The Visual Essay Project

In the summer of 2017, I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities program in Beaufort, South Carolina called America’s Reconstruction: The Untold Story. I spent three weeks learning about one of my favorite subjects in the company of an amazing collection of teachers and professors, many of whom I’ve continued personal and professional relationships with since. I’ll be interviewing several of those people as part of the Tuesday Talk series. One of the presenters during that conference was Joshua Brown, a social historian at the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning at City University of New York. We had been assigned a book he co-wrote with the guru of Reconstruction history, Eric Foner. In between Foner’s conventional history chapters, Brown had written visual essays, a sort of hybrid type of writing in which the essay doesn’t stand alone. The essays need the images to function, and the images alone wouldn’t nearly tell the story.

As part of Brown’s presentation, he split our cohort into groups of four or five teachers and gave us five images (usually political cartoons due to the time period). He asked us to use the images to find a common thread or to tell a story, and instructed us to fashion some kind of order. My group consisted of two African American women, one or two other white women, and myself. We talked about the images and I was struck by how the two teachers of color viewed the images differently from the white teachers. An image might be seen as portraying dignity or subservience. Images that had multiple players in it would have us focusing on different individuals, based on the lenses we brought to the experience.

When we were informed that we had to write our own visual essay, I couldn’t help but take that experience and write a meta essay about perspective. In retrospect it was reasonably well written and makes some interesting points, but in year two of the project I’m going to describe, I realized I had approached the essay in a way that I did not want my students to emulate. The essay was about the images and was wholly sequential, as in: “Here is image one, this is what I think about it. Here is image two…” But more on that evolution below.

Three weeks is a long time to be focused on a single topic while away from home, and it is more time than we have, typically, to spend on a subject within a large curriculum. The US History I course covers the time from before European involvement in the new world up through Reconstruction. And though there are other critically important topics, it’s hard to dispute the prominent role of race in America over the course of both US I and US II. Because Reconstruction is the last unit, many teachers are hit with a time crunch and race through to the end, resulting in students who don’t retain a great deal of information. I’ll talk more in future blogs about the disservice many of us are guilty of when it comes to teaching black history, and this was central in my mind as I considered over these three weeks how to make Reconstruction — and the ultimate derailing of this amazing time period — a centerpiece of US I and something the US II teachers could build off of. The visual essay seemed a good way to do that, particularly as our school had started allowing the replacement of final exams with capstone projects.

When I got back from Beaufort, I had my typical prep work to do for the school year. I floated the idea of the visual essay to my supervisor who thought it could be a good activity, but was reluctant to have it take the place of the final exam absent a component of authentic assessment. As defined by Wikipedia, authentic assessment is the measurement of “intellectual accomplishments that are worthwhile, significant, and meaningful,” as contrasted to multiple choice standardized tests. In application in public schools, it’s largely come to mean having some outside player involved. The district had an initiative wherein students would create projects that could be presented to the Board of Education, Township Committee, or some other entity. To me that is a nice enough goal, but didn’t need to be a focus of this project. In the end it would not serve as a replacement for the student’s final exam, just an additional requirement for the course. Another teacher in the department had his own capstone project that did have the authentic assessment component, so my students were not too thrilled to have to write a paper and take the exam, but I assured them that the experience would be beneficial to them, and probably give them an advantage on the AP exam the following year.

One concern I had was the subject matter of the essays. I didn’t want them all writing the same thing for two reasons: sheer boredom as a reader, and my plan was to teach them thoroughly about Reconstruction. I wanted this experience to include an opportunity for inquiry on a subject they didn’t know as much about. To that end, I decided that they would be writing about the Fourteenth Amendment and its impact after Reconstruction. Students would have to pick a subject covered in the US History II curriculum, a course they wouldn’t take until the following year.

I convinced the two remaining US I Honors teachers, Rob Longo and Matt Mosko, to join me in this project. We read all of the essays and were impressed by their overall quality, despite the semi-rush job we’d had and the lack of exemplars to share with students. I had shared mine, but also told them “Don’t really do it like this…” Brent Morris, the director of the NEH program at Beaufort and the chair of the history department at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, agreed to post the best ten essays on the NEH website. The ten runners up were posted on the school’s web page. The subject matter was diverse and the overall quality of the essays was very good, though the range of effective use of the Fourteenth Amendment was not always consistent. It was a great first year, but I was determined that we could do an even better job.

For the second go round, I made a number of adjustments, but none bigger than the inspired idea of teaching Reconstruction out of order. (I also got approval to use the activity as a substitute for the final exam.) Students had started writing essays the year prior before they had fully learned about the subject matter they were drawing a comparison to. As a consequence, they really only had a couple of weeks to fully realize the big picture. I decided to move up the teaching of Reconstruction to early in the third marking period. I revamped all of my lesson plans to make sure that not only would students emerge with an understanding of where things had gone wrong, but also have the benchmarks to compare later events to. The biggest challenge, of course, was that they hadn’t yet learned about the Civil War, so some of the antecedents might not be as clear as ideal, but ultimately all they really needed to know to understand Reconstruction was that slavery caused the Civil War, the North won, and the South was not happy about having to change its ways. Later on the context would be elaborated on.

At the end of a two-week unit, I planned a full-day in-school field trip. In the morning students viewed the documentary 13th, a blistering view of the ongoing legacy of racism in America (answering the assigned questions). They would then hear from a lawyer, Lenore Horton, with knowledge of the 14th Amendment and its application to an array of issues. Next they would be given a folder full of unmarked images (mostly photos) selected from various events from the time period covered by US II. Most would not be instantly recognizable to the students. In small groups they collectively picked two unique images for each person to examine and create an accompanying graphic organizer. Afterwards they discussed their interpretations and assumptions about the images. Later, they used reverse image search tools to learn about the context of the images. Then my friend, Gregory Pardlo, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner sat for an hour-long interview and Q&A session about his work. I had primed the students by having them read two chapters of his memoir, ones that were directly relevant to the subject matter at hand. Finally, Greg led the assembly in an activity designed to unleash their creativity in grappling with documents, forcing students to go beyond simple descriptions of the actions in an image to something far more complex. In a key moment, Greg was answering a question about creativity in writing, and he called me out, asking, “You don’t want them following a cookie cutter formula, do you?” Truth be told, part of me wanted to say, “I do, because it’s easier to grade,” but I knew it was important for me to say “No, I want them to unleash their creativity within the constraints of the assignment.” The bank of images that students picked from were designed to pique interest, but students were welcome to pick unique, original topics if they preferred.

Although students complained after the fact that there was just too much packed into the day and felt working in the auditorium for 6+ hours was exhausting, on the whole they enjoyed the day and got a lot out of it. We had nearly a whole semester for them to pick a topic to focus on, find appropriate images, and develop their connection to the Fourteenth Amendment using the accompanying rubric as a guideline. One of the biggest problems was that students would pick an image that was too on point, wherein they didn’t have a great deal of interpreting to do other than to describe the image, which is not really the point of a visual essay. Many students, naturally, had to change their topic midway. Others wrote and rewrote their thesis statements a half a dozen time until finding the right formula. Images also changed up until the last minute.

After the essays were completed, students performed some reflection activities and offered feedback. One of the most common frustrations was that they felt that there wasn’t enough guidance about how to write the essays, but ultimately that comes from the (too much?) freedom they had to pick a topic and design an original piece of research and thought. I did make sure to set aside a batch of diverse exemplars for students to use next year as inspiration.