Presenters: Mary O’Brien Guerrero—Bread Loaf Teacher Network Lawrence
Student presenters Kathryn Corniel and Denssis Pena
Description: In 2005–2006 a class of fourth grade students from Henry K. Oliver School, along with the photographer Oscar Palacio, writer and educator Michael Armstrong and museum education director Julie Bernson worked on a year-long writing and photography project. In this project students documented their lives by looking, photographing, thinking, writing, sharing with their classroom community and in the end publishing the book Home and City.
There are two important principles to this work which in turn becomes part of the process of documentation and assessment. First, we will look at the choices students make when documenting their community life through images and words. Second, we will look at the act of looking closely at their documentation in order to develop an understanding of the work. This process was used during the actual work and will be utilized in the workshop with a few of the students who participated.
This workshop will be about the choices students make when documenting their home and city life through images and words. Along with students, the workshop participants will employ the collaborative assessment model to look at students work closely. Through this process we will consider how the students look closely at their work and assess what they are communicating. In this process, students looking with peers and adults see their work with the eyes of other’s experiences which in turn expands the meaning of the text and allows each student the opportunity to consider his or her work as an object which impacts the thinking of the community as a whole. Students watch as others imitate and learn from their work creating a shared set of experiences which gathered together creates a powerful supportive structure where students gain the “capacity to represent, portray, characterize, and depict”. |
