Let’s Make a Better Picture - Teaching Photography as Science and Art to First Graders (original) (raw)

"….more and more photographers have discovered that the power of the photograph springs from a deeper source than words-the same deep source as music. At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction."-Nancy Newhall 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 educator. As the philosopher Patrick Maynard has explained, "photography is…a kind of technology … [that can] amplify our powers to do things." In particular, Maynard has pointed to photography's ability to intensify "our powers to imagine things, and our powers to detect things", noting that photography often performs these various functions simultaneously, and that the functions do not just merely combine, but interact in useful ways (1997). My original idea for teaching photography to elementary school children was intended to serve many purposes. Committed to a form of community action that would enrich the M.E. Fitzgerald School, a K-8 school in Cambridge, MA 1 , I had conceived of a curriculum that would address gender inequity and the under-representation of women in the fields of math, science and technology. Planning to focus initially only on a subset of girls in the first grade, I wanted to use their natural interest in drawing and coloring, which I had observed from time spent in the classroom, and create an inquiry-based 1 The M.E. Fitzgerald, my local community school, was located at 70 Rindge Avenue in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. My son, Andrew Dumit, attended the school for three years. In 2003, the school was closed as the result of a district-wide consolidation plan. The plan allowed for Fitzgerald students to stay in the building if they so desired, and be joined by the students, administration and staff from the Peabody School.