Inquiry Question/Issue/Problem:
How can teachers nurture new literacies in this increasingly image-driven world? How will teens respond to the exploration of photojournalism? How can the art of storytelling be explored through nonfiction visual texts?
Relevance of this Inquiry to Young Adult Literature and how it is supported by our Waves of Change:
Both the exploration of the images and the creation and publication of our own will work to develop students’ new literacies. Our understanding of the texts and images will be constructed through social discovery, based on the theory of social constructivism. The project will take into account the multiple intelligences present in young adults; students who are creative in visual ways will be given the opportunity to respond to the text in a meaningful way. Students will be encouraged to think creatively in their responses.
Theoretical Framework Project Design (what you intend to do, what aspect of the inquiry you will implement, how you will evaluate your project, how will you collect student feedback . . .)
For this project, a group of a few high school students and I will look at the collection of photojournals by Dan Eldon. Together, we will look through the images and discuss the stories they are telling and how. After about 20 minutes, students will have the opportunity to create their own photojournal. (They will have been asked to bring their own photos.) They will create pages in a style inspired by Eldon. Then, each student will contribute to a Voicethread to provide their response to the project. I will evaluate the project by looking at the work produced as well as their responses in the Voicethread.
Project Multimedia Report (how you intend to tell the story of your project, including what kind of artifacts you will keep and what type of documentation you will do. Also, any issues related to school policies on media and privacy, security that you have researched and will adjust for).
The multimedia report will be a video slideshow in which I detail the project’s specifications and implementation. The artifacts I will present will be the students’ photojournal samples along with their recorded responses to the project. Though this project will not be implemented in a public school setting, I will make sure to adhere to sound practices regarding student privacy. I will post the pictures of their final work to our Voicethread with their permission, but they will comment using my account. They will not be identified by name or picture.
How can I help? Any burning questions you have and ideas/plans I can help you clarify.
Not at the moment, but I might as I implement! bookhenge
Learning Teaching 
Congratulations on designing what will surely be an exciting experience for these kind young adults, Hannah. You’ve definitely improved upon the original implementation — having them bring their photos and then learn about Eldon’s style makes this much more doable.
I’m going to add the url for Eldon’s site so colleagues can check it out. http://www.daneldon.org/site/ Goto “Art” and look at both the sample pages and the journals. Amazing what this young man could do with image and design.
You know, if you take photos of their pages then you could add them to your original VoiceThread and they could use the identities you gave them to make comments about each others work. They might enjoy that.
Have fun with this. I am grateful for this introduction to Eldon’s work.