Tag Archives: education

Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay (M4P5)

The coming school year will be the first time I teach Photography 11/12, and I am hoping this resource will help me prepare for that. The paper, Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay Aisinai’pi Storying Place (Walsh et al., 2018) outlines a photo essay project that situates the students’ identities with place. A photo essay is “a series of images evoking stories of original peoples and settlers on this land and fuels important questions about identity and belongingness” (p. 103).

An example of a photo essay, representing the importance of (controlled) burns for healthy ecosystems.

In the paper, the authors describe using a photo essay of the City of Calgary to orient students with Indigenous worldviews and a sense of place. Each photo has a theme, and many interconnect. For each photo, they asked students key questions, such as:

Who originally occupied this land?
How do Eurocentric societies and Indigenous societies understand Mother Earth?
What are your beliefs about live-giving forces?
What promotes health and wellness?
How do you understand the notion of all entities to be interconnected and interdependent?
etc.

I think this could be a valuable way to introduce students to both photo essays and to local history. You could extend the learning by having students create their own place-based photo essays.

Reference:

Walsh, C. A., St-Denis, N., & Eagle Bear, A. (2018). Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay Aisinai’pi Storying Place. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.18733/cpi29376

Using Visual Arts to Explore Local Community (M4P4)

Teachers for Social Justice published a lesson that facilitates students connecting with their local community. This is important for students to explore their own identities, their relations to others, and a sense of place. The lesson uses Bryan Collier’s book Uptown as a visual example of the art project (video of the book below).

https://youtu.be/7eJFJjQsTy4

This lesson is geared towards younger elementary students (grades 2 and 3), but I see the potential for this to be adapted for older students in digital media and photography classes. To begin, you could start by learning about media literacy through an anti-bias, anti-racist lens. The Association for Media Literacy has a useful framework for this. This would set the foundation for a “Reading the Street” activity during the community exploration, where students would experientially learn that media includes the environments around them, conveying ideologies and implications. The project can culminate with a digital collage project using computer programs such as Photoshop or Krita (free). To go even further, students could animate their collages using a program like After Effects, or make it interactive (such as clicking certain parts triggering an audio clip) using Adobe Animate (click here for an example, from ETEC 540’s “What’s in Your Bag?” assignment)

Other lessons on Teachers for Social Justice website that look promising:

Little Stones: Art for Positive Change (M4P2)

Little Stones is an award-winning documentary following four women making positive changes in their communities through art. The documentary’s team also joined up with the University of Michigan School of Education to create a Take Action! toolkit to help educators bring social justice to their own classrooms. This includes lessons surrounding the documentary itself (focused on Gender-based violence), as well as two workshops on Graphic Design (p. 119) and Spoken-Word Poetry (p. 126). The toolkit has many valuable media literacy activities, such as an analysis of infographics (Lesson 3, p. 45-48) and lyrics (Lesson 7, 95-108). Overall, this is a solid resource on its own, but also has the potential of being used as a reference for developing Anti-Racist and Indigenous art and media lessons.

Project of Heart (M4P1)

Project of Heart is an artistic inquiry into the history of Indigenous people in Canada and the legacies of the Indian Residential Schools (IRS). Though open to all Canadians, it is geared towards schools and students. The website is organized by Province to help provide local context and resources.

The project’s framework includes 6 steps:

Investigate the History and Legacy of Residential Schools in Canada
Look closer at a specific IRS in your local area, including whose territory it is located on and the children taken to the school
Create a gesture of Reconciliation
Survivor Visit
Social Justice Action
Finishing Up Project of the Heart

For Step 3, the website gives several suggestions for projects, from their traditional commemorative wooden tiles to crafting feather wreaths or writing a song. The provincial pages also provide blog-rolls with examples from schools. An approach that I think would be interesting is a collaborative mosaic. Ideally, this would be done in collaboration with a local Indigenous artist who would create the overall design and perhaps teach the students some art lessons. For examples of Collaborative Mosaics, check out Jen Jolliff‘s school ones, and the Global Roots Project.

M4P5: Youth who inspire

These five First Nations youth are being highlighted for their action in restoring language and culture and ultimately hope in their communities. They are also an example to students of action: it is personal, it takes different forms, and it is in response to a personal connection. As the final project considers using technology to inspire activism in the classroom, all of these youth use technology for their purpose. Exploring who they are, their message, and their delivery offers students a rich experience of activism in action.

M4P4: Burnaby Village Museum, a step toward reconciliation

Over the past few years, Burnaby Village Museum has taken steps to undo “the part it has played in erasing Indigenous history from the place we now call Burnaby (Vancouver is awesome, 2019). This is an important step toward reconciliation and an example that can be discussed in class.

Out of this process has come the Indigenous History in Burnaby Resource Guide. This guide is an excellent resource for grade 5 and beyond, providing local context and story to the areas in which my school is found and where the kids play and live. This guide also serves another purpose though, and that is to open up conversation about how history is written. Who funded this book? Who consulted in this book? Who received credit for this book?

Naylor, C. (2019, November 1). Burnaby museum works to undo erasure of local Indigenous history. Vancouver Is Awesome. https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/history/indigenous-history-burnaby-village-museum-1946638.

M4P1: The Bill Reid Centre

The Bill Reid Centre is located at Simon Fraser University, a forty-minute hike from my school, but I did not realize its website was so rich in resources. It uses digital technologies such as photographs, drawings, videos, and other visual media to highlight the depth and vibrancy of Northwest Coast culture. Each section is so plentiful in resources that an entire year of curriculum could be developed with the website as a starting point. Its stated mandated is to (1) encourage community and academic conversations regarding the visual culture of Northwest Coast First Nations, and (2) promote public understanding and respect for the First Nations of the Northwest Coast past and present. The digital village project, in particular, could be of particular value in my class when using Minecraft to showcase knowledge.

M3P5: Books to Build On: Indigenous Literature for Learning

This University of Calgary website, in combination with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, offers a curated list of Indigenous books suitable for all ages (from child to university student). As a bonus, they have also included lesson plans with most of the books. I considered my knowledge of Indigenous books suitable for my class to be well developed, and this resource offered new books to add. In particular, I like that it is not limited to social studies or language arts (where indigenous content is often included), but rather focuses on all the subject areas (including science, math, etc).

M3P4: Gladys We Never Knew

Using the art of storytelling, this BCTF resource focuses on Gladys, an Indigenous girl from Spuzzum, and her life in a residential school. I appreciate its BC centered focus relating it directly to where students live and explore. It links to additional sites throughout the each lesson that enhance learning, but the information provided within the resource itself is rich. Each lesson is easily adaptable to earlier or older grades and provoke students to make connections to their lives. It is also available in French for those teachers who are in an immersion classroom.