Is War A Necessary Evil? Take Away

Artist Kris G and Daja discussing the layout of her war scene

The class using primary and secondary sources to research photos of their war era

Paris and Essence organizing and preparing their scenes

Myia contemplating where to start and Genesis filling in details. As my mom always said, " Time only exists because some people need more and others need less." This is especially true for students. Thanks Mom for the wisdom.

Tariq wasn't really interested at first, but now that everyone is saying its the best in the class, guess who's interested?!?! Flattery works wonders, especially when its true (even the artists are impressed!)

Cynthia, Donovan, and Darrion are busy creating which was difficult for them. They are the more intellectural type (school comes easy for them) and said they were not the "artsy-type". But giving them their own space has helped the creative process.

During the CCAP Summer Institute teachers re-discovered how much adults are still excited about the take-away (handmade projects) and it renewed my non-techie side. I wanted students to definitely feel the same sense of accomplishment I felt after connecting my learning to a tangible item. Our culminating activity to "Is War A Necessary Evil" project is to re-create a scene from the war they have been working on (choices: Civil, World War I or II, and Vietnam). Kris and I supplied the students with lots of materials and told them to have their way. Just kidding! We told them they had to create a scene from the perspective of a person or thing that would have seen that war. The students became very creative. One student sees the war from the perspective of a bullet from barrel to body. Another used the nurses POV and another as a civilian watching it unfold on television. I was happy to see that they were very careful in choosing the materials that were used and would have been appropriate to their war choice. They were quick to correct one another about who used khaki and when the soldiers begin using camouflage fatigues, the change from drummer boys to bugles boys, etc. Below are the pictures of the students working with the artists, Kris and Brandon, to bring their war to life. Also, the completed box scene that is featured is the work of the Artist Brandon with the Cuban Missle crises as a teacher model. The prespective is of a bird flying overhead. The hamburgers represent the United States and the sugar cubes the Cubans. You can expect to see the students finished products by next week!!!