In Stephen's story about the park bench, I was drawn to the different perspectives of those that used the bench on a daily basis: pigeons, an elderly man, a young mother, the grounds crew, teenagers, young children, newlyweds, etc... My idea for a lesson plan would be a field trip for students to go to a park with a bench area such as this to merely observe the daily flow of the space and how different people interact with the bench and use it for their own purpose. Students when then create their own stories about what happened with a specific instance on the bench that day. Perhaps their stories could be printed out and posted on the bench for people to pause, read and reflect upon during their own time on the bench.
Laura March's photo of the construction site in Puerto Rico made me think about the concept of imperialism and our view of the 'other.' This may be a good instance to make students think about their assumptions made about other people and and how other people are viewed as invading the territory of others. Maybe in this way, difficult issues like slavery and imperialism can be brought up in the safety of the classroom for discussion and contemplation. Young children are often interested in construction equipment, so this might be a great opportunity to make them think about the perspective of the workers in such a situation.
Laura McGowen's story about the fund raising drive was touching, but also a dose of reality for how many of us lead our day to day lives. I immediately identified with the idea of 'bad' news overwhelming our daily lives. I think a good project would be for children to peruse daily papers or news websites with the purpose of finding positive stories. These articles could then be presented in a collage to show that there are positive aspects to the news, although they are often hard to find. Many of these instances aren't front page material, but perhaps by pointing them out, people may stop and reflect upon the good things happening on a daily basis instead of the bad things.
I thought about what you said for my part of your idea and thought it would be neat to see students create a few panels, similar to a comic strip or some kind of cartoon drawing, to show what they observed that day from being at the park.
ReplyDelete1. An extension of your idea inspired from Stephen’s story is the students create something to place on the bench to change the routine way of seeing, to see more about the conditions of the world, or the conditions of the local area in a way that would lead to productive action.
ReplyDelete2. If you link March’s photo to Ellsworth and Kruse’s artwork (see exploration 6) concerning deep time investigations, students in visiting a local construction site could be asked to take photos in way that selects one aspect of the site (a machine, person, land, bird, etc.) and learn about that one entity’s history (3 historical views presented visually) and connection or relationship to a minimum of 3 things (also presented visually). This could be a 6 images brought together as one image, either side by side or layered.
3. An extension of your idea inspired from McGowen’s story is for students to select a story in the news and revision it visually as “good news” seen from another perspective (perhaps like Onion News http://www.theonion.com/). The goal would be to see like a detective, or forensic scientist, or social worker who solve problems in different ways but often through a process of understanding why the event or problem occurred.