Laura's Response to Ewald

I Wanna Take Me a Picture – Teaching Photography and Writing to Children
By Wendy Ewald

Wendy Ewald points out that state and national mandates defined visual literacy as one of the four forms of literacy (reading, writing, and listening were the other three). Yet, most teachers and administrators are not at all sure what “visual literacy” means. When young children begin to write, they often rely on their drawings rather than their writing to convey the meaning of the story. As they develop their skills in writing, very little attention is paid to their visual skills. Wendy Ewald finds it disturbing how people lack the sensitivity about what their visual surroundings communicate to people and how they are affected by it. Her book describes how to teach photography to children. It was her attempt to focus on our neglected physical and visual surroundings and the need we all feel to articulate and communicate about our personal and communal lives. The book evolved from thirty years working with children and years of thinking about how we learn and how we express ourselves with images. She states that the desire to be photographed is as strong as the desire to photograph. While working with a group of students on a reservation she found that the photographs were much more personal and deep when taken by someone living within that life. An outsider can only get so deep. The outsider is more careful and selective which can hinder their level of depth. After photographing, she had some students write a story about the place they lived and the images taken could be used to add to the story. She found that the photographs sometimes inspired the students to write. She began to experiment in conventional classrooms with how photographs and writing stimulated one another. The writing seemed to come more easily when the students worked from a photograph that they had taken themselves. However, before the kids were let out loose to photograph, she found it necessary to have the students organize their thoughts writing about the subject they were going to photograph, then asking them to make a list of images suggested by their writing. As Wendy Ewald saw that as the classrooms becoming more and more diverse, she realized that photographs could provide a much-needed opportunity for the students to bring their home lives into school. The students who were essentially strangers to each other could actually get to know each other. She had the students create an exhibition of their photographs and writings. Some of the pictures and stories were censored as many of the teachers and their administrators felt that the content and sometimes the presentation of the children’s work not suitable for display. However, the photographs and writings did give them a better authentic glimpse into their lives. Wendy Ewald believes that photography is perhaps the most democratic visual art of our time. For most of us, picture taking is part of our family lives.

This sounds like an interesting book that I would like to buy. I am curious to read more about the lessons in that book. I enjoyed writing about a photograph at the Columbus Museum of Art and I want to try something like that with my students. We have ten digital cameras that can be borrowed in our principal offices. I would like to try to use them more this year with a more in-depth photography lesson. I like the idea of the kids photographing their personal lives and families. The students in my building come from a wide range of socio-economic background and I don’t think that some of the kids or maybe even teachers really know how some of the kids live. I think it would give teachers and students a better window into their lives and what values to them. It would be interesting to see what they would choose to photograph and why. What does it mean to them? I’m not sure how this idea would be received in my school though. However, it is something to discuss with the principal for sure.