Game for Change

Play my Game!

Artist/Teach Statement: This game encourages people to engage with the multitude of difficulties that are associated with illiteracy in the United States. Players are forced to make decisions that many people are faced with on a daily basis that are all connected with their inability to read. The information provided in the game are focused on many of the statistics that help us understand how many people this truly affects in our nation. The Twine story creator seemed an appropriate medium for me to present these choices that people have. I managed to learn a little bit of coding in order to switch up the appearance a little so that I wasn't restricted to the usual fonts and colors created by Twine. As an English teacher, literacy is something that I am really passionate about and I hope that I'll be able to make a difference in the lives of my students so that they don't become one of these statistics.

Sources:

http://literacyprojectfoundation.org/community/statistics/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

https://www.creditdonkey.com/illiteracy-in-america.html

http://www.positivetomorrows.org/ending-homelessness/homeless-cycle-statistics/

https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/futurework/conference/nalsfina/nalsfina.htm

Round Robin

Artist/Teacher Statement: This was a really fun project because it required people to make inferences about what had happened in the previous parts of the story. There was creativity involved as well because we wanted to make the stories interesting and the narrative had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Students would have a fun time doing some creative writing for this or attempting to make a new ending to a story.

Textual Poaching

War Never Changes

Can you spot the difference?

I never in my life thought that I would marry a soldier. I never pictured any part of that as my future life. But then I met Alex, fell in love, and his lifestyle was just another piece of him that I had to accept as part of the whole package. I have never regretted my choice since then but the culture of being an Army wife has become an enormous part of my daily life. I look around at the other Army wives I know and we are such a unique culture because we band together and we support our husbands in a lifestyle that can be so difficult sometimes. I started thinking about how the things that we deal with are the exact same circumstances wives have dealt with for over a hundred years now. I began searching for images that represented the moments that we are most keenly aware of as Army wives...departures, deployments, homecomings, and death. Recently, we received news that my husband is being deployed this year and all of these things point to the fact that war never changes and that is my new reality.

Artist/Teach statement: Above I have pointed out the many correlations between the past images of Army wives and the pictures of my husband and I mixed with images of other current Army families experiencing many of the same life events. We know that the wars that they fight may be with different countries, may be in different places, but they always seem to boil down to the same things and mean the same problems for Army families. I feel that juxtaposing these images makes similarities and differences very clear to those who look. 

This activity could be very beneficial for students in any content area. For an English classroom specifically, students could take a passage of book, poem, or even a film adaptation of literature, and isolate an element of the work that they identify with. Then they can attempt to create a new work of art in response to what they have found. This would give students a way to respond to the literature that we are exploring and make it their own. This will help them build analytical skills for future use. 

Process Piece

Artist/Teacher Statement: For my Process Piece, I chose to take pictures to document the act of human labor and then compile them into a video. This form is slightly different from other videos in that it is made up of individual photos. There is also no sound for this silent video. Each photo represents the individual steps that make up the process of folding the laundry. I began with a very large pile of clean laundry and then ended with it nicely folded in a pile. This is a weekly job for me and felt like a perfect human process to document. The process itself took probably 15-20 minutes but the documented result is just around a minute.