Literacy through Photography
By: Koehler Morrissey
Literacy is a common word that people around the world know. Everyone has different opinions and different ideas on how to teach literacy within a classroom. Many techniques involve only read alouds, writing seminars, and basic textbooks found in every day elementary schools. What most people don’t think about is that this isn’t reaching every student. Different students learn in different ways, and by teaching them in new ways it could help those students and also could help the students who had a good grasp on literacy to develop their skills even more.
In a classroom teachers are supposed to teach students basic knowledge, but teachers are also supposed to be preparing students for the future. Teachers need to hone in on specific skills that will not only help their students within the four walls of a classroom, but out in the real world. We can do this through literacy by teaching literacy through photography. This technique allows students to look at literacy in a whole new light. Just using the example of two students each taking a picture of the other student taking a picture would be a great mini lesson for literacy. When you develop these two prints, you develop a whole new point of view than what one of the students was seeing. You’re not only teaching through writing with this technique, but you are giving the student a visual of what point of view is.
So many more students would develop the skill of literacy within a classroom just by buying a disposable camera and snapping a picture. It helps the students learn about setting, characters, points of view, and every picture is worth a thousand words. If you use one hundred pictures within a literacy lesson, that’s one hundred thousand words a student is using to describe and explain literacy, that’s more than most students write doing a basic paper for their literacy class, and they are using a skill that could help them find what they want to do when they reach the real world. Literacy can be informative and fun, teachers just need to find the right tools to make it that way
When you look back at your first education experiences everything you saw was visual. There were cartoons and television shows like Sesame Street that used photographs and drawings to teach children new lessons with each episode. There were picture books that helped teach a student a literacy lesson. And there was always a picture of an apple next to the letter A, so you could figure out that apple began with an A. We started visual and that’s how our students began their learning process. We need to continue this process and help our students develop further along so that they can continue to grow within our classroom. John Dewey wrote about how students develop through experience, growth, continuity, and habit (Dewey Chapter 3). By starting the educational experience through a visual eye, we need to continue it so our students can grow through experience and so they can develop habits within literacy so they are becoming better students.
One way to continue a visual experience throughout literacy is using literacy through photography (LTP). According to Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, “LTP is a teaching philosophy and methodology that encourages children to explore their world world as they photograph scenes from their own lives and to use their images as catalysts for verbal and written expression.” LTP is important because it allows for students who aren’t the best at writing or just sitting down with a pen and paper express themselves. It gives the students a chance to go out and capture new things through a photograph and then write about the photograph or just create a story with photos. With this lesson plan you are giving students a life skill and a hobby that can develop into a career and into something they are passionate about. With LTP you can save a child’s educational experience, and possibly keep them from dropping out of school, or just give them a reason to not give up.
Doing the Work
When students use this lesson within a school system, they aren’t only learning literacy. They are learning how to use a new tool and a new sense of mind. Not only just how to use a camera and to snap a picture or two, but how to look in on themselves. Wendy Ewald created a lesson plan within an elementary classroom where the students had to choose what they like best about themselves. They first had to take a picture of their favorite part of themselves and then had to write a small paragraph or poem on the subject (Ewald 58). Wendy did this project with a classroom of 3rd-5th graders. After she conducted this project she created the book The Best Part of Me. This book is the collection of the children’s pictures that she took, and also the poem or short paragraph that they wrote. A sample from this book is show below. She also wrote the entire lesson plan within the book Literacy and Justice Through Photography. This is a great way to create a relationship for your students with not only literacy but with themselves. The students will be able to look at themselves in a completely different way and see how they really do love themselves. This will help your literacy lesson because it will bring a whole new lesson to light and help students really get personal with their writing and to write on a subject that they know a lot about, but find something new and interesting to write about because of this new point of view that this picture will offer. This will not only help your students get to know themselves better, but will allow you to create a special bond with your students. You know how you see your students, but you never really know how your students see themselves. I think this would be a great way to start out a literacy lesson using photography at the beginning of the year, to begin to create this bond you need with all of your students.
I like my hands because they turn the pages of a book slowly and magically. Reading makes me happy. They wipe my eyes when I am sad. They threaten he things that make me mad. They pull the covers over my head when I am scared. They feel my forehead when I am sick. They write what I am writing now. They touch the precious earth and ground. They dance. They act. They’re slender and unique. They’re mine — that’s all. slender and unique. — Colette Cosner
Lesson Plans: Old to Young
When researching this topic I was expecting to find articles and articles on how to teach elementary aged students how to do literacy through photography, but I was pleased to find that this wasn’t the case. In 2011 a teacher at San Diego State University was able to do a semester called “Innovations in Instruction.” With this once in a lifetime chance to teach what she wanted, Marva decided to do a semester on integrating photography with literacy. Her only requirements for this course was that everyone needed a camera, it didn’t matter what kind or of what quality as long as they had one. She also recommended a few different text selections, including a book by Wendy Ewald, but didn’t make these required for her course instruction. The students in this classroom weren’t normal students though, all were teachers. They came from several different backgrounds, but shared the fact that they all were teaching in one way or another. The lesson plan was to create a “Neighborhood Alphabet Book.” The neighborhood alphabet book is created by taking pictures of the community and creating a picture for each letter of the alphabet and creating a book for the final project. Before the teachers began they were given an alphabet book and had to discuss how the wording was on the page, was it with the pictures or underneath in small text, and also discuss the content within the books. After they created the book the classmates showed off their books on the final day of class (Cappello 99–101). This lesson plan inspired teachers to bring photography into their own literature classrooms. It is important to realize that literacy through photography can reach students at all ages and levels within a school system. It can even reach the parents.
In the article Using Photography in a Family Literacy Workshop discusses how just by parents helping with literacy it can improve the students literacy skills immaculately, but also will involve the parent more with the students literal development and life (Baskwill & Harkins 28). When developing this study they wanted to create a better home environment for students and their parents by creating a bond and a positive image for young students looking at their parents. They decided to take six single mothers with children ranging from the ages four to six years old and put them in this experiment together (29). First they only wrote, and then they added photography in. Harkins and Baskwill state, “Since photography and writing are both composing processes, they help children develop their visual as well as linguistic competencies”(29). By doing this experiment together the parents were able to have a more positive impact on the students learning of literacy and were able to become more involved with the students lives. By giving the students a project with literacy through photography, you are giving them so many outlooks to look at and so many more experiences than just giving them a pen and paper and asking them to write what they did. Instead they could take pictures and write and show what they did.
Literacy through photography has been proven to help adult teachers, students, and parents helping their students grow. Literacy through photography can also help all over the world. It can help students everywhere of all ages develop skills they didn’t know they had. In an article titled Taking Over the Reins, A Photo Reflection In 2014, the Duke Engage group was given the chance to teach a science lesson at a school called Arusha. Michelle Stackman was given a group of seven boys and was given the topic transportation. Michelle and the boys discussed the topic for a little bit and then she gave the boys free rein. They were to find something to photograph to describe transportation. They weren’t any modes of transportation around, so instead the boys used their imagination and created their own transportation. They created the image below to show transportation. By creating this image Strackman said, “this activity unleashed creativity, promoted teamwork, and encouraged the practicing of motor skills.” If she would have left them in the classroom and only discussed transportation, probably none of these tools would have been utilized. Using photography with literacy opens up so many more doors than just leaving a student in a classroom enclosed within four walls. We need to give the students something to look forward to and also something that they can be creative with and show who they really are. Some students do just fine with a pen and paper, but I want to see what my students can create through interaction and photography. I want to really know my students.
References:
Baskwill, J., & Harkins, M. (2009). Children, Parents, and Writing: Using Photography in a Family Literacy Workshop. Young Children, 64(5), 28–33.
Cappello, M. (2011). Photography for Teacher Preparation in Literacy: Innovations in Instruction. Issues In Teacher Education, 20(1), 95–108.
Dewey, John. “Criteria of Experience.” Experience and education. New York: Touchstone, 1997. 33–50. Book.
Duke University. (2012). Center for documentary studies: Literacy through photography. Retrieved from: http://documentarystudies.duke.edu/projects/past-projects/literacy-through-photography.
Ewald, Wendy. “The Best Part of Me.” Literacy and justice through photography. New York: Teachers College Press, 2012. 13–58. Book.
Stackman, M. (2014, September 17). Taking over the reins, a photo reflection. [Blog]. Retried from: http://literacythroughphotography.wordpress.com/.
Genres:
A Hand
A poem inspired by a photograph by Koehler Morrissey
