Living Images
For many students, Social Studies is a subject to which they ascribe the modifier "booooring." What? A subject that pulsates with the energy of human ambition, dreams, tragedies, and relationships! Ironic isn't it? How do you get students to connect with events decades, even centuries, in the past? Effects that affected intimidating numbers of people. How to make it real, personal, meaningful?
Educators know that, in order to have students learn about history, you have to have students connect emotionally with the lives of those who lived the past. What better way than through an arts-infused approach.
Living Images begins with,.....an image. A photograph or painting contemporary to the period being studied. This image must have as its subject human beings. A person, a family, a group of people existing in the selected time frame. Students are not given any context for the image when it is shown to them. In class, an actor asks them to answer many questions about those in the image. How old are they, what is their socio-economic status, what is their emotional state? If more than one person is in the image, what is the relationship(s) between them? In short, the students create what actors call a "character biography."
Next, with a playwright, the students create a hypothetical ten year time line for the subject(s) in the image. Where were they ten years ago? What significant events happened to them during those ten years? Whose missing in the image who might have been around five years ago? Had they always lived where they were in the image?
Once the time line is established, artistic artifacts are used to introduce the context for the image. Plays, music, poetry, choreography, visual art has been created during and about any period of human existence. Slavery? How about a performance of "Molasses to Rum" from 1776 which outlines the triangle trade. Immigration? How about a selection from Rags? The Holocaust? Read the poetry of a local resident who was herself a survivor. The possibilities are endless.
The Social Studies teacher follows on by delivering the existing curriculum for that unit of Social Studies. Collectively, the students, the teacher, and the artists decide on an art form through which they can communicate their feelings about the content they have learned by creating original work in that artistic discipline.