Through the (Contemporary) Looking Glass, and What Teachers Found There by Nina Schoonover

Through the (Contemporary) Looking Glass, and What Teachers Found There

by Nina Schoonover, North Carolina State University

“Where should I go?” -Alice

“That depends on where you want to end up” -The Cheshire Cat

Cameras allow us to adventure through the looking glass as we frame images of our realities and our experiences. Like Alice stepping through the mirror, photography lets us forge creative paths as we take a peek through the lens.

Photography is already part of our everyday lives. From taking photos of our pets and our children, to capturing political protests or civil rights violations, photographs play a pivotal role in our day-to-day experiences. With the advent of technology that has merged how we communicate with how we take pictures, many people now have access to high-quality cameras in their pockets. As photographer Chase Jarvis said, “The best camera is the one that’s with you.”

As a former secondary ELA teacher and growing teacher educator, I want to share why I believe bringing cameras into the ELA curriculum pushes students to view reading beyond traditional notions of texts. Capitalizing on students’ love and familiarity for the camera in their out-of-school lives–think TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat–using cameras can help draw parallels between how we teach reading and writing practices.

Why does Photography and Visual Literacy matter?

Photographs are images that represent our imagination as well as our realities. They reveal our worlds, our lived experiences, and what we see through our “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.” So, when we engage students in activities that promote new ways to respond, write, and create, we honor their unique abilities and perspectives through which they understand the texts we ask them to read.

Photography also drives us forward, capturing the “real” and forcing us to think critically about what we “see” in the images. As we build our ELA curriculum to be culturally relevant and address the lived experiences and needs of our students, photography can help us push students to “read the world” through the camera lens.

What I call “culturally relevant photography” is founded on the idea of students and teachers embracing the rhetoric of visuals and their power for shaping cultural identities and ideals. Especially in our contemporary context where we often encounter fake news and media, I argue that ELA teachers must pass on the tools to understand the rhetoric behind visuals in order to learn the skills of evaluating the story behind the image.

How can you bring photography into your classroom?

There are two ways I see photography fitting within the ELA curriculum:

• Responding to Literature
• Writing, Creating, and Sharing Texts

First, photography can be a great way for students to capture their reactions and analysis to literature and visually depict their understanding in multimodal ways.

• Staged Photography: Different from point-and-shoot techniques we use daily on our smartphones, a staged photograph requires students to put together objects, scenery, lighting, and other elements that force them to be intentional about space within the photograph. For this activity, students may stage a scene or pivotal plot point from a novel or play the class is reading. Staging photographs forces them to slow down and analyze important literary elements such as tone, mood, theme, and characterization and how those shine through in their photograph.
• Character Selfies: This activity is what it sounds like: students capturing selfies in a reflection of the characters from the texts the class is reading. Character Selfies ask them to hone in on characterization and to consider facial expressions, clothing, and other movements in one still captured photograph.
• Photo Diaries: These help students continue to build on characterization and perspective as they respond to literature. Building a Photo Diary can be done by putting together a social media post (e.g., Instagram story or Tik Tok video) or using a more traditional scrapbook format. Either way, students are asked to photograph relevant events, characters, objects, symbols, and other pieces of the narrative to respond to literature.

A second way photography can be taken up in the ELA classrooms is through opportunities to write, create, and share their content knowledge.

• Story Retelling: This activity is similar to a photo diary, but instead of focusing on a response to literature, this assignment asks students to storyboard to create their own “fiction” project. Like a comic strip or a flipbook, a Story Retelling captures the narrative in panes that function together to tell a complete story. Using photography requires students to be intentional about movement specifically, therefore, giving them a chance to embody the characters, themes, or other literary elements they hope to capture in each pane of their story.
• Cultural Mapping: This project asks students to zoom in on themselves, their families, and the objects that are important to them. Teachers might align this project with a personal narrative unit building on class discussions of identity, memoir, and self. Photographing the individuals and artifacts that reflect who students are allows them to construct the stories they want to tell of themselves.
• Detail Collages: This assignment truly asks students to slow down and zoom in. For this activity, students may choose an object or building and focus on one detail or piece of that artifact. For example, they may choose to focus on the front door of their home or the legs of a desk or coffee table. Once they have chosen the object or building, they take detailed photographs from multiple angles, positions, and perspectives before collaging those pictures together. The purpose of the activity is to have students deep dive into their object or building’s properties and elements. This can help you teach descriptive writing skills or enhance conversations about perspective and how these details may change from new angles.

How do you assess photography?

You may be wondering how you will assess photography in your classroom. In his book, the Arts and the Creation of Mind, Elliott Eisner wrote that “judgments can impede student performance and can thwart student learning if they are conveyed to students in insensitive ways” (p. 180). Eisner’s words reflect that when we think of “assessment,” especially in regard to art projects, we must be careful of equating it to “judgment.” Instead, we have to consider more sensitive and responsive ways of assessing such as:

• Conferences: Conferencing requires a lot of time, but if teachers are able to add workshop days into their unit, meeting 1:1 with students to talk through their artistic projects gives them a voice in their creations.
• Co-Designed Rubrics: Similarly, co-designing rubrics together with students helps them construct an understanding of artistic value. Co-creating the rubric for their art projects allows them to critically engage with how we culturally evaluate and understand art.
• Portfolios: These are a great way to assess any creative project because students are not only sharing their finished product, but they are sharing the phases in between. Portfolios can include the brainstorm, outlines, storyboards, edits, and revisions. These help show students that art and writing are creative processes, not products. Creativity requires multiple iterations and many, many revisions.
• Community Celebrations: With photography assignments, curated gallery walks of student projects work really well. You may limit these presentations to only your class, but you may consider inviting parents, principals, or even other community members! The beauty of photography is that it is easily shared with the wider public in-person or virtually, and this gives students a chance to share their work with someone “real,” not only you as their teacher, and it will help them feel pride in their creations.

So, are you ready to step through the Looking Glass?

For those of you not ready to take the full photography plunge, I have listed some news and media sites that have photo prompts to inspire daily warm ups or bellringer activities that reflect current events. These can help you dip your feet into the water and hopefully inspire you to find ways to incorporate more photography.

• The New York Times “What’s Going on in this Picture?
• The Atlantic Photo
• National Geographic Photo of the Day

For those of you who are ready to step through the looking glass and find what’s through the camera lens, I have also included a list of some editing and creating tools that could be useful for students to develop digital photography skills in your classroom.

• Photo Collage & Grid
• PIXLR
• Canva
• Fotobabble

As you capture, share, or post photos this summer of your vining tomato plants, sandpipers scuttling on the beach, or your dogs cuddled with you on the couch as you enjoy your much needed break, I challenge you to think about how photography can help us as ELA teachers construct an arts-based curriculum that is relevant and “real” to our students’ worlds.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” – Alice

Nina Schoonover is a doctoral candidate at North Carolina State University in Teacher Education and Learning Sciences. She is a former secondary ELA teacher, and her research focuses on arts-integration, visual literacy, and arts-based pedagogies. You can reach her via email at nradako@ncsu.edu.