Tableaux Image and Media

For this assignment, we chose to represent an issue that is often faced by public school teachers today: what types of literature should we present to our students? The problem in this field is that the vast majority of literature traditionally taught in schools was written by old, straight, white men. Society is making a push to incorporate literature from other circles: literature written by black lesbian women, for example. With our three poses, we attempted to show the silencing of alternative voices (alternative meaning voices outside of the straight white man category), the joining of society with these other voices, and the resulting value discovered from these voices.

This assignment forced us to think outside the box. 3 of the 4 of us had never performed a tableaux before, and so it took a while for us to understand how we could use our bodies to visually create a concept. It helped to first decide our topic, then to find images that represented our "story," and then to distill those images down to just one word or emotion. By using just one word or emotion per image, we found it easier to translate a concept to our physical and literal stance. However, I wonder how effective this particular assignment would be in an English classroom. In part, I felt limited by the idea that I had to take deep and important ideas and distill them into a single pose. I almost felt like that cheated the concept or idea of its value.

Pros: Allows students to distill their take-away into just a few words/images/poses.
Cons: potentially doesn't acknowledge the vast nature or critical meaning of an idea.