Its back! The return of color (well, mostly). In the previous post about shooting families (blimey, how that must index on a Trumpian-Moscovite snooping algorithm) I alluded to the parallel worlds in which children exist as we watch over them. Sat at dinner one night, my daughter was explaining the intricacies of how exactly you should deal with a particular dragon species, while my son sat there eating. I thought he was listening, even if his arms were moving a little too much given what was on his fork, but it was fair assumption to think he was locked in with us. Suddenly he interjected, "you know, Batman eats a lot of lobster..."
It started me thinking about how diverse our thinking is, and how I need to remember that the next time I teach a class. There are many ways to link dragons and Batman's lobsters, and in class, I have to hit them all. This thought rolled into another, and later while writing a draft photo workshop outline, I stopped to ponder how right from the beginning of my professional photography life I have taught and photographed for schools. Not just sports or concerts, but new school openings, fundraisers, and in one school, innovative annual student portraits, complete with a black and white set that rocked!
Everything is connected - the photography came first at collage, followed by film making and screenwriting, and then the academic journey through comparative mythology brought me to teaching. From that moment on, life became a continuous braid of the camera, the pen and the classroom. It's not all a bed of rosy idealism, though. A Facebook post of a friend reminded me how challenged some schools are, and an email from another highlighted the work teachers and their administrators put in, and its toll.
The reality is that we live in a world that talks a lot about the importance of education and yet undervalues teachers spectacularly. We talk of the future being in the hands of our children, of your children, but we give them poor tools and old practices with which to create a better world. While many of us go to work in innovative workplaces designed to foster a more productive and constructive world, schools are often a hodgepodge of decaying spaces nobody wants to fund.
But the cliche is right: these institutions and their key population are our future, and we have a pretty serious set of challenges barreling down upon us that we, and our forebears, have brought through the pipe; indeed, the future is here, isn't it? The present is prescient. Can I say that? It makes a kind of sense to me!
There are many people and schools out there working like giants to make this happen, and as an educator of almost two decades, I have been very fortunate to work in some innovative forward thinking schools, guided by empowering leadership and collaborative peer to peer relationships. It isn't rocket science but it is human science and it needs to be treated as such.
We can't change the world alone, but we can support change, recognize like-minded people, and help nudge that change forward. Since my own kids have come along I've been involved in their schools, offering what I can, and always with a camera close by. It is a good way to publicize the schools in their endeavours, tell their stories, share the experience, give something back to the community that does so much for so many.
I have had very close access to my kids in their schools because of their age, but as I write this, it occurs to me that that time is now drawing to a close. My son is in his final weeks of pre-school. This marks the end of an era on many levels: as their primary care-giver, my role, my time, is being transformed. There were days I turned up for a shoot still smelling of wet wipes, or when I berated a high schooler for not getting enough sleep when I had not had any myself for days. Once while leading a workshop that I had glitter in my hair and across my face. There have been many nights spent editing weddings while rocking a baby after a night feed. That's all gone; the older they get the less time at home they spend and the nicer the smells get (for now at least!). And although I will continue to seek involvement, the nature of that involvement is probably about to change, right?
I'm not sure I'll get this opportunity again, unsure the schools will let me get this close. At a certain point parents are distracting and need to let the professionals get on with the job (this is of course before parents become embarrassing to the kids and then no one wants us around!)
What's interesting to me, when I'm in the viewfinder, swallowed up by the moment, watching the story unfold before me, is just how immersed the kids are, how big the world looks to them. And that's when it comes full circle and hits me - all those words about the future and change and need to better value teachers and our education systems - that's when I drop the camera and see that we are out of time, that we have to act now, be acting now. The future is here.
It's easy to be caught in the culture of kids, obsess about our little darlings, but that is to miss the point. It's not about them, this is about solving the worlds problems and making a sustainable future; this is about us, about who we are.
There is so much work to be done. Poor leadership, rotten teachers, lack of money, political interference by people who cannot know what is truly the best way forward but who have enough power to think they do, these people still roam the world in abundance. As a society we need to change our thinking and act: education is the single most important foundation of a true democracy and the key to a sustainable human future.
It's disingenuous to say we have to let go of the past because we have so much to learn from it, but we are not learning as much as we could, and we hold on to too much of what should be let go. We have to embrace the future, of research based, inquiry based, collaborative, reflective learning, that deepens understanding and promotes, compassionate, creative and flexible ways of thinking. My kids are lucky, I believe they have attended a couple of the best pre- and elementary schools in the world in their short journey thus far. That's great for them, but what about the rest? The bigger task is to find a way to extend that to more kids who do not have same accidental fortune of birth as mine had.
It's time to close this post. I think it began as something that intended to value education as a whole but it turned into a siren call, a panic stricken cry, probably based on the nostalgia of this era closing for me and my kids, that era when they were a vehicle for me to get up close to some remarkable education and get the stories out, a vehicle that is perhaps out of gas. But Brexit, Le Pen, my local President, the Trump government, the May government, the greatness that is Russia being completely undermined by Putin - all these things have got to me. It's time to find another way to help get the successful stories told. Wouldn't it be great if a class hired a photographer for the year to document and film their journey? It would be quite the documentary! The reflective power of such a record would be awesome. How can we reach out further and help others? I made a film in India that was intended to be part of a bigger narrative on helping such projects, but I was unable to continue and. Perhaps this is the time to reflect on that experience. Time to get my thinking hat on....
