We have been truly privileged to this week to be working with Josh Hite of Arts Umbrella from Granville Island in Vancouver. And fortunate, too, to have the assistance of Franzeska, who is visiting the Valley from Germany. By some lucky fluke, our school was chosen for an outreach opportunity.  Josh and I met ahead of time to do some planning around creative use of some free, open-source software created through the The Glocal Project.

Josh lead us through a process of thinking about image making through a new lens–both literally and figuratively. We talked about abstraction and representation, appropriation and remix, and how to represent an idea through metaphor. Students created images around two themes: electricity and justice. One aspect of the process that was particularly illuminating was providing critiques of images; this extend much of the work we had been doing on how to provide quality feedback.

In the two weeks we created almost 1000 images. Josh printed of many of them and we then collaborated to create (and curate) a gallery of images which we installed at our neighboring high school. Some grade 11 and 12 students took part in providing feedback, again adding to the richness of the experience.

It was a phenomenal learning experience for all of us. The students and I learned a tremendous amount about creativity and design through the process, and most of all we came away feeling fortunate to have met and worked with Josh and Fanzeska.

The images below offer a taste of the eye-catching images we created. Check the student blogs for their reflections.

Hi! It’s Chaeyoon who loves to draw!

That picture, below, I drew that. It was hard to draw it.

One day, I was drew character at recess time. Then my friend Sophie asked me, “Can you draw me like that?” So I drew this picture at Saturday morning. But there was one problem. I knew there are nine girls in our class, but it’s really hard to draw without their picture. Maybe it’s hard to draw with their pictures, but it’s even more difficult to draw without them. So I had to think about what are they looks like for 1 hour…

Now I have to do one of the boys There are 18 of them!

My real post is at my blog My Drawing Life’s “The Girls of our class“