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:

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:

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:

I've just read 'Inside Out' by Solomon-Godeau in preparation for Monday's talk. Last week's lecture about John Berger produced some fairly heated discussion about whether Berger was more or less interesting than Walter Benjamin (to whom he was indebted) and whether his Marxism was an obstruction to the enjoyment of his writing. It was the sort of debate that reminded me of university or the early years of my teaching career. I really enjoyed it and came out determined to re-read everything by John Berger I could get my hands on.

Teemu has been an excellent guide thus far. We are about 25 students of varying ages, backgrounds and levels of expertise in photography. At least a couple of people have done Masters degree study. There is at least one professional photojournalist in the group. There are also people who appear to be interested amateurs and some who have never heard of Benjamin, Barthes or Berger. The lectures last about 90 minutes. Teemu, aware of his audience, is very good at pitching things so that they are challenging but accessible. We stop fairly frequently to discuss ideas or seek clarification. Often, there is just enough time at the end to enter into group discussion, like last week's exchanges about Ways of Seeing. In fact, that would be a much better title for the course in my opinion. Each writer selected is discussed in terms of their specific contribution to the history of photography theory but each lecture is careful to identify how one concept builds on another or where there are contradictions or changes of direction in the writer's own thoughts. Consequently, we are presented with a plurality of approaches to looking at photographs, a number of ways of seeing.

I have been very lucky that my school has helped to fund my attendance (under the generous banner of Continuing Professional Development) but at £18 per lecture it's really very good value. Some of these texts were familiar to me before the course began but I hadn't read them for quite a while. I have thoroughly enjoyed dusting them off. Some of the texts are new to me and I'm sure will give me much pause for thought. 

Chris and I are almost at the end of creating our set of resources to support the Threshold Concepts. We're just about to publish number 10, the final instalment. Lots of the ideas I've encountered in my re-reading of these great texts have found their ways into the TCs. I imagine, as I encounter more, I will want to add new observations to what's already there. I have certainly been weaving summarised versions of photography theory into my A level lessons, alongside more explicit reference to the Threshold Concepts. Feedback so far suggests that students are enjoying the chance to get to grips with big ideas. 

It's been such a pleasure to go back to school, to be taught again. This is the third iteration of the course and its popularity suggests that it may well be running again next year. I can think of worse ways to spend a Monday evening.

Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School

The following guest blog post is by Jim Hamlyn, an artist and lecturer interested in contemporary art practice, philosophy and teaching. It was originally posted on his excellent blog Thought • Art • Representation. We are very grateful to Jim both for his insights on Threshold Concepts and the permission to publish this fascinating exploration of "the way images actually work":

A few days ago I presented a paper at a conference at the University of California Berkeley on the subject of the image. One of the other speakers gave a presentation beginning with the above quote from the early 20th Century social documentary photographer Lewis Hine. The quote reminded me of Picasso's famous remark: "Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.” Like Picasso and Hein, many people hold the view that images — photographs in particular — are truth bearers, that they provide meaningful testimony and have what philosophers sometimes call "factive", as opposed to fictive, status. I aim to explain why such talk about images has the effect of misleadingly reducing them to linguistic tokens. Furthermore, doing so overlooks, misunderstands or worse still ignores, the essentially mute but nonetheless powerful effectiveness of images as substitutes for the things they represent.

As any linguist will confirm, all well formed sentences contain a subject and a predicate. Language is thus a system of procedures by which we ascribe attributes to things through the use of arbitrary symbols. Only the most intelligent creatures can do this because only the most intelligent creatures are capable of following the rules necessary to engage in practices of predication: of the socially negotiated attribution of abstract linguistic tokens to objects and states of affairs.

It should be clear to everyone that images are not linguistic entities, yet quite evidently it is not in the least clear. Almost all theories of representation refer to images as "signs" or "signifiers", as "readable" objects or "messages" that require "decoding", "deciphering" or "interpreting." In everyday use, we talk of how images "convey meaning", "have content" and are "about" the things to which they "refer." We also talk of what images "tell" us, what they "describe", "articulate", "suggest", "explain" and "imply."  And it is not impossible to find reference to images as oracles and chronicles or soothsayers or that they predict the future, commentate on the present and narrate the past. It might help to exemplify the absurdity of such thinking by noting that we can say the exactly same of tea leaves or the lines on one's hand. That we can do so, reveals far more about our infatuation with language than it does about the nature of images or the susceptibilities and skills that enable their use.

Any student wishing to understand the question of how images actually work (this was the title of my presentation at the conference by the way) will be met by an impenetrable thicket of confused and over complex theorisation about these profoundly simple but powerful tools. They will have to assimilate and understand numerous technical terms like "denotation", "connotation", "punctum", "studium", "icon", "index", "symbol", "sign", "referent", "veridicality", "verisimilitude" etc. And with each step along this path they will be no closer to the answer they seek. In fact, with each step, they will descend deeper into a convoluted labyrinth from which there is little hope of return.

Depictive images work because they can be mistaken for the things they represent in certain ways and in certain respects. It is as simple as that. There are ways to make images resemble the things they depict because there are ways and respects in which they can be made more or less indiscriminable from them, ways that fully exploit the potential for illusion. You simply cannot do this with words — words do not look anything like the things they stand in for.

So when we say that images "tell" "truths" or "lies" we ignore their essential nature and instead treat them as linguistic items. In ordinary usage this is fine, but strictly speaking (which is what we should require of all serious theories) lying and telling truths are the exclusive preserve of language users. Of course, images can depict things that never did, could or will ever happen. But nonverbal misrepresentation does not reduce to verbal misrepresentation: to lying. Images are not texts and the skills necessary to use them for communicative purposes are by no means reliant upon (although they are massively assisted by) our skills as language users.

There are two fundamental questions we can ask of any image: "What is it of?" and "What is it about?" The first is always more basic than the second because the second relies to a very significant degree on the first. If it were not a matter of some importance what images are actually of, then we could indeed replace them with abstractions, with symbolic tokens, with words. We can do this of course, but not without significant loss.

Recognising what an image is of, is usually effortless, whereas the answer to the question of what an image is about — what it means — is almost never so. In fact the answer to the question of meaning is about as straightforward as the answer to the question of the function of a length of string. If you do not know how to use a length of string, then it has no function. The same is true of meaning.

Images can neither lie nor tell the truth. They can be used in acts of lying and they can be used to corroborate truths, but just as a nonverbal human witness can point to the perpetrator of a crime with no recourse to language, so too do images gain their fundamental efficacy from factors that are entirely independent of linguistic competence. Images can be deceptive but they cannot deceive. They can mislead and misguide but they cannot cheat. They can be clear but they cannot be honest.  They can distort but they cannot feign. They can simulate but they cannot pretend.

Images are powerful because they trigger many of the same embodied responses as the things they represent — just as words do in fact. But, unlike language, they do not require elaborate skills in symbolic substitution and rule following to do this. So it is simply mistaken to suggest or conclude that images are bearers of truth, tellers of tales or descriptions of the world. If someone shows you a view through a window, they are not showing you a lie and nor are they showing you the truth. Likewise, a view of the moon through the distorting lens of a telescope is neither factive nor fictive. When we present evidence of the truth, the evidence does not constitute the truth. Truth is not something that can be perceived. When we say "I see the truth" we do not mean to suggest that the truth is something that can be seen. We mean that the truth is something that can be understood.

During the conference, another of the presenters mentioned something that struck me as relevant to this analysis. Apparently the root of the word "epiphany" is to be found in the Ancient Greek term: phanein, meaning "to show." Images show us things. It is what we do with images, and more specifically, the communicative practices within which images are integrated, that transforms them into such extraordinary and useful tools. Language enables us to use images in extraordinarily sophisticated ways, but language also significantly obscures our understanding of these essentially mute witnesses.

Jim Hamlyn