Real Super Heroes

Project Description:

-How do we help students to become more aware of their surroundings, in order to foster an educated, ethical, and empathetic community?

-How do we facilitate opportunities to help students translate experiences, investigations, and ideas into artistic renderings that effectively communicate new knowledge?

We devised an experiential project, "Complex City" in order to help students think critically about their communities. In asking them to map an area of San Diego that had significance to them, we wanted them to step back from the familiar aspects of their community and city, and translate those aspects into a visual map. As part of this project, students researched, interviewed, and investigated their city and community in myriad ways. What they once thought was familiar suddenly became very unknown. By compiling their work and making collective and idiosyncratic maps of San Diego, they have been challenged to rethink what they understood to be the reality of the built environment around them, as well as to accept the new knowledges that their classmates contribute. They have become more invested in their own community because their new knowledge implicates them as involved citizens. Using Solnit's Infinite City as one model, and our own creative explorations as another, we have made a series of complementary, contradictory, confounding and even contestatory maps of San Diego. These maps collect particular versions of this place (versions not always visible to others, or in traditional maps) as we see it in the fall/winter of 2011.

Produced at High Tech High by 12th Grade Students

Instructor Margaret Noble (Media Arts)
Instructor Rachel Nichols (English)


More Info: http://margaretnoble.net/educator/complexcity/

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• super
• hero
• Superhero
• map
• animated
• high
• tech