Spotlight: The Pipeline Project

The Pipeline Project

The Pipeline Project, housed at the University of Washington, is a K-12 outreach program that connects undergraduate students with local and regional schools and community organizations through tutoring and mentoring. UW Students enroll in a two- quarter seminar that allows them to explore the themes and practices of LTP while beginning to tutor in the K-12 classroom.

They introduce their students to LTP by familiarizing them with cameras and the themes of framing, content, lighting and props. The children then create written and visual images that represent their ideas of self, family, community and dreams.

These seminars have been offer for two quarters of each academic year since Autumn 2003. Since that time there have been 85 undergraduates who have participated and hundreds of elementary students.

http://www.washington.edu/uwired/pipeline/index.html

Student work from the Pipeline Project can be viewed on Flickr.com or Google Video.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/expatuw/collections/72157600244727069/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1667284214216301869

Christine Stickler, Director of The Pipeline Project, attended a LTP workshop at the Center for Documentary Studies in 2003 and has been using LTP ever since. She can be contacted via email: castick@u.washington.edu

Spotlight: Reflections on a LTP Teacher

Photograph by Christina Wegs

Reflections on a LTP Teacher
by Christina Wegs

Janine Gomez has been working as an educator in Durham, North Carolina for 14 years, both as a teacher as well as school principal. In 2004, she participated in an LTP Teachers Workshop co-facilitated by Wendy Ewald, and since then has integrated youth-led photography and writing projects into her classroom work with elementary-, middle- and high school students, as well work with youth in leadership development workshops and summer camps.

I worked with Janine as an LTP intern during the spring of 2008 at W.G. Pearson elementary school, where she taught photography and writing through a course for 3rd-5th graders. Each section of the course, called Expressive Paparazzi, formed a team that worked together to define and complete a project that combined writing and photography to explore a theme. In the first quarter of the spring, Expressive Paparazzi focused on the theme of “community.”

Spotlight: The Contrast Project

CONTRAST PROJECT
The Contrast Project works with youth in using digital media as a tool for expression, empowerment, nonviolent activism, and advocacy. The project started in 2006 with two youth groups in the Bethlehem area of the occupied Palestinian territories, and has since expanded to working with youth in six refugee camps throughout the West Bank. The Contrast Project is also starting to work with youth in the Washington, DC, area.

The goals of the Contrast Project are to provide youth with technical and artistic skills; offer youth a therapeutic means of creative expression; empower youth through educational trainings; provide youth with viable alternatives to violence; and advocate for the needs and rights of youth at the local, regional, and international levels. For more information, visit www.contrastproject.org. The Contrast Project was started by Julie Norman who participated in the undergraduate LTP course at the Center for Documentary Studies in the fall of 1999.

Community Alphabets in Arusha, Tanzania

Last summer LTP offered a workshop in Arusha, Tanzania for 40 elementary school teachers. During the workshop, the Tanzanian teachers created visual alphabets about their community. They used the English and Swahili alphabets as organizational frameworks for their pictures. One group created a visual alphabet representing a local marketplace. Another created an alphabet about their school.

LTP will return to Tanzania this summer to continue working with these teachers and their students. To read more about this project For more information please click here: LTP Tanzania and watch for more blog posts in June and July.

Wendy Ewald’s American Alphabets project began in the early 1990’s when she collaborated with ESL students in Durham, NC. The Spanish-speaking elementary-level students selected words associated with each letter of the Spanish alphabet and then decided how to visually represent these words with objects, gestures, or scenes. Ewald has since worked with children in other parts of the country to create three additional collaborative alphabets, including an African American alphabet in Cleveland, Ohio; a White Girls’ alphabet in Andover, Massachusetts; and an Arabic alphabet in Queens, New York. In Ewald’s American Alphabets (Scalo 2005), the photographs combined with the students’ writing reveal what is important to the students as they highlight cultural aspects of their lives—as immigrants, for instance.

Reflections on a Duke-Durham collaboration

Photo by Elena Rue

In an undergraduate course called Literacy Through Photography, Duke students learn to use Wendy Ewald’s methods for working with children while helping Durham teachers carry out classroom-based LTP projects. The course takes a multi-disciplinary look at teaching and learning, language and literacy, and contemporary social issues that Durham schools face. Students are encouraged to see through children’s eyes–to understand children’s writings and photographs as expressions of their culture and time.

We asked our spring 2008 students to write a reflection about one particular image made by a Durham elementary school student. In their essays, our students also comment more generally on the process of collaborating with children on darkroom-based photography projects.

Reflections on a Duke-Durham collaboration
By Anna Cassell

When I first met Evan* during a group photo-planning session, his intentionality was the first thing that struck me about him. The kids folded up a sheet of paper into quadrants; in each quadrant they were to map out a picture they might take, based on some prewriting they’d already done for the LTP community project listing the people and places they see every day, as well as the things they like and dislike about their communities.

It was interesting to watch how different children approached the task of planning a photograph. Some of them started drawing right away. Some got very stuck; one student in particular felt embarrassed about her drawing skills and, despite my praise, ran off to sit alone at another table until I coaxed her back. Even then she felt self-conscious and wouldn’t share her drawings with the group. I could see Evan thinking before he started drawing. After a few seconds, he would suddenly get an idea and just go for it; I admired his decisiveness and sense of purpose. Perhaps misunderstanding the assignment, he drew from an aerial viewpoint. He also drew in much more detail than the assignment called for, which both impressed and somewhat exasperated me, because it made it impossible to keep the whole group on the same page.

When it was time for Evan to print his photographs…

Reflections on a Duke-Durham collaboration

In an undergraduate course called Literacy Through Photography, Duke students learn to use Wendy Ewald’s methods for working with children while helping Durham teachers carry out classroom-based LTP projects. The course takes a multi-disciplinary look at teaching and learning, language and literacy, and contemporary social issues that Durham schools face. Students are encouraged to see through children’s eyes–to understand children’s writings and photographs as expressions of their culture and time.

We asked our spring 2008 students to write a reflection about one particular image made by a Durham elementary school student. In their essays, our students also comment more generally on the process of collaborating with children on darkroom-based photography projects.

Reflections on a Duke-Durham collaboration
By Jen Kozin

Throughout the semester, it was great to get to work with a multitude of students and see how differently each of them interpreted the theme of their photography project: The Best Part of Me. However, the class size made it difficult to work intimately with each student as they each, unfortunately, only had one chance to take pictures and one chance to work in the darkroom. The image I selected for this reflection was printed by Ana*, who I luckily had the chance to work with more individually than the others. She was absent the day that her group went out to take pictures, and so when her group first went to the darkroom she waited until everyone had their negatives and then shyly told me that she had not taken any pictures yet. I had her print from another student’s negatives, and promised that she would get to go back again later in the semester. That day she went through the steps of printing with everyone else without saying very much, and speaking very quietly when she did open her mouth.

Finally last week I was able to take her out to shoot her own pictures, and it was instantly clear that she had thought a lot about what she wanted to do. Usually a timid girl, her personality really came out as she directed her friend and told her exactly how she wanted her picture to come out. She seemed like a different girl than the one who had barely said a word in the darkroom before. In her picture, she was swinging on a swing on the playground and waited until she got to the height she wanted to count to three and have the picture taken. The result is her in the center of the picture, slightly blurry since she is moving, with a clear and focused background. She has a big smile on her face, which was her “best part”, and her closeness to the camera really draws attention to it…

Current work by Wendy Ewald

Towards a Promised Land, Margate, England

Towards a Promised Land is a project commission by the London-based international arts organization Artangel as the prologue to a promenade performance and film project by Penny Woolcock entitled The Margate Exodus. Wendy Ewald worked with twenty-two children who migrated to the British seaside town of Margate from near and far. Some of these children have fled countries afflicted by war, poverty or political strife; others have been affected by the simple facts of domestic upheaval from one town to another. With Ewald, they have learned to explore their imaginations and express their different experiences of displacement and relocation in the search for a better life.

Over an eighteen month period Ewald photographed the children and interviewed them about their past and present lives, and them how to take their own photographs. This collaboration captured the children at critical turning points in their lives. Ewald’s photographic portraits of the children have appeared as huge iconic banners in various locations around Margate, including along the historic Sea Wall; the children’s own projects and photographs formed an exhibition at a local Margate gallery. Towards a Promised Land, supported by Small Voice Foundation, touches some of the most salient issues confronting contemporary society today in the form of the displaced human being and his/her effect on the concept of nationhood. These issues are further explored in an innovatively conceived publication. Edited by Louise Neri, this “book of fragments” brings together Ewald’s case studies, the children’s own materials, and a host of interviews, writings and commentaries by prominent writers and artists on the contemporary search for a sense of place in a world of constant and turbulent change.

http://www.click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=242

To read about the book Towards a Promised Land click here:
http://artangel.org.uk/pages/publishing/pub_ewald.htm

Labrador, Canada

Wendy Ewald began collaborating with youth in 1969 when she was seventeen years old. The first community she worked with was a group of Innu youth in Labrador, Canada. Now, nearly forty years later, she has returned to Labrador to both look back at the work and create a new series with the community living there today.

To hear an interview with Wendy about her work in Labrador click on this link and scroll down to the September 15th interview archive:

http://www.cbc.ca/wam/interview_archives/2007_sep.html

To view Wendy’s Labrador pictures from 1969 click here:

http://www.tshikapisk.ca/home/22