Over the past two weeks, I have been working with fellow students and fellow future teachers to teach our Composition Theory class about photo essays in 20 minutes. We had a chance to all meet together in class on March 3rd and really got to plan things out. Before this we had bounced ideas off of each other via email about what we each thought was the most important part of photo essays to teach to the rest of our Composition Theory class. I had originally thought that teaching our fellow students how to make one in a step by step manner should be the main focus of our lesson plan and that we should go in depth into how to take pictures, edit them, and then compile them into a final photo essay. However, after hearing my teammate's ideas, I quickly reconsidered and agreed that there was a lot more to our lesson than just teaching students how to create a photo essay.
Meeting in class on March 3rd gave us the chance to figure out what we needed to say, how we needed to say it, and how to split up the presentation (and the work) among the six of us. I think we all worked great together and each member of the team pulled their own weight. Maggie took charge and acted as a very capable leader throughout the process, and each teammate added their own ideas to our lesson plan. I suggested that we include a section about visual rhetoric to the lesson plan and came up with the idea to actually guide the class through the process of creating a brief and simplified photo essay. I thought this would be a fun way to actively include the class in our presentation. I hope it turns out okay! We'll see tomorrow afternoon. After we all reached a consensus about what needed to be included and who was responsible for what, I suggested that we meet before class the following week to go through our presentation and to make sure that we would be able to finish it in under 20 minutes. I think we were all concerned about this and everyone was enthusiastic about having a practice round.
Over the next week, we each worked on our own part and emailed our materials and our final ideas to Maggie. We each added to her original PowerPoint presentation and were able to all include our own ideas. Also during this time, Allen worked on creating an original photo essay which will conclude our presentation tomorrow. This will provide the class with a concrete and powerful example of what they (and their students next year) will be able to achieve with a photo essay. I wanted to find a series of pictures that would be able to demonstrate different potential meanings to different audiences. Following an idea from my teammate, Sarah Brown, I chose to collect different pictures of Barack Obama. These worked out great! There were many, many pictures online to choose from and any one of them could be used in different photo essays to create different effects, depending on the context. I also needed to find materials for the class exercise of creating a photo essay. Again, Obama seemed like a great subject. I also found several songs that the class could choose from to create their short photo essay. I compiled all these materials into the PowerPoint.
Today, March 9th, our group met to discuss our plan for tomorrow's presentation and to go through a practice run. We added a few items and changed a few things around, but were pretty much ready to go. We each tried to speak fairly quickly and we all recognized the importance of splitting our time evenly and working together to make a cohesive presentation that flowed nicely from one section to the next. We finished our presentation only 2 minutes over, but considering that we had some technical difficulties that shouldn't exist tomorrow, we were all pleased with the final result. I hope that everything goes well tomorrow, and considering our preparation, I think it will. I'm really looking forward to teaching a small section of class tomorrow!
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