Changing Perspectives

This photojournalism project will have our students look at the idea of human rights. Through service learning, the students in our classes will have the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to collaborate with others, and to strive toward a common goal. They will be given the opportunity to take initiative to research issues, and agree on a focus and raise awareness. This will allow our students to examine issues of disparity and human dignity as well extending their own caring and compassion while developing skills like empathy.

Based on the themes related to human rights, students will brainstorm a focus through which they will attempt to look at a given situation from multiple perspectives. After becoming informed citizens, the students will go out and take pictures about the different issues that they have selected. This will include researching images supplied by aid agencies such as Amnesty International, UNICEF and so on. The students will then take pictures from their own community that demonstrate various viewpoints. The next step is for the students to source or create captions that epitomize the different viewpoints possible for a single image.

Update (May 9, 2012)

At the moment, our students are learning about what human rights are and how they affect us and the world around them. Once the students have a better understanding of what rights are, we will be assigning each class a theme that will guide their photography assignment.