New Teacher Diaries
Seeing the big picture
Apr 12, 2007 7:03 PM
In celebration of Women’s History Month in March, the 14 girls in my 9th-grade advisory spent the month looking at their lives though different lenses — camera lenses, to be specific. It seemed a fitting activity for a high school advisory, in which teachers serve as the liaison between school and family and are also a point of contact for each student during the school year. Teachers are trained to help students both academically and socially through activities such as tutoring and organizing philanthropic projects that help the student explore their school and community at large.I asked the girls in my advisory to document their roles in society through photography. Each girl had the use of a black-and-white disposable camera (about $8 at Target) for three days. The assignment was to take five photographs that represented her different roles in society. I asked the students not to take pictures of themselves, but of things that represented them. The photographs had to fall in these categories:
- Home
- Community
- School
- Free Choice (two photos)
My students looked at their roles as sisters, caregivers, girlfriends, students, friends, daughters and granddaughters. I provided my students with two free-choice photographs because I wanted them to feel free to depict a role in their life that made them different from others. I asked the students to write an accompanying paragraph for each photo. The results were eye-opening for both the students and me.Akira took a picture of dirty dishes piled up in the sink to represent home. Samantha took a photo of her shower to represent home. “I care a lot about appearance,” she said. “I feel like if I’m in control of my appearance, I can be in control of my day. That’s why I’m late to school sometimes, because I can’t get my look right.” For home, Jasmine took a picture of her bedroom door, which has a plaque with her name on it and magazine clippings of hunky movie stars plastered all around. “That’s home to me because when I’m in there it’s just me and nobody else. And I can finally have my own space,” she wrote about the photo.“Oh, no,” Jamie said, when she first saw the shadow of her finger in her “community” photo of a row of tidy apartment buildings.“That’s cool though,” she said on second thought. “It represents the darkness of the community,” she said, referring to the drugs, abuse and violence in her neighborhood. “It disrupts the illusion of perfection.”Sarah took a picture of the hallway to represent school. “That’s when I get to chill with my friends. I can just be myself there,” she wrote. For one of her free-choice photographs, Sarah chose to take a photo outside a library. “I spend a lot of time here getting my homework done and reading books because my foster mom doesn’t have a computer,” she wrote. Tamra took a picture of her cell phone for one of her free choices. “My cell phone is my life,” she wrote. “It’s how I stay connected with my friends and my family. If I lost my cell phone, I don’t know what I’d do.”When the photos and paragraphs are all compiled, each teenager will have created a book that she can hold on to. Sarah told me she liked the idea of making a book of the photos because “we will be able to look at it in the future and remember our past.” The teenage years are a time when girls are often challenging, questioning and developing their concept of themselves and their larger place in society. I found that this assignment provoked them to think more deeply about these issues. This project worked well in the context of my advisory, but could be adapted for a social studies or ELA classroom, for males and females alike. The girls were enthused about the project and couldn’t wait for their turn with the camera. They were having fun and learning valuable life lessons at the same time — a successful outcome, no matter what kind of lens it’s viewed through.
Ms. H is the pseudonym for a first-year teacher. A version of this post first appeared on the UFT blog, edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature.
