MORE BY TINA ZITA
ast fall, as I sat with my colleagues Ariana and Samar working on our Leading Education Innova- tion Project proposal, it was the series of questions at leſt that
What if our library collection represented the diverse identities of our community?
What if we had books with real photo- graphs that kids could connect with?
Why can’t we create our own books in which kids can see themselves, their lan- guages, their cultures? Books that can rival the ones we would find in bookstores?
What if we included digital layers? What other text forms could we explore?
How might sophisticated tools like DSLR cameras impact how learners see them- selves as photographers, authors, creators?
helped guide our final submission. Leading Education Innovation Projects were initiated by our board as an opportunity to support and fund innovation grounded in equity and inclusion, connected back to our school im- provement goals. As a teacher-librarian, part of my responsibility is to ensure our com- munity sees itself reflected in our collection, that the texts in our spaces, as Rudine Sims Bishop wrote, provide learners with mirrors, windows and sliding doors. As a group, we thought, who better to capture the nuance of our individual identities then our learners themselves? With that, our project focused on having students use professional
tools
to collaboratively publish multimodal texts capturing our intersectional identities. If we did our job right, we would create books that could blend in with the professionally pub- lished ones on our shelves and the art we see on gallery walls. Photography in the classroom has always
been an interest of mine. From photo walks to flat lays, every time I have invited learn- ers to communicate through photography, I have been amazed by what I learn about them and their views of the world. Students’ voices always seem to surface when they are comfortable and immersed in a text form.
8 ETFO VOICE | WINTER 2023
THAN A PAGE L
OUR JOURNEY WITH PHOTOGRAPHY AND IDENTITY
During the pandemic, these visual texts were a go-to for us at our north Brampton K-8 school, allowing us to maximize learning outdoors and create together online. As I sat across the table from the awesome educators in my innovation project team, I was excited to see how we could build on our past learn- ing and push beyond. When we got the news that our proposal
had been accepted, we were ecstatic and re- alized we needed to quickly start sketching out the framework for our investigation. Our project would begin with creating our own series of books before working on an interac- tive augmented reality portrait gallery. With our school improvement plan focused on literacy, we tapped into the Language cur- riculum expectations for the writing process, media literacy and elements of design from our visual arts curriculum strand. Along with language and art, we realized how much learning we could do connected to the trans- ferable skills of communication, collabora- tion, innovation and creativity in each of the provincial curriculum strands.
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