A Trip to the Printer

Recently, my 7th grade Adobe Youth Voices students and myself were incredibly humbled and fortunate to be invited by Chicago photographer John Batdorff to his gallery and printing space.  John volunteered his professional expertise and equipment (not to mention his time!) to create high-quality prints of the posters my students had created this past year in tech class.

Below are a few of these amazing graphic design creations.  You can see all eleven of the posters here or read about our creative process in a previous post here.

John gave us a demonstration and explanation of his printing process as he prepared their prints for his equipment.  My students buzzed him with questions about the printing and his amazing photography prints displayed in and around his gallery.  They were fascinated to hear about his world travels with his camera as well as the various photography books he has authored.

The prints turned out truly fantastic, beyond what my students or even myself had honestly hoped for.  The experience gave my students a peek into the world of a professional photographer.  They were able to see a professional artist and author speak about his craft and his passion.  The impression left was strong and I certainly recognize the need and value of connecting my students with professionals in the fields I am instructing them in, particularly with my middle school students with whom I cover a variety of media arts topics.

After the prints were complete and framed, they travelled along with my students a week later to an event showcasing Adobe Youth Voices student work from around Chicago.  You can watch a short, 90-second, film of the event below.

Purposeful graphic design with 7th graders

Estimated reading time according to Read-O-Meter: 3m19s

Finished poster painted in Photoshop by a 7th grade student

This year for Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) with my 50 seventh grade students I have focused a lot of technology instruction on Photoshop and a few relevant graphic design techniques using that software.  This was a very lengthy process for me and my students, but I believe they gained a lot valuable technical and design knowledge while I learned many lessons in project management for this number of students.

After a handful of technical lessons with the software, we dug into the AYV program by looking at successful projects from past years.  A successful AYV project is one that has a clear message, an intended audience, expresses youth voice, and showcases creativity and innovation with the software.

View some of last year's award winners

Next I wanted to help students find an issue or cause that they were particularly concerned with.  For some students, this is simple and apparent while others benefit from guidance and suggestions.  I had students do some private free writing and then go through and highlight words or thoughts that stood out to them as important.  Students then filled out an anonymous Google Form where I asked them three questions:

• What topics are you concerned about in the world?
• What are you passionate about?
• What are you worried about or what pressures are you facing?

Having that questionnaire be anonymous greatly helped me discover what themes or trends they were really engaged with; and three trends emerged:  friends/cliques, bullying, and getting into their chosen high school.  As a specials teacher, I only see my students one time each week and it is challenging to develop the kind of trust needed to openly speak with ALL students about their personal life concerns – so an anonymous Google Form was extremely helpful.

After students decided a topic, they began planning the design for an 11”x17” poster on their chosen message.  Some students worked purely with brushes and text to create an original design and message, some found Creative Commons-licensed images and manipulated them in Photoshop to remix as their own, and some took original photographs to use in the creation of their poster.

A Creative-Commons photograph remixed in Photoshop by a 7th grade student

After a few classes of working with images, I showed them Karen Kavett videos about typography to get them thinking deeper about the typefaces they ultimately choose.  At the end of every class students shared in small table groups their creations and changes in order to give and receive feedback.  It took a bit longer than I had planned, but all students eventually wrapped up the design and creation of their original poster.

After everyone was finished, myself and another teacher selected 12 posters from the group of 50 that we thought should be submitted to this year’s Aspire Awards.  Those posters, though “turned in”, now needed a lot of fixing of details both big and small, as well as written artist statements.  That is where we currently are in the process, I am working with 12 students after school to refine and write.

Revisions of a student's poster (original at top, finished at bottom)

I learned valuable lessons from this experience that I will definitely apply to similar situations in the future.  The first is that when doing 50 different projects that are artistic and technical, it is vital to include peer feedback consistently throughout the process.  This saved time and students became skillful at it once we began practicing a quick critique at the end of class.  The second is that although it was wonderful to tell students they could create anything they wanted, in practice it ruined some students’ ideas from the start.  I should have seen that some ideas were too ambitious for the time we have and in the future I will give more guidelines as to what specifically can be accomplished in the amount of time we have during tech classes.

I can’t wait to share their finished posters in the next few weeks and wish them the best of luck in the Aspire Awards!

Aspire Awards Medal Winners!

Back in April, five of my (now graduated) 8th grade students created a stop-motion animation film for Adobe Youth Voices titled "Gone".  The film was entered into the 2012 Aspire Awards Film/Media Festival.  Recently we found out the film was awarded the silver medal in the narrative category by panel of film professionals, quite an honor!

The students chose the topic of child soldiers in Africa for the piece.  They collaboratively wrote the script, created storyboards, created the construction paper artwork, photographed and directed the stop-motion animation, edited the piece in Adobe Premiere Elements, and produced the soundtrack in Garageband.  They amazed me with their creativity and work ethic throughout the process, and in particular I was blown away with the soundtrack they created, a very professional end result in my opinion.

Here is the artist statement written by the students:

"Thousands of children in Africa are abducted into war every year by corrupt soldier militias. These child soldiers are placed into extremely violent situations and girls are frequently abused and forced into unimaginably heinous acts. We felt we could most greatly help children forced into warfare by publicizing a story that has been repeated throughout the world far too many times. The intention for this piece is to educate other teenage children like ourselves as well as adults who may be unaware of these atrocities."

If you have not seen it, I hope you'll watch it now (below) and enjoy!