Our Place in History
Many of our students carry cellphones with powerful cameras that can be used to record and tell important stories. We want them to think like visual artists, seeing the stories around them and taking a few minutes throughout the day to build photographic diaries in their cellphone albums. We want them to use the power of imagery, the sciences and the arts to tell their own stories.
This site features quick, high impact things we can do now in our current classes that will develop our students’ powers of visual, scientific and verbal expression. The idea driving this project is empowering our students to record from the grassroots level how the pandemic has affected their lives, to help themselves and others see and understand across cultural divides and to argue for social justice.
The project starts modestly with 15 minute units that can be added to current courses and with optional extra credit projects in which students create their own Grassroots Histories. The quick projects we individually add to our classes can cumulatively transform the way that students use imagery, the arts and sciences to understand and influence their world, their lives and each other. The grassroots histories our students create may eventually become part of the historical narrative of our times.
In addition to classroom projects, we are adapting and developing both week-long workshops for developing students’ abilities as grassroots artist scientist historians and week-long workshops for educators, artists and historians who want to work with students.
Here is a recording of the SENCER/NCSCE webinar on Friday, March 26, 2021 and here are pdf versions of the slides that were used in the webinar Frank Wattenberg Colleen Woolpert Marianna Bonanome Kate Poirier. These were designed to be accompanied by our words.
Quick Projects
Images-of-the-day: One way to learn how to use images for narrative is by looking at how others use them. Spending a few minutes in class discussing current images from newspapers and other media can help us build our narrative power and become more discerning readers.
Grassroots Histories and Programming: Computer programming together with the powerful cell phone cameras most of us carry around with us gives us enormous and inexpensive creative and narrative power. Grassroots Histories is a wonderful setting in which to teach computer programming. Our students will develop programming abilities that they can use in future careers as artists, electronic game developers and movie-makers and to train astronauts preparing to travel to Mars.
Grassroots Photography, Modeling and Geometry: This unit has many ideas that can be used in middle school, high school and higher. It relies on geometry and the idea of similarity and can be done with careful drawings or using the trigonometric functions.
Just Add Math 