What is Home?: The Art of Digging Deeper

Educator: Bonnie Bredes - Librarian

Other Participating Staff: James Spinaris - Technology Teacher

Teaching Artist: Holly Hunt - Photography/Multimedia

School: Center Moriches High School, Grades 9-12

District: Center Moriches UFSD: https://data.nysed.gov/profile.php?instid=800000037468

Summary

This partnership explored ways that photography and careful observation of architectural design can show cultural influences, differences, biases, and stereotypes. High school students collaborated with their librarian, technology teacher, and a professional photographer to make and analyze photos, visit different architectural sites, and design homes for each other. Students described deep care for the elements that surround them and make up a home.

Rationale

Why did you work with this specific group of students? What issues were addressed during this project?

To build tolerance and cultural self-awareness by bringing attention to our personal biases by creating an architectural work based on another’s culture. Culture is defined as customs and beliefs. These beliefs are influenced by the ethnicity, race, and religion of the members of the family.

What learning goals/standards did this meet?

Arts

VA:CR3.1 HS1 Students created a personalized artwork to represent the definition of home through the perspective of our own eyes, through the eyes of others or through the eyes of society, culture or environment.

VA:Cn10.1.HSII Students learned the power of expressing themselves through an individualistic lens based on historical and current examples of local architectural structures.

VA:Cn10.1.3 V Gained the knowledge of other cultures and perspectives through partnership and research.

CCCR

Civic Knowledge

Apply knowledge of government, law, history, geography, culture, economics, and current

events including inequities within democracy in different circumstances and settings.

Students had the opportunity to process and express their own interpretation of home and share what has affected their interpretation. They discussed their own definitions of home and how that has influenced their outlook on the world and each other.

CR-S

Provide students with the opportunities to present to their peers through project based or station based learning to leverage student experience and expertise.

Students worked in pairs to create drawings of each other's idea of home. They recorded their voices stating their definition of home. Their work was presented in a collaborative video, created by the artist, to the group and to the school.