What's the Story Behind the Picture?

One of the ideas I came up with focuses on helping students answer Hobbs’ questions of “What is the author’s purpose?” and “What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented?” I want to do this by letting them explore art and then to question what the story behind the picture is. First, I think it’s important to provide the students with examples. For this lesson, we would do this by discussing a piece of media together as a class, discussing things like: “How do you think the artist got created to create this piece? What aspect of life does this piece represent? What do you think was the artist’s motivation in creating this piece? What materials were needed to make it?” After having a discussion like this with the class I would split everyone into groups and give each group a piece to analyze and then present to the class. After I feel like they’ve reached a point where they’re used to questioning the motive and reason behind a piece, I want to give them a chance to create something of their own. I’m not sure if I would want to make the medium specific, or just let them create something in whatever medium they wanted. Throughout the creative process, however, they must take into consideration the sorts of questions we talked about earlier—the piece they create must mean something. Along with turning in the assignment, I would want them to turn in a reflection where they describe the reason why they did certain things to create their piece. Hopefully, by having them analyze the creative process of someone else and to then experience the creative process themselves will help them to think more about finding the author’s purpose in future texts they read.

I thought that the Heroes and Monsters exhibit was a wonderful collection of art that would really grab a kid’s attention. Ideally, I’d like to use art like this to discuss with my students because it deals with subjects that they’re interested in and familiar with. However, one of the biggest problems I see in this is that we don’t have the ability to bring out a Heroes and Monsters exhibit whenever we want to in our classroom. Going on any field trip period is hard. So, we have to use resources like projectors to display and discuss media. However (I know—yet again), knowing what to google to find a really cool piece of art is hard. I know how to find a picture of the Mona Lisa, but it would be so much cooler to talk about the statue of Captain America holding the head of the bad guy. I would have no idea where to start in order to find images of most the stuff that was in the exhibit! I suppose the point I’m trying to make is this: there are tons of amazing pieces out there that will catch our students’ attention and that would be good to analyze, but how can we find them? Is there some sort of website or resource that collects awesome pieces to use? Or does it just take time as a teacher to build up a library of neat pieces of work? 

The last thing I'd like to bring up in this post is that I just want to mention that I loved this quote in Hobbs' book: "This means less focus on "covering" material through lecturing and more focus on "uncovering" the process of critically analyzing, comparing, and synthesizing texts to form meaningful interpretations of [them]" (page 74). I love this quote so much because it's at one of the core principles that I believe we as teachers should share. Our goal shouldn't be to fill up our students with facts. They can find facts anywhere. Our goal should be to teach them how to make sense of the facts/messages/information they come in contact with. We should be trying to create critical thinkers, not robots that can spout off facts.