With the Digital Camera at School – A Project in Elementary School
A picture is a representation of reality,
not reality itself. To most adults that is very commonplace. Children however
often do not make this difference. If a person on a picture is good looking and
flawless they infer that this person really must be beautiful in the real
world. That a picture can be staged or modified is not really a consideration.
Media products and reality do not stand in a one-to-one relationship. This is a very important message that media eduction teaches. A message that is the more important for young kids that are constantly confronted with advertisements in every form. This is a big part of what the project “Digicam at School”, that I instruct as a part of my job as a media educator, do with children in fourth grade at an elementary school in Marburg.
Of course we do not come marching into the classroom, ask the pupils to sit down and then start complicated reflection about representations and reality. For a good part media education is always practical and has a hands-on part in it. What we do first is get the kids to take the cameras into their hands and teach them how they work. Being able to handle the basic mechanism is important to be able to understand how pictures are taken.
Knowing one's way around a digital camera does not only involve being able to put it on and off and press the button to take a picture. It also includes choosing the right mode for example for portrait pictures. This is also the first thing we have the children do: Take a good picture of a friend that shows his face from different sides. It is simple, but in fourth grade even this task takes time.
Afterwards, and that is a thing we first had to learn when we started the project two years ago, the kids need to learn the basic handling of a windows computer. Where we all expected this to be a thing we could teach in one lesson, we had a lot of work to do. A fact that follows us through all of our work is that the foreknowledge children bring to a media class could not be further apart. You always have some specialists and fast learners and some who seem to have never seen a computer.
What we do with the pictures is talk about them. What view looks the best? Which pictures are good and which ones need improvement? We slowly lead them to realizing that the way the picture is taken strongly influences the outcome. There is a difference between a picture from the front and a picture from the side. The latter will normally make the photographed person look much better.
The thing we then tackle is creating our own little photo-story. What happens every year is that we see that our pupils are not aware that there is a fundamental difference between putting a story in pictures and making a film. Namely you have to choose what the distinctive moments in the story are and put them into frames. Creating such a sequence takes quite some time. We use storyboards to do sketches of what we are going to photograph later. Although for pricacy reasons I'm not allowed to upload pictures, what I can show is our storyboard:
Media products and reality do not stand in a one-to-one relationship. This is a very important message that media eduction teaches. A message that is the more important for young kids that are constantly confronted with advertisements in every form. This is a big part of what the project “Digicam at School”, that I instruct as a part of my job as a media educator, do with children in fourth grade at an elementary school in Marburg.
Of course we do not come marching into the classroom, ask the pupils to sit down and then start complicated reflection about representations and reality. For a good part media education is always practical and has a hands-on part in it. What we do first is get the kids to take the cameras into their hands and teach them how they work. Being able to handle the basic mechanism is important to be able to understand how pictures are taken.
Knowing one's way around a digital camera does not only involve being able to put it on and off and press the button to take a picture. It also includes choosing the right mode for example for portrait pictures. This is also the first thing we have the children do: Take a good picture of a friend that shows his face from different sides. It is simple, but in fourth grade even this task takes time.
Afterwards, and that is a thing we first had to learn when we started the project two years ago, the kids need to learn the basic handling of a windows computer. Where we all expected this to be a thing we could teach in one lesson, we had a lot of work to do. A fact that follows us through all of our work is that the foreknowledge children bring to a media class could not be further apart. You always have some specialists and fast learners and some who seem to have never seen a computer.
What we do with the pictures is talk about them. What view looks the best? Which pictures are good and which ones need improvement? We slowly lead them to realizing that the way the picture is taken strongly influences the outcome. There is a difference between a picture from the front and a picture from the side. The latter will normally make the photographed person look much better.
The thing we then tackle is creating our own little photo-story. What happens every year is that we see that our pupils are not aware that there is a fundamental difference between putting a story in pictures and making a film. Namely you have to choose what the distinctive moments in the story are and put them into frames. Creating such a sequence takes quite some time. We use storyboards to do sketches of what we are going to photograph later. Although for pricacy reasons I'm not allowed to upload pictures, what I can show is our storyboard:
| storyboard_zauberer.docx |
Already this requires a lot of thinking on the part of the kids as we try not to intervene too much. It is also part of the concept to let them make mistakes. That is what they learn the most from, even if it means taking a picture again and again. We always try to discuss what would change in a scene if we change the angle or if we do a close-up rather than a shot from far away.
The last part before the story is finished is adding text to the pictures. We show our pupils some photographs of people that have a very distinct facial expression. Sometimes we even use some of the shots we made at the beginning of the course when we did the portrait-photos. Then we add captions to the pictures. After the kids did a lot of laughing, we can discuss how a little bit of text changes the whole meaning. This tells us a lot about how printed advertisements work.
Then we can add text to our own pictures and try out how the message changes if we add different vary what we write. Thanks to the school we are allowed to exhibit our stories in the hallway.
What is very interesting about our work is that what the kids learn about the difference between media products and reality is something they make themselves accessible. It is nothing we are overtly telling to them. While learning how to create their own products, that are themselves representations of the real world, they understand the mechanisms behind medial productions. At the same time they are able to handle a digital camera after we are finished.
This kind of work is groundwork in media education. It is nevertheless fundamental because working with pictures and films is something that comes up increasingly in schools today. Learning this first level of decoding messages is also a competence that helps kids keep their orientation in a highly medialized world.
