student activity

What are our family stories?  What do our families have to say? We interviewed different family members so that we too can come to know these stories and stay connected.  Knowing our history is important. 

We learned a lot about oursleves, eachother and our families.  This study as brought us together and even though we may come from many places in the world,  staying connected with our past is an important part of who we are.  Listen to our thoughts about this project.

“Properly worried over, properly cared for and remembered, these things keep coming up,” erupting and interrupting of their own accord, asking for attention, needing something from me, it seems.” (Jardine – On the While of Things)

This task lets students:

“Children are profoundly concrete, imaginal, playful, bodily, and substantive in their ways of knowing. Artifacts are concrete and fleshy and substantial. They allow the children to connect with something that has Earthly, bodily texture and tactility.
They are memorial, somehow. Memory is somehow already housed in such things, "incarnated," if you will." (see Gadamer 1989)

Using the self portraits we have completed what story do they have to tell? Where have you come from and how are we now connected as a community at St. Edmund? Using your self portrait, complete the phrase, I am ____________ and I am from ______________. As a class we will write the beginning and ending of this story. Our self-portraits and statements will be compiled together to tell the story of our community.

“There are places we all come from, deeply rooted common places that make us who we are. There is a sense in which we need to go home again to sanctify memory”
~ Fulgham

With your family choose a picture from your family's past. Now digitally edit the picture by inserting your face/body. All of a sudden,you are also a part of that historical photo You have made a whole new world. Now write about it. Take us there - and make something really interesting happen.

Extend this idea into a larger project for older students by using the ideas below.

What does it mean to go home? Why do we leave the comforts of home? What do we do once we get to where we are going to preserve home? How do we stay “connected?”

What does connected mean to you? Think of a word that tells or shows tells what it means to be connected? What image could you use to help provide the viewer a stronger image? How have we connected as a community to tell a new story?