Week 3: Independent Reflection
This reflection seems out of chronological order, however, it contains feedback relating to a school trip only recently completed…
For this week’s activity, I have to accept that I was unable to commit to the precise guidelines of the task. However, a zine (of sorts) was produced following appropriate collaboration.
Having worked in education for 25 years, I am well used to gleaning information from children and using that as the starting point for work. In that respect, the ‘Making Zines’ activity was no different and I openly embraced the collaboration with the children.
How well the task was tackled was comparatively simple to ascertain: during the South Africa trip there were still countless questions – such is the nature of children, but there were very few to which the response needed to be anything other than ‘have a look in the book’. Of course, the reality was that I still gave the answers to any such questions. Such a publication provided a useful reference for the children and gave reassurance to the parents that the trip was being managed by competent, experienced professionals.
The zine was produced using Microsoft Publisher – not an industry standard, but certainly an educational standard. Producing high quality publications helps me directly in my teaching of desktop publishing, but also helps the children realise what can be achieved (as well as the high standards that I have). In that respect, this collaborative work helps all involved parties.
The concept, design and realisation of this zine was done entirely in-school using normal educational procedures. The welfare and protection of children is so entrenched within any such activity that there is no chance of ‘taking advantage’ of the subjects, thus there are no ethical concerns.
During Week 3, the only photographic work I carried out was at the Regional Athletics Championships. With a sizable team to Manage, my photographs were rather few and far between, and sadly GDPR constraints dramatically limit what I can publish here.
