The students of class 9d created their own GIFs against racism that are collected in a padlet.
We spent the month of February discussing the topic of racism and exchanged our experiences. Some NMS art teachers used the opportunity during the Black History Month to specifically focus on visual art created by Black artists. The online art lessons, however, should be creative and product-orientated, not necessarily concentrate on more cognitive content that our students would get en masse from many other subjects.
So, after speaking about the hardships of some Black artists like Faith Ringgold, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jean-Michel Basquiat, I gave out the assignment to the students of class 9d to create their own GIF against racism.
Although due to the lockdown and online learning the students had made many experiences with new media and spent a lot of time in front of their computer, they did not have experiences with creating a GIF. I thought them which strategies to apply and with programs to use to come up with an appealing result. They could choose from working with single photos like a stop-motion clip to filling slides of presentations or connection film bits. We got to know programs like Canva and Gifmaker to help us succeed. Discussions were lead about the content and wording to be used. And all this had to be done with only one lesson of art per week (due to the reduced online-learning timetable). The students learned to work creatively with their computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones and can now easily transfer their skills to creating other individualised GIFs. The results are presented on a class padlet that blink and flash and set your perception in motion. The vividness of the padlet symbolises the pressing need to deal with the painful matter of racism and hopefully increases the awareness of the viewer.
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