Serendipity35

"We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory." - Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you haven't already guessed, I am a believer in serendipity and play (and constructivism if you want to take it into my education world).

This past summer I was able to get togther with a childhood friend that I had not seen in 25 years. Jim Shive was a neighborhood friend that I grew up with and after I lost contact with him, he became a professional photographer.

Another of my friends from the adult portion of my life, Steve Smith, was teaching at Christian Brothers Academy in NJ and ended up having Jim's son as one of his literature students.

Steve shared with me some short stories written by Ian that were excellent and I would get updates about him at college in Montana, working in films etc. And Ian Shive has become a photographer too.

So when I was updating links and ideas for my visual design course this semester about photography, I looked at Ian's web site and portfolio and bookmarking his site led me into other sites online that allow you to play with photography and images.

There are sites that allow you to make a mosaic from a photoset, favorites, tags, or individual digital photographs or images. You can build images based on themes, colors, shapes or whatever. That site also works with photos hosted on Flickr or anywhere else. How about a photo wall (a kind of experimental photo viewing interface). You choose the photos and they appear a few at a time creating an ever-changing tapestry.

There's a very good site full of image tools (toys?) that can be used with students. I like playing with Interact 10 Ways from Getty Images. One of those ways of seeing leads you to color and truth. I guess my favorite to demo is one that I think of as an infinite zoom - a section that allows you to zoom in on a very small section of a photo and see that it is "built" of many other images and you can see many ways to explore - by a color that you click or choosing an image based on subject etc.

Then I was reading a piece called "Lighting the Way" by Alexei Bien that asks what would children who are blind show us about the world if they learned to take pictures?

This question came to photographer Tony Deifell in 1991. He had recently graduated UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studied anthropology and he ended up setting up an experimental photography program, called Sound Shadows, at Governor Morehead School for the Blind, in Raleigh, North Carolina. From that program came a book, Seeing Beyond Sight.

Thinking about seeing is a good question to ask our students in a variety of ways. I can think of many classroom moments I've had that might fall in this lesson plan folder. My film students were always asked to watch some film or video with the sound turned off. It changes how you see. Even a Tv commercial or movie trailer without the soundtrack gets a different look.

I used to teach animal tracking classes and they were a great way to do heightened seeing (adults and kids were on the same level in those classes - actually, the kids were proably better)

Or turn all that over and focus on teaching the lost skill of listening. Learning Through Listening is a good site to start you teaching listening with downloadable lesson plans, strategies, activities and case stories. Teaching tools include lesson plans using poetry, music, stories, and case stories of teachers meeting the diverse needs of their students. Learning Through Listening is the web site of the company Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Are you starting to get ideas about inclusion and individualized planning?