Juli
Kendall's
2004-05
READING/WRITING
WORKSHOP JOURNAL
Entry #16
More Adventures in Student Journalism!
Who would have thought that I would end up teaching a series of lessons on how to be a photojournalist! I'm not the photographer in my family and the pictures I do take tend to be flat and uninteresting with very small people and lots of sky. But one thing I've learned as a teacher is — expect the unexpected.
So here's what happened. We've published 3 newspapers so far this school year. We aren't on a monthly publication schedule. It seemed better this first year just to publish when we were ready rather than beat ourselves up about deadlines. But for the fourth issue we decided to try photojournalism. Our newspapers have been great but they've been much more about the text than the photographs.Our goal was to teach kids how to take a picture that tells a story and then write a short caption for it. It ties into our need for kids to be to able identify their purpose for writing, or taking pictures. Topic choice and selection has proven to be the most challenging part of our adventures in journalism. After months of mini lessons on how to choose a topic and practice choosing real topics, they still struggle to come up with ideas that seem appropriate for a school newspaper.
Perhaps this is an indication that they are still coming to understand the purpose of the newspaper. Originally we told them that the purpose was to let others know about all the good things that are happening at our school. I still think that they aren't as fully informed about what's going on as we had envisioned. Or it might be that the good news they want to communicate to others about our school is different than what we want to communicate. We'll keep working on this one!
We started our mini lessons on photojournalism by talking about famous pictures we know that tell a story. We discussed several photos from the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Then we asked for the kids' contributions. They mentioned the picture of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon and the photos of 9/11 and the twin towers. Next we handed out copies of the local newspaper and asked the kids to look at the photographs and read the captions and talk about the photos with people sitting around them. We gave them 10 to 15 minutes to do this. Then we had one of the kids from each table share about what their group had noticed in the photographs. Interesting information! It was often difficult for them to decide why the photographer had taken the picture. As we handed out the cameras, we asked our journalists, who would be working in pairs, to think about three questions before they took their pictures.The following week we had each of the pairs of photographers share out with the whole group about how their picture taking was going. Yikes! Half of the kids hadn't been able to come up with an idea for their photos and had not taken any. So we had the kids who did take pictures share how they chose their pictures. This whole process got us to thinking. So I went searching for a photographer to answer my questions and I found one close by. My question – Where does a photographer get their ideas?Why is this picture important?
Who is the audience? Who will be interested?
What story am I trying to tell with this picture?
His answer – Everyone is different. Some go looking for a specific thing, some create what they want, and some look for the serendipitous image.
His advice – Set up something for them. They are to take a picture. Tell them, "I want at least one closeup, one of someone watching an event." When they do this, they begin to see pictures that have been there all along but they hadn't looked for. This forces them to view the event in ways they might not otherwise see.
The photographer has agreed to come and be a guest speaker for Journalism in a few weeks. By then we'll have the results of our photos and he'll bring some other pictures taken by kids to share. For now, I'll hold on to what I know about photography and working with kids, and I'll just have to remember — expect the unexpected.
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