Community Visions
Community Visions is an arts and cultural experience that incorporates museum visits, photography, and writing in order to emphasize the value of personal expression through voice and multiple literacies. In a 1990
ERIC Clearinghouse digest on Reading and Communication Skills, Roger Sensenbaugh quotes Harvey J. Graff’s position on literacy:
"What is needed is a broader view of reading and writing that integrates and emphasizes the many human abilities in a context of a changing world that requires their development and use. Paths to learning individual literacy by the young must be made less rigid; more attention must be paid to different sequences and structure of learning; and more sensitivity must be shown toward cultural and class influences"
It is with this understanding that we offer the Community Visions program to our partner school teachers.
The Community Visions program grew out of the desire to extend Turning the Page’s existing Literacy Through Photography program for TTP teachers, enabling them to keep cameras for their students for 24 weeks instead of one. What began as a process of investigating the logistics of such an endeavor grew into the development of an enhanced arts program. The program begins with a teacher professional development session, and continues with pre- and post- visit museum experience activities for each of the following museums: the
National Building Museum, the
National Museum of the American Indian, the
National Postal Museum, and
The Phillips Collection. Students take photographs of their communities (including their families, friends and neighborhoods) after visits to each of the museums, and participate in writing activities based on the photographs they take. Teachers participate in monthly Professional Learning Communities. The program culminates with a collaborative arts, photography and writing exhibit hosted by The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
The goals for the program are as follows:
- To allow students to explore their place in a culturally diverse world.
- To enable students to examine their communities – past and present – and to allow them to articulate their visions for their communities in the future.
- To promote literacy development – reading and writing, visual, and cultural – through exploration of self and community in neighborhoods and at museums.
- To promote positive classroom relationships as a result of studying facets of a community.
- To encourage families to become partners in their children’s education.
- To foster a lifelong love of learning, including writing and arts exploration in the community.
