Downtown, Chicago(2). 2010.

Castle, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Lakefront, Chicago. 2010.

On Photographing Children and Meeting Students Halfway.

My colleague Almae Larson and I were sitting around the lunch table a few semesters ago when she mentioned that someday she would really like to put together a slide presentation of photographers who make images of children. It was frustrating to her that students gravitated toward images of babies in pea pods or tended to only photograph children who were doing cute, sweet things.

Feeling adventurous, I took her up on the challenge, and got on ArtStor and put a little something together, with the following artists:

August Sander
Wynn Bullock
Harry Callahan
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lewis Carroll
Emmet Gowin
Gertrude Kasebier
Lewis Hine
Jacques Lartigue
Sally Mann
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
W. Eugene Smith, and here
Anonymous 19th Century Daguerreotypes of Sleeping Babies.

If you know anything about the photographers on the list (or you take the time to look through the links), you will see that there is some challenging work in there.

The statistics that my university system gives us, as faculty, is that something like sixty percent of our students are working mothers who are trying to improve their job situation, and thus, are back at school. That number is not always born out in my classes, but on the day I showed the images to my class, I would bet more than a third of the students had children of their own.

Again, if you know the photographers on the list, you can probably imaging the top-of-my head narrative I was giving: “This guy photographed Germans and had to run from the Nazis, this girl is Alice from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and the images weren’t so creepy in the 19th Century, this woman photographed her children and her books were banned as obscene, this guy was a well-to-do young french child who had a darkroom and camera when he was very young, this girl was exposed to mercury and suffered her entire life...” You can imagine the silence in the room when we got to the Daguerreotypes at the end of the list.

In the following days, I stopped to consider the absurdity of showing these images to students who really were expecting something much warmer and sweeter. I had tried to show photographers who were significant names in the history of photography (which is part of my job given that the course satisfies an arts elective). However, if you step out of your preconceptions of photo-history, the images are pretty horrific.

I think that those of us with children tend to filter a lot of what we see through our experience as parents. When I was twenty-five, I found sleeping baby images to be fascinating. Now that I have taken three a.m. trips to the emergency room with a colicky infant, I tend to see my own child laying in the images. And understand the heartbreak those 19th century parents must have felt.

I can also understand why my students were put off by the images.

Isn’t there a way to meet them halfway? To let them voice their love of pea-pod babies and still talk about Sally Mann? Is getting them to improve their own images of their children enough? It is, after all, why a lot of them are taking the class. Where do we find the balance between the images we devoured as graduate students, and the images our students are ready to see?

By the way, I regularly show a clip on YouTube from a PBS documentary about Jacob Riis. I know the voice of the narrator, but can never remember his name. At any rate, toward the end of the clip is a segment about infant mortality in New York at the turn of the century, with a description of mothers walking the streets at night holding children dieing of dysentery or T.B. I tear up a little in class when I show it now. Again, you always filter it through your own experience. Plus, the video has a sound glitch right at that point, which makes the whole room jump out of their seats. You can't embed the video, but it is here.

Legs, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Downtown, Chicago. 2010.

Update Photography I rubrics.

In Effective Grading; A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson lay out a strategy for using a system of rubrics to expedite grading and assessment. Walvoord and Anderson call their rubric system PTA Scales - Primary Trait Analysis Scales. The principal is simple. You can clearly articulate the traits you are looking for in student work. You describe, in plain language, several different levels of success for each of those traits. Each level of success is given a value. In effect, you have a tool for collecting data about your student’s success across the traits you are measuring.

You can use the PTA to articulate to students at the outset of a project what success or failure looks like. You can use the PTA to simplify and speed up grading. Most importantly, you can use the data you collect to measure student learning in your courses and as a basis for assessment of your courses.

If you’ve never read the book and you teach, go to Amazon now and order a copy. It was a career-changing discovery for me when I found it - it clarified so much that I had difficulty understanding about my courses. And on more than one occasion, I have used information gleaned from course assessment to make valuable changes to my classes. The PTA stuff is just the beginning, really.

At any rate, my Photography I assignments all have a PTA associated with them. Unfortunately, they were all written more than five years ago when I taught at another institution, in a different darkroom, with a different group of students.

Also, Rochester Community and Technical College has been making a big push on institutional assessment, and there are a lot of assessment tools floating around my job. The school seems to have agreed on a format for laying out these tools that is different than the ones I created on my own five years ago. I made a couple of major mistakes then, and finally felt like it was time to make some changes.

The rubrics I made originally were formatted vertically, with traits running down the page. They were really wordy. They tended to have incomplete, run-on sentences. They weren’t relevant to printing on RC paper and using easels with fixed borders, like we do here in the darkroom at RCTC. They ran across multiple pages. When it was time to use the rubrics for grading, I was intimidated. Imagine how my students felt about reading them on D2L.

You can find an original rubric here, for an artificial light project.

I wanted rubrics that were short and concise. I wanted rubrics that fit on one page. I wanted rubrics that looked more like what is quickly becoming RCTC’s institutional standard - a horizontal grid with values running across columns and traits running down rows. Most importantly, I need to update the content to reflect printing with RC paper, in fixed-border easels like we do in the RCTC darkroom. I wanted rubrics I wasn’t afraid to read when it was time to grade.

You can find the updated rubric here, for the same project.

I am always happy to share more rubrics or projects, leave a comment or send an email if you are interested in talking more.