Photo!Bomb: Thinking Like a Photojournalist
What’s Happening in this Picture?
WHAT: Centered on a humanities unit built around taking action for avoiding stereotypes and single stories of diverse communities, students practice “Thinking Like a Photojournalist” as part of a Global Youth Media Photo!Bomb experience and community exhibition embedded inside the Grade 9 interdisciplinary unit.
WHY: Through photography, interviewing, and exhibition curation, students are tasked with respectfully expressing curiosity about the history and lived experiences of others and exchanging ideas and beliefs in a creative and open-minded way. Students examine diversity in their social, cultural, political and historical local contexts rather than in ways that are superficial or oversimplified.
HOW: After deconstructing work from Lens Culture, Humans of New York, Aperture, Out of the Blocks and PhotoVoice, learners are challenged with a short design challenge in their immediate community around portraiture and underrepresented voices.
In the first image, students utilize their phones and mini-artists’ statements to illuminate their understanding of key photojournalism concepts in this makeshift gallery walk and formative feedback loop.
In the second picture, Steve works with a student on connecting with an economically diverse local community member through both interviewing and photography.
Lastly and importantly, integrating the meta-language of such resources as Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards can help both educators and students to articulate and evaluate success criteria for taking informed, purposeful action — connecting with both interdisciplinary learning objectives and impactful applied learning for systemic and sustainable development.
THANK YOU: Jeanine Freeman for inquiring about the possibility of using photography, interviewing, and artists’ statements as relevant learning outcomes. We were able to launch a great collaboration with your teaching team to co-facilitate student exploration of the knowledge, skills, processes, strategies, and global competencies and concepts related to photojournalism and the interdisciplinary unit theme.