A new poetry assignment for students in Elaine White’s and Karen Gold’s English classes included visualization. In addition to poetic analysis, students needed to take five pictures and caption them with specific quotes from the poem they had chosen. The work was then uploaded to the library’s Flickr space.
To prepare for this, your Pesky librarians also did the assignment. Selecting “Aimless Love” by Billy Collins, we printed out the poem and sat together with stickies and highlighters. We generated idea after idea and then went out for a campus walk with our camera. After downloading our work, we kept one picture, dumped the rest, and went back to the poem. We continued this process until we had a set we thought worked well. The next day both classes came to the library and we introduced this part of the assignment, modeling the process we had undertaken and showing our work. In the next week we worked with the students, uploading their pictures and talking about how Flickr is a social networking tool and lets us connect with other people who share our interests. We were thinking about how we connect with other librarians but a young woman in London has a Flickr pool for pictures of soap (who knew?) and she invited us to put one of our pictures in it. The students did some nice work. Take a look.