When I was a younger woman, I wanted to be a rock-and-roll photographer. In this profession, I surmised, I could travel the world, learn from creative people, develop my own vision, and not work in a nine-to-five world. But more than all of those, I wanted to photograph the musicians and singers whose music transformed my life. I wanted my vision of these talented and eccentric people to represent how the masses saw them. I wanted to be like Annie Leibovitz.
Well, that dream didn’t quite work out as I’d hoped. Unfortunately, I liked to eat. And pay rent. Lack of support (and youth) kept me from progressing very far. However, I found other means to live the life I wanted. I traveled the world (OK, one country besides this one but I have traveled). I have worked around creative people, and I have developed my own vision. And thanks to advanced humanities degrees, I do not work in a nine-to-five, 40-hour a week world (I work much more than that). My life took a very different turn from what I first imagined, but the camera was with me through it all.
The point to this foray into my girlhood plans? My dreams weren’t meaningless, and nor are yours. The dreams we have as young adults simply change as we get older. From time to time, it’s important to revisit where—in our earlier lives—we saw our lives heading. There is significance in those untaken paths, significance that can affect your life and your career today.
Over the years, I have continued with my love of images and my desire to create representations of the world. I moved from rock stars to the everyday, from the exciting to the mundane, and I have found detail and interest in this shift. Through photography, I have found a way to teach, a way that is personal and that is important to me. I teach writing through photography, or more accurately, photographic concepts.
On more than one occasion, I have encouraged students to take photographs of their world as part of a writing assignment. In addition to learning more about their world (they see it differently when they photograph it), they come back with their images, and they are able to explain (and write!) about the meanings and significances of those images. They can analyze their constructed images in a much clearer way than they can images produced by others (advertisements, for example). This becomes an area of scholarship for me, but it also introduces students to a new way of communication, a way that they can control.
Additionally, when students complain about the structure and discipline necessary to write in most academic forms (instead of rushing the night before an assignment is due), I have them take part in Project 30, a modified Project 365. Project 365 is an activity for photographers, posting a photo a day on a blog for one year.
This project requires commitment and discipline, but communities are built around these projects and one learns from others in the community. In a composition classroom, for example, in Project 30, students write each day for 30 consecutive days, and they post their work to a blog, commenting and linking to each other’s work.
When finished with Project 30, the students appreciate the discipline of writing and they acknowledge the fluency they achieve by writing daily. They also note that knowing each other online is a different experience than knowing each other in a classroom.
These three examples are fairly simple, low-stakes activities in a classroom, but they are activities that came about because of my interest in photography and what I have learned looking through the lens of a camera. I didn’t anticipate, as that young woman who wanted to photograph rock stars, that my abilities and visions in photographic arts would someday affect a teaching career. But they have.
This is my experience. How about you? What were your dreams as a younger person? How do those dreams (hopes and desires) affect your teaching today?
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