|
 |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
• Students will research and explore the voices of wartime participants. • Students will compare and contrast personal letters, memoirs, songs, poems, and visual art that represent the experiences of wartime participants. • Students will compare and contrast voices from historic and present-day conflicts. • Students will identify their own voice and create a narrative from the point of view of a fictional or real-life wartime participant.
Art:21 Web Site • Some/One & the Korean Military – Do-Ho Suh interview & clip • German Brutality & Roman Sensuality – Collier Schorr interview & clip Additional Web Sites • http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/warletters American Experience War Letters archive • http://www.civilwarletters.com/home.html Letters from the Civil War • http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/grant/filmmore/ps.html Memoir of Ulysses S. Grant from PBS series American Experience • http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov1999/regrettoinform 'Regret to Inform’ Web site and resources from Vietnam War • http://www.pbs.org/now/society/scrapbook3.html First World War Memoirs and Diaries • http://users.erols.com/kfraser/ Poetry and Music of the War Between the States • http://www.caterina.net/paw/ War poems by Kenneth Koch and Yusef Komunyakaa • http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org William Butler Yeats, On Being Asked for a War Poem Classroom Materials • Student Journals • Magazine, Newspaper or Photocopied photographs of soldiers
• What are the different roles that are played during war? Consider the roles of soldier, demonstrator, doctor, general, politician, reporter, etc. • How have experiences of war changed throughout time and what has provoked these changes? Explore issues of military technology, global travel and transport, changes in attitude and expectation about war, casualties, violence, etc. • Discuss the concept of dehumanization as it relates to war. • How does point of view change the stories that get told about war? Is history told only by the winners? • What are the stylistic differences and similarities between personal memoirs and personal letters?
Finding a Voice Collect images of different people who have been photographed during a range of wars throughout history and in current news. Include images of soldiers, protestors, military personnel, government officials, medics, journalists, etc. Have each student select an image of a person who they will begin to create a personal history of and correspondence with. Ask them to write the first chapter of their memoir based on any known information about the person, the war they participated in, the role they might have played, any additional visual clues from the image, research, and imagination. Encourage students to create a narrative that might be described as ‘fictional non-fiction’ or ‘magical-realism.’ (Time: One 45 minute session) Voices in Writing Choose a selection of poetry, songs, and diary entries from different perspectives and different times in history from the Additional Web sites list of resources. Have students read in groups or individually and discuss who the authors are, when they are writing, what they are writing about, and the tone in their description or narrative. Ask students to consider how the voices in each work vary with the different forms of writing, the different time periods the authors are writing from, and the different roles they are describing. (Time: One 45 minute session) Do-Ho Suh, Artist and Soldier The artist Do-Ho Suh served in the Korean military before coming to the United States to become an artist. His work often refers to his experiences as a soldier. View the video segment on Do-Ho Suh as he talks about his experiences in the military: “The program was basically pushing your psychological and the physical limit, you know, to the extreme, so actually you can kill someone. And that, you know, that whole thing—experience—was very kind difficult to swallow and that’s a process of dehumanization.” Compare his statement with specific works of his art including Some/One. Compare how his sculptures reflect his statement. Direct students to the interview on Some/One for further reading. Have students describe Suh's voice and how it compares to the other voices they read in the previous activity. (Time: Half a 45 minute session) Eleanor Antin and Nurse Nightingale Look at the performance of Eleanor Antin in Angel of Mercy as she plays the role of a nurse during the Crimean War. In her interviews, Antin describes this work, saying: “There’s this grand nurse Eleanor Nightingale who invented nursing as a profession for women—a rather complex and tragic tale. Eleanor Nightingale discovers that by saving these men to go out and continue to be soldiers, they are going to kill other people and then finally be killed themselves. Where she had one corpse before, she’ll have two or three or four. So nursing doesn’t really solve problems. You need a much more revolutionary ways to do this.” Antin has created the persona of the nurse to discuss a particular experience and moral dilemma in war. How does her narrative compare to those who served as nurses in the 1850's when the Crimean War took place as opposed to a nurse serving in a current war? How is her voice different from Suh’s, both in their words and their art? (Time: Half a 45 minute session) Collier Schorr & Soldiers Collier Schorr describes her photographs of boys dressed as soldiers in the interview German Brutality & Roman Sensuality: Images of Soldiers and the Landscape. Using this interview and the video segment that focuses on this group of photographs, introduce students to her work. As a woman photographer who has never participated in a war, what are the ways that her images might tell a different story than those of someone who has served as a soldier? Because her gender is different than the ‘fake’ soldiers she is photographing, how do you think the issue of gender contributes to the images she is making? How does this change the voice from which she is speaking as an artist? How does real-life experience relate to these photographs and how is imagined or fictional experience involved? (Time: Half a 45 minute session) Art and Voice Ask students to write in their journals about their reaction to each of the different artists, their video segments and the specific works of art. What are the different perspectives these artists offer about participation in military or wartime events? How do each of their real-life experiences relate to the works of art they create? How do each of these artists express their voice differently? Ask students to describe how these voices are different or similar to the voices they found in the poems, diary entries, and songs they read. Brainstorm a list of other works of art that refer to experiences in war or in the military. (Time: One 45 minute session) A Day in the Life Have students write a journal entry from the point-of-view of the person in the original image they chose. Create a ‘Day in the Life’ based on the photograph that describes the events that happened before, during, and after the photograph was taken. The journal entry could incorporate poetry, song, or images to express the sentiments and events of the day. For each day of the week or week of the month, have students create a new entry in their journal incorporating additional events that have taken place either before or after the image they have. Ask student to develop a particular voice for the person they are representing and to have that voice reflect the emotional and physical state of their person. (Time: From five 45 minute sessions to semester-long project) Writing Letters Have students begin exchanging letters with another student in the class using the voice of their person. Consider pairing soldiers with other wartime roles like citizens or administrators, demonstrators, or soldiers with other soldiers in physically or temporally distant wars. Create a book of letters from all of the correspondence generated by the class. Organize the letters into chapters using thematic or logistical categories such as Everyday Life, Emotions, Geographic Areas of the World, Time Periods, Specific Wars, etc. (Time: From five 45 minute sessions to semester-long project)
• Have students read and responded to a wide range of voices of wartime participants? • Have students compared and contrasted personal letters, memoirs, songs, poems, and visual art in representing the experiences of wartime participants? • Have students compared and contrasted voices from historic and present-day conflicts? • Have students created their own voice and a related narrative from the point of view of a fictional or real-life wartime participant? Find out if this lesson plan correlates to your state's education standards! On PBS TeacherSource do a search for "Art in the 21st Century" and click on the Standards Match icon.
While this lesson uses the artists Do-Ho Suh, Eleanor Antin, and Collier Schorr and their relationships to wartime events as its starting point, this lesson could be modified for different artists and wars, forming a unit with other lessons such as: Confronting Conflict War on Film, Photojournalism and the Art Photograph Did you use this lesson or generate your own activities based on ideas inspired by the lesson? Submit student art work, new lesson plans, and your comments to Art:21 and have them posted on the site. Help the Online Lesson Library grow! |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
