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Blog

Very occasional musings about
photography education

Inspiration without incident: A successful Year 12 Photography trip

27/6/2016

2 Comments

 
By Julia Hanlon, Year 12 Photography, St Peter's School
We recently had the opportunity to visit the new and expanded Tate Modern as part of an exclusive schools preview day. My Year 12 classmates and I were invited to look around the exhibitions and gallery spaces in all its new found glory. I had never been to the Tate before so I found this visit a very inspiring eye opener.

Tate exterior shots by Paul, Year 12
We first visited Tate Exchange. a new civic space on the fifth floor of the Switch House extension. The view was breathtaking, literally - Mr Francis suggested we walked up the stairs rather than take the elevator. Excitingly, we will be involved in a project early next year in this very space...  

The rest of the galleries were brilliant. From Sheela Gowda’s Behold, an installation made from metres of human hair and car bumpers, to Cildo Meireles’ Babel, a vast tower of noise emitting radios. I was exposed to many contemporary new works alongside some more familiar artist names and styles.

I was particularly drawn to the work of Louise Bourgeois, the French-American artist. Although terrified by the spiders, I was captivated by the underlying themes of sexuality, fragility and protection.
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Julia photographed some of the work by Louise Bourgeois and created these two-frame films, above and below, with images taken on the same day at Borough Market.
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Another artist whose work I found intriguing was the Indian painter, Bhupen Khakhar. His paintings confront provocative themes with sensitivity and wit, achieved through a narrative of bright colours and experimental ceramics.

Due to the Tate’s sheer vastness I didn’t have time to see everything, but what I did manage to see has certainly helped support new ideas for work.


After the Tate Modern we walked to Borough Market and had the opportunity to experiment with some street and documentary photography.
Images by Harvey and Briony, Yr 12
From here, via a few Tube stops, we went to the ‘Strange and Familiar’ exhibition at The Barbican, curated by British Photographer, Martin Parr. The show included a wide range of works, not least from photographers we have studied in class such as Henri-Cartier Bresson, Garry Winogrand and Paul Strand. The exhibition considered how international photographers from the 1930s onwards have captured the social, cultural and political identity of the UK, a timely choice for our current documentary themed coursework. I found the formality of the exhibition and chronological ordering allowed me to reflect thoughtfully on the wider contexts of the pictures.

Perhaps the most striking images were the imposing portrait prints by Bruce Gilden.The close proximity of the huge, over-sized prints in this space, created an uncomfortable feeling when viewing the images; it felt intrusive, yet, compelling, scrutinising each minute facial detail.

After absorbing all these new works and artists it was time to head home. A safe return, thankfully (no threat of terrorist encounters, as with our previous trip). Seeing these exhibitions has certainly expanded my knowledge. It has enabled me to think increasingly photographically as I continue to find my own creative ways forward as an artist and photographer.


Julia Hanlon
2 Comments

Designing a Programme of Study for the new linear A-level

15/6/2016

4 Comments

 
To be honest, I've never been a very big fan of lesson plans. This is a bit ironic given that we decided to call the set of resources on this website Lesson Plans. Of course, they aren't really lesson plans at all but schemes of work or sets of provocations with accompanying resources. I do plan all my lessons but I rarely teach from a set Scheme of Work and, as an incessant tweaker, I enjoy the process of designing lessons from scratch each week (not the most efficient practice I agree). Nevertheless, I base these lessons on an over-arching Programme of Study which enables me to stick to an agreed timetable of structured activities and largely prevents my colleagues tearing their hair out with frustration.

This year, with the various changes to subject specifications, we at Tallis were asked  to revisit our Programmes of Study at KS4 and 5 ensuring that they were fit for purpose. In an earlier post, I described why we made the decision in the visual arts to go linear. We no longer offer the AS qualification in photography or art. This summer has felt quite different with only the A2 students being moderated. This meant that we needed a Programme of Study that would sustain students for two years, support those who arrived in Year 12 with little experience of the subject but also stretch and challenge those who had done GCSE photography and needed to move on quickly.

The structure we were given by senior leaders for our new Programmes of Study was as follows:
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Regular readers and NSEAD members will know about the thinking we've done this year here at PhotoPedagogy Towers about Threshold Concepts for Photography, a version of which has appeared in AD magazine. We think Threshold Concepts are important because they identify the big ideas in our subjects. We think it's important for colleagues to debate and determine these big ideas, separate from Assessment Objectives and the whims of the incumbent Secretary of State. In short, Threshold Concepts are what we (as professional teachers) agree are the foundational ideas in our various disciplines. "Powerful Knowledge" is Professor Michael Young's phrase and describes an order of knowledge that is different to the everyday wisdom brought to schools by young people. It is a controversial term, in some respects, since it contains an implicit criticism of what has been termed "progressive" approaches to education. However, my Head co-authored the book 'Knowledge and the Future School' with Professor Young so it's no surprise that "Powerful Knowledge" appears in our new Programmes of Study document! Whilst I'm not convinced about the term itself, (what is powerless knowledge?) I support the notion that disciplinary knowledge (the kind we get when we are taught subjects) is an important element in education and students can benefit from being explicitly taught stuff and thinking hard about it. There is then a direct link with threshold concepts - those troublesome nuggets of complex knowledge that take a while to assimilate and 'master'. We might call this the Content of the curriculum, although in a subject like photography or art this is often quite a complex issue. Finally, we have "Fundamental Skills". If "Powerful Knowledge" is the Knowing What, "Fundamental Skills" are the Knowing How. For us, this includes not only procedural issues (processes/techniques) such 'How to make a cyanotype' but also connects with intellectual skills like 'How to conduct strategic research' and our Habits of Mind (e.g. 'How to stick with difficulty').

We've been hard at work for the last couple of years testing a variety of mini projects with Year 12 students. Many of these have been shared in the Lesson Plans section of this website. In the last couple of weeks we have begun to shape our new Programme of Study. As always we've written it in Googledocs so we can keep it as a live document, editing, tweaking, adjusting collaboratively as we go. We are happy to share the document with other colleagues outside school, knowing how valuable it is to connect with professionals in other contexts and with different experiences and expertise to our own. This is what the first half term looks like:
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Here's a link to the whole document. It's very much a work in progress so please forgive any typos and don't be surprised if it continues to change over the coming weeks. Our plan is to have something that we are pleased with by the end of term.

Hopefully, you can see how the three elements knit together: Powerful Knowledge, Threshold Concepts and Key Skills. In terms of the two year programme it breaks down like this:

Autumn 1 - An introduction: What is photography? Mini projects begin.
Autumn 2 - Mini projects continue, each dealing with a specific historical/contextual issue and giving students opportunities to develop their own work in response. Objective vs Subjective approaches to photography.
Spring 1 - Photo Exchange and the beginning of the extended Photobook project.
Spring 2 - Photobook project continues, the launchpad for the Personal Investigation.
Summer 1 - Personal Investigation continues, supplemented by occasional provocations E.g. Inside /Outside, Mirrors or Windows? etc.
Summer 2  - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 1 - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 2 - Personal Investigation continues. Students begin finalising their responses and pulling together their accompanying essays.
Spring 1 - Personal Investigation concludes. Component 2 The Externally Set Task begins (1st Feb)
Spring 2 - The Externally Set Task continues
Summer 1 - The Externally Set Task concludes (shortly after Easter)

The first two terms of Year 12 give us an opportunity to tackle the notion of photography in terms of relative objectivity and subjectivity. Alongside an introduction to the chemical darkroom as a kind of experimental space, where the magic of light can be observed and captured, we attempt to juxtapose the Modernist tradition (straight, objective, documentary) of photography with approaches that celebrate photography's ability to represent subjective experience. We also attempt to tackle issues surrounding the ethics of photography and an awareness of the difference between photography as art and all the many forms of photography that belong to other domains - the law, medicine, surveillance, war etc. We hope that an awareness of the history and theory of photography (still hotly contested) will help students see their own work in context.

We are live testing this type of structure with our current Year 12 students and making tweaks to the Programme based on what we have learned with them. So far, the basic structure seems to have worked well, giving students a good grounding in the subject (without the distraction of the AS exam) and allowing them to develop their own practice and interests. We are particularly pleased with the Photobook project. It has been a great platform on which students can build a sense of themselves as photographers and thus confidently begin the fully assessed Personal Investigation. It also means that each student is responsible for defining the nature of their own investigation through an authentic process of research and practice.

Here are just a few examples of selected pages from Year 12 photobooks:
We would be really interested in any feedback readers may want to give us about this Programme of Study. We would also be excited to see how you are developing your new courses, whether or not you are sticking with the AS exam and how your students are getting to grips with their Personal Investigations. The main aim of this website is to provide a place where colleagues can share what they do, ask for support, test ideas and showcase students' work. We hope the information above is of some use and look forward to seeing how everyone else is getting on.

Jon Nicholls
Thomas Tallis School
4 Comments

The choices we make

2/6/2016

2 Comments

 
I was in the supermarket yesterday - a local co-op, all business as usual - when I saw an elderly lady collapse. As she fell, her hand, then wrist, caught the edge of a shelving unit (specifically, a protruding metal label holder - Tuna chunks in brine / sunflower oil £3). I rushed to help, as anyone would, making a series of observations within a few steps:

1. This lady was approximately my mother's age (84).
2. She was dressed very smartly - light grey suit jacket, dark grey trim around the collar.
3. The trim on her suit matched the floor tiles.
3. Her face was also grey, desaturated, as if adjusted in Photoshop.
4. Her make-up  (much more than my mum would wear) hadn't changed colour. It seemed to sit above the surface of her face.
5. The blood emerging on her hand and wrist - slowly, and thankfully not dangerously  - created a visual relationship with the pasta sauce jars on the grey shelf that her hand reached over, upon the grey floor.

This was less than seconds. The lady was conscious throughout, impressively dignified and calm. She lay straight as a guard whilst we (two store workers and I) ensured she was okay, comfortable, bandaged and warm (it was cold; the milk section was to the side of us). An ambulance was called - just to be sure - and it then felt appropriate to leave. I edged away from the scene, wondering where in the rush I'd put my tomato soup.

I didn't take any photos, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't cross my mind.

This is not to say I cared less, acted slower, or wanted to exploit her misfortune; I was just aware that as these events unfolded I noticed things, picturing them photographically.

Is that wrong?

I hope she is okay.

CF
2 Comments

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