Let’s Make a Better Picture:Teaching Photography as Science and Art to First Graders
(.pdf version w/ photographs)
“The camera is an artifact of our technological culture and my approach to teaching photography to young children reveals the multiple relationships I have with the medium as an artist and an educator. As the philosopher Patrick Maynard has explained, ‘photography is...a kind of technology...[that can] amplify our powers to do things.’”
“Why shouldn’t the scope and sequence of our social studies curricula and textbooks be organized around the images, descriptions, depictions, legends, lies and cherished myths of American military dominance and conquest of the west and beyond? It’s not really violence when it is promoting democracy, is it?"
“I was nine years old when I followed my little brother and his friends into the woods behind my step-grandparents’ house. Watching them swagger down the narrow tree rooted path, I heard them bantering about what they were going to do when they got to the ditch. The deeper we got into the woods, the more my fear of snakes arose, so I walked slowly and quietly behind them.”
“When I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's text, I see it not only as a product of a certain man, a talented artist who lived in and wrote about a certain era called the Jazz Age, but of a particular racial sensibility that in turn reflects a multiplicity of attitudes from the larger culture of which it is a part.”
“National demographic data indicate that the US population of persons of color and immigrants is continuing to increase. By the middle of this century, people of color as a whole will constitute about half of the US population (Banks, 2003). Regardless of these ongoing changes, however, the teacher corps of the US remains over 90% White and middle class, while the majority of public school students in several major cities is already Black, Hispanic, and/or Asian American (Sleeter & Grant, 1994).”
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