Portraits and Dreams: Framing and Point of View in Self and Community Portraits

Portraits and Dreams revisits photographs created by Kentucky schoolchildren in the 1970s and the place where the photos were made. The film is about the students, their work as visionary photographers and the lives they have led since then, as well as the linkage of personal memory to the passage of time. A POV co-production with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

This lesson acknowledges that students have insight into themselves and their communities and that such insight is worthy of deliberate self-expression. Throughout the lesson, students will learn about a rural Appalachian community, and a group of middle school students who engaged in a long term photographic project with Wendy Ewald. Clips of the young photographers discussing their work–and their lives since then– will help students explore and discuss tensions between insider and outsider perspectives of community, with a particular focus on depictions and experiences of poverty. Students will have the opportunity to learn about photographic elements and then apply these elements in their own portraits. The selected clips, and related assignments, are designed to help students slow down and interpret and make meaningful artistic decisions and to pay attention to how communities are framed in the media.

Sarah Bausell, PhD., is a former high school English teacher and current teacher educator and researcher in Durham, North Carolina. Sarah completed her master’s degree in curriculum studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and her doctorate in Teacher Education and Curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked alongside practicing teachers to understand the ins and outs and power of classroom discourse.