James P. Brochin
Academic Setting, Resources, and Assessments
The unit will be used in a large urban public school with great diversity among ethnic groups and levels of past academic preparation. It would be taught in an elective course on Journalism. it might also be taught in a course on United States History II. The target audience would be either eleventh grade for US History II or tenth through twelfth for a course on Journalism. Although this unit was written for "honors" US II, and/or motivated elective students, which include ELL ("English Language Learner") students, with the proper modifications it could be taught at any level.
The material for the unit is designed to be covered in ten sessions, (two weeks of classes, which breaks down as six 45 minute classes and two 90 minute block classes) divided into roughly three sections: Section I:
War Photography as a propaganda too, official censorship, and voluntary censorship;
Section II:
War photography's realistic depiction of war's horror.
Section III:
Atrocity, Outrage, and Grief.
The overarching theme in this unit will be the empathy that war photography can instill in the viewer and how it can awaken society to our common humanity, even with the "enemy." The observational and writing skills, along with historical context and the development of photographic technology, will be taught with the thematic structure and not as separate subjects.
The primary classroom materials and resources will be a computer and a high quality video projector, with student taking notes and writing. In addition, students will be provided with reading materials, such as sections of books on the technological change in photography since the Civil War. The longer classes will enable the teacher to use a greater variety classroom materials and teaching methods. For example, an LP containing audio commentary by W. Eugene Smith and other war photographers about their own work, audio commentary by Edward R. Murrow from England during World War II, segments of books such as
Johnny Got His Gun
,
Friendly Fire
,
Dispatches
, and
Regarding the Pain of Others
. The object would be to gain a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the horrors of war.
The primary teaching method will consist of class discussion, along with student writing, using sources such as the images and first person accounts, including those of the photographers, audio and book segments as described above, and perhaps one or two film clips from such films as
The Piano
and
The Thin Red Line
.
Assessments will be in the forms of 1) written critical and persuasive piece(s) during the Unit (in the five paragraph format used for the CAPT test (at most two), an end of Unit written examination, and at least one inquiry lesson. This inquiry project has been described generally above and is further described below.