I’ve been struggling with how to integrate the ‘maker centered’ learning into my curriculum for the Photography and Film course that I teach.
My background is in early childhood education, educational technology, I have a degree in Human Development, I’m an early-adaptor, macro and often very concrete thinker. I think about the three electives I teach as all living in the same multiverse of hands-on learning and digital media arts. My three courses are:
In my classes, we are all hands-on and we are making stuff- so aren’t we already makers? How do I integrate these new thinking routines and perhaps projects?
A few years ago I took a professional development workshop on bookmaking- physically making a book out of a variety of paper or other 2-D materials. I’ve been ruminating on how to bring this hands-on type of project back into my PAF course. The last hands-on project we did on PAF was a deconstructed self-portrait. I’ve lost the detailed wording of the original assignment- the spirit of the assignment was to use your DSLR camera to capture images that show someone who you are (what you value, what you love, what is important to you) without ever showing me your face. Here are a few images of those projects:
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| Sample #1 |
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| Sample #2 |
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| Sample #3 |
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| Sample #4 which is a screenshot the actual image |
The Cultural Lens Research Project, which is my accidental take apart, asks students to create the following-
You will assemble your final project in a book/2-D non-digital presentation that you design and build yourselves.
Your book/2-D non-digital presentation will include the following:
- The scope of the project
- Your chosen genres and a definition of each
- A biography and contextual information about your two photographers, three images of their work (6 images in total) and, your summary of each of their styles.
- Your chosen cultural lenses with a short explanation of each based on your understanding of that cultural lens pre-1968 and a contemporary understanding.
- Your emulation of four of the photographs you’ve chosen- 2 for each genre.
This assignment is my way of bringing physical “making” back into my classroom. We are a digital photography and film class. We make images almost daily which are digital, the editing is digital and very few of these images get made into physical prints. We focus on fine art photography so my students learn how to resize and prepare their images for fine art printing. Currently, I print the images myself. Last semester I allowed students to use their own laptops in class (rather than the uniformly imaged desktops) and we tried to have them each print from their laptops but we could not navigate that level of complexity in the time allotted so only a few students were able to master this. In my planning for the future I’ve put printing as an advanced skill- so only my 2nd-year students will learn this process on their own laptops- if their technology is compatible.
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| In order to talk about storytelling using images, I’ve collected several copies of a New York Times Sunday edition special report. |
I’ve cut up the special report so we will look at the newspaper as it was printed, then sequentially page by page lined up in a linear fashion, then just at the images without their surrounding text.
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| Linear line-up with center two-page spread intact. |
We will do this to discuss how and when images are used, how layout affects the reader/consumer and how the construction of these images contributes to the storytelling.
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| What story can you glean from the images alone? We have already discussed that all images are curated and constructed. |
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| Teacher preparation for the classroom discussion. |