Picture Writing

Overview

I have had a poster hanging in my classroom for many years. It has the following story on it:

A small boy lived by the ocean. He loved the creatures of the sea, especially the starfish, and spent much of his time exploring the seashore. One day he learned there would be a minus tide that would leave the starfish stranded on the sand. The day of the tide he went down to the beach and began picking up stranded starfish and tossing them back into the sea. An elderly man who lived next door came down to the beach to see what he was doing. "I'm saving the starfish," the boy proudly declared. When the neighbor saw all of the stranded starfish, he shook his head and said "I'm sorry to disappoint you, young man, but if you look down the beach one way, there are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see. And if you look down the beach the other way, it's the same. One little boy like you isn't going to make much of a difference." The boy thought about this for a moment. Then he reached his small hand down to the sand, picked up a starfish, tossed it out into the ocean and said, "I sure make a difference for that one." ¹

In this unit, I have developed a community-service art project that integrates literature, Victorian history, and animal art. The unit focuses on the idea that one person can make a difference, and in this case, they can do so using art as the conduit. I will want the students to understand how artists can not only contribute to society but actually change society. I will use two visual artists, Edwin Landseer and Harrison Weir, and an author, Anna Sewell, as exemplars of artists who have made clear contributions to society. To that end, the students will read Black Beauty, understand its historical and cultural context, analyze paintings and ultimately create an animal portrait that will be used to make cards that will be donated to the local SPCA to be sold.

While these different topics might seem unrelated, they are actually very interconnected and supportive of what I am trying to accomplish. By looking at the Victorian period and the change in perceptions of animals, I have been able to combine literature, art, history, and community service. During the Victorian period, many things were happening that worked to change the culture's view of animals and even some of the laws concerning animal treatment. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is an example of how one person's work directly impacted the world and resulted in changes, first in perceptions and ultimately in laws. Artists also created work that showed a shift in attitudes towards animals. Using this time period and these works, I will show students how people have and still can make a positive impact on the world.

There are three reasons why this unit is timely and appropriate. 1. The students must perform twenty hours of community service. My students come from a variety of elementary schools throughout the system, and as far as I know, none of the elementary schools requires community service. Many of the students struggle with this requirement. Either they don't have the ability to get out to school-community service opportunities, they haven't found a project or a charity with which they want to work, or they just are overwhelmed with the transition to middle school. Regardless of the reasons, the majority find it challenging to get their hours. By teaching this unit, I will introduce the students to community service, and they will be given an opportunity to gain these hours. This will help alleviate the anxiety that some feel about this new requirement. 2. By using animals as the main theme, I have chosen an appealing and easily accessible topic. 3. Students at this age are beginning to find their own identities and want to feel that they have some control and power in their lives. By teaching this unit, I hope to give them a sense of empowerment. I want them to feel that they too can change the world.

While I have taught in an inner-city school system for twenty-two years, I have been an International Bachelaurate art teacher for the past ten years. I teach in the Middle Years Program, which is designed for students aged eleven to sixteen. The program is divided between a middle school and a high school. I am the art teacher in the middle school, responsible for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. The students come from thirty-three different elementary schools and are accepted based on application. While the students are gifted academically, they come to school with a range of experiences and backgrounds.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) program was started in 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland, serving high school students, and it has grown into a program that serves students ages three to nineteen. Currently, IB programs are in 3,632 schools in 146 countries, and they serve over a million students. ² IB has a number of components in its teaching philosophy. The emphasis of IB is to develop students who are critical and creative thinkers. There is also a focus on making connections between traditional subjects and the real world, with one of the areas of interaction being service learning. In IB schools, the students are required to perform a certain number of community-service hours a year. While I have always allowed students to earn hours in the art class, it has been in individual ways. I give students opportunities to help hang displays, help in the art room, and participate in poster contests. I have not incorporated community service into my actual teaching curriculum. I have wanted, for a long time, to find a project that would be a community-service project. I also like to integrate history and literature into the art curriculum. IB stresses the importance of interdisciplinary and integrated instruction. By creating a unit that has a strong community-service component, I will be integrating this IB focus into my curriculum and providing the students an opportunity to gain community-service hours and become more comfortable with service learning in general.

I will have the students read the novel Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, published in 1877. This bestselling book is credited with changing public opinion and ultimately laws concerning the ethical treatment of horses in Victorian England. I will share with the students background information on the book, the time period, the author, and the impact of the novel. In conjunction to looking at the time period during which Black Beauty was written, I will also look at Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), an artist who specialized in painting animals. He painted humanized animals, often depicting them in service to humans. Landseer is famous for his dog portraits; and to provide a balance, I will also share the artwork of Harrison Weir (1824-1906), an author and illustrator, who, while depicting all sorts of animals, was very much a cat enthusiast. For the studio part of my unit, I will have the students create animal portraits and poetry about animals. The pictures and the poems will then be turned into notecards. We will print off multiple copies and donate them to the local SPCA to be sold. In this way we will be doing community service and having our artwork positively impact the local community.

Concurrently, I want to understand and be able to share with the students the emergence of the animal rights movement in Victorian England. It was part of a larger movement involving increasing concern for the poor, children, the mentally ill, and the elderly; this movement was basically an advancement towards an enhanced social consciousness. I will need to tread lightly with the topic because I have students who can be upset by issues such as animal cruelty. I will include information on Anna Sewell, who I think will be an inspiration to the students, as she is an inspiration to me, on Edwin Landseer and his paintings, and on Harrison Weir and his illustrations. In selecting images, I will focus on those that have a quality of anthropomorphism or in some way elicit empathy from the viewer.