MY JOURNEY
Personal Narrative
Level: First Year Art & Design/ ESL Low-intermediate to intermediate
Language focus: Sentence construction + tenses consistency
Design focus: Mixed media collage techniques and narrative construction
Time: 3 hours 40 min. (3h 15min activities + 25min. break+debrief)
Prep time: 2 hours
Lesson Description:
This lesson introduces students to hand-made and digital collage techniques in relation to storytelling; the teacher introduces ethnography as a research methodology, in which students use themselves as the research object to reflect on their life experiences. As the subjects of research, students visualize their life experiences, important events, and imagined futures through hands-on mixed media techniques (drawing, painting, collage) transformed into a collective narrative; in writing the story of their lives, students practice English tense consistency and sentence construction. By combining these two modes of communication, students explore non-verbal communication to elicit emotional responses (mixed-media piece) and language to elicit mental pictures (written story).
Visual Chronology, The World Needs More Dreamers
Life-history map
PARSONS / VANS Activity Day, instructor, Niberca Polo. 2015
FOR TEACHER:
Readings:
- Drawing on The Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards. “Brain Systems/Right & Left” Chapter 3, pages 30-34)
- Verb Tense Consistency
Visual Aids:
– Visual Chronology presentation, Jessica Cannon
TEDtalk:
Frederic Kaplan, How to Build an Information Time Machine
FOR STUDENTS:
Readings:
- Color format/emotional response (Jesse Day, Line, Color, Form, pages 30-39)
- Composition/Layout (Kristin Cullen, Layout Workbook, pages 42-49 and 70-71)
Handouts:
Worksheets: