Grade levels:
9 - 12
Duration:
Minimum one 45-minute classroom period
About this Exploration
How can photography prompt reflection?
In the words of education reformer John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” And so, this lesson turns our attention from action to reflection, using photography to consider our advocacy actions.
Advocacy Action Plan ↓ Advocacy Action in Motion ↓ Reflection ↓ Future Action
Reflection is as important to service learning as taking action. It can help you to translate your experiences into a broader understanding of social justice advocacy, fine-tune your skills as a photographer, and build your self-knowledge. Reflection requires careful observation, listening, and thinking to hear what your advocacy actions communicate. This lesson allows us to see where we have been successful, where we failed (and we will), and what the future might hold.
Reflection can make us feel vulnerable at times, but it is that vulnerability that helps create the greatest bonds between us and makes us more courageous individuals and community members. To start the process, you'll consider the idea of reflection and how photography can guide the direction for future action. Following a discussion of the factors that contribute to reflection, you will then reflect on your own advocacy actions and share with the group. Next, you will continue to practice reflection through a photographic memorial of your action. Throughout, think about whether you would like to dig deeper into your initial advocacy action, what role photography played, and if there are different advocacy opportunities you would like to address in the future.
Vocabulary
Advocate, Advocacy
Someone who publicly supports and speaks up for an idea, a cause, or members of an identity group.
Community
A network or group of people, sometimes living in a particular place, who share interests, values, characteristics, responsibilities, or physical spaces.
Culture
A social system of meaning and custom, developed by a group of people to assure the group’s continuity. The system has unspoken rules that shape values, beliefs, habits, patterns of thinking, behaviors, symbols, and styles of communication. Consider using instead: Social identity group, social group
Discrimination
Actions stemming from conscious or unconscious prejudice, which favor and empower one group over others based on differences of race, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, language, age, national identity, and other categories.
Ethnicity
A social construct, used to group people based on shared cultural heritage and characteristics such as values, behaviors, language, political and economic interests, history, geographical base, and ancestry.
Intersectionality
An approach coined and theory developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, scholar of critical race theory, which holds that characteristics such as gender, race, class, and others must be examined in relation to each other, rather than in isolation from each other.
Justice, Injustice
In different contexts, “justice” refers to both moral correctness and fairness, and also the rule of law. By contrast, “injustice” usually describes unfairness.
Marginalize
Treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or powerless; placing them outside of a group, society, or community; and enforcing prejudice through societal institutions.
Privilege
Unearned social power granted by societal institutions to members of a dominant group, based on the nature of their identities. Often invisible to those who have it.
Race
A term used to identify individuals as part of a distinct group, based on physical characteristics and heritage. Though, at one time, the term purportedly was based in biology, race is now understood as a social construct that is not scientifically based.
Religion
A system of beliefs, usually spiritual in nature. Often advanced in the context of a formal institution.
Restorative Justice
A theory of justice that focuses on repairing or mitigating the harm caused by a crime. As a cooperative, in-person process with all willing stakeholders, its goals for offenders include taking responsibility, understanding the harm caused, redemption, and discouraging further harm.
Stereotype
Attitudes, beliefs, or assumptions about a person or group that are oversimplified and unsupported, but may also be widespread and socially sanctioned. Stereotypes can be positive or negative.
Unconscious Bias, Implicit Bias, Hidden Bias
Negative stereotypes regarding a person or group of people, which influence individuals’ thoughts, attitudes, and actions without their conscious knowledge.
Lesson
Introduction
As you reflect on your advocacy actions in motion, you will start to see change and consider future action.
Key questions in this lesson include:
- What did you learn?
- Did this process change you? If so, how?
- What future advocacy action might you take part in?
- How can photography aid what you do as an advocate for social justice and help shape our future? And by extension, how do professional artists use photography to the same ends?
Set the Stage
Untitled, Melissa Barales-Lopez, 2018
Look at the image shown here.
Questions for Discussion:
- What do you notice first about this image?
- What compositional and photographic elements do you notice, and why? Include:
- How is the photo framed?
- The position of the subjects—what is the physical relationship of the people?
- What does the background tell you about where this might have been taken?
- Expressions
- Lighting
- What do you think the photographer is trying to show or explain?
- Do you get a sense of whether the photograph is advocacy or mere documentation?
Discuss: Advocacy Action Reflection
Freedom Riders, Montgomery, Alabama, 1961, Bruce Davidson, gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
Now that you've looked at how a student photographer communicates about their culture, consider another example from the Getty collection. How do photographers use their work to help bring about or document advocacy action?
Look at the image shown here. Or, view the image on getty.edu. Read the caption to situate the photograph in time and place.
Questions for Discussion:
- What do you notice first about this image? What is this space and location?
- How did the photographer compose the photograph?
- What do you feel are some of the messages of this photograph?
- How does your reading of the photograph change once you learn the title?
- Do you think the photographer was undertaking advocacy with this work?
- Do you think the photographer is showing that this topic is important, or not? Do you think the photographer is simply documenting an event, or making a social comment? Why?
About Bruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson’s (born 1933) photography centers on people and communities. He has often chosen subjects deemed to be outside mainstream society. In 1961 the New York Times assigned him to cover the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who rode buses in the American South to protest the lack of enforcement of the Supreme Court decision declaring segregated public busing unconstitutional. This led Davidson to undertake his own documentary project about the civil rights movement.
Exercise: Reflecting on Your Advocacy Action
In this exercise, you'll reflect on and document your advocacy actions. You'll need the photographs from your advocacy actions, and if you completed the lesson Inspiration to Take Action for Advocacy, you can also reference your Advocacy Action Plan.
Start reflecting on your photographs by responding to the prompts in the Reflection on the Advocacy Action Organizer. [See Resources section.] You may choose to work individually or in small groups. If time allows, share your reflections on advocacy action in a class discussion.
Practice: Using Reflection on Advocacy Action
In this exercise, you'll continue the practice of reflection by using photography to further reflect. Using your Reflection on Advocacy Action Organizer, create a photographic memorial of your own advocacy action. The related photography skill videos listed under Resources provide quick skill refreshers. Think about how you will apply these skills and understandings.
Continue your practice at home and in your neighborhood, taking the opportunity outside of class to incorporate these contexts from your daily life into your practice.
Reflect
Sharing your work can feel vulnerable, so creating a safe space for sharing is important for this exercise. In small groups or with a partner, share one to three of your photographs. You may choose to speak about your reflection, or not. Alternatively, this exercise can be done on your own as an individual reflection.
Consider the following questions as you look at each others' photographs and think about what it was like to make them. As you discuss them with your peers, think about ways you can share positive feedback with them.
Questions for Discussion:
- What is the first thing you notice about the reflection and photograph?
- What is the artist explaining, or perhaps, highlighting, about their advocacy action?
- What did you discover about yourself, your advocacy action, and others, in the course of the project?
- What was challenging, and why?
- What part are you most proud of, and why?
- What would you do differently next time?
Banner Image: Untitled, Michael Valenzuela, 2018
[1] Sturgill, Amanda, and Phillip Motley. "Methods of Reflection about Service Learning: Guided vs. Free, Dialogic vs. Expressive, and Public vs. Private." Teaching & Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal 2, no. 1 (2014): 81-93. Accessed June 12, 2020. doi:10.2979/teachlearninqu.2.1.81.
