THEME TEACHING LESSON EIGHT - THEMATIC COLLAGES

Students will develop their artistic intelligences by choosing and arranging bits of graphic media into collages relative to Romeo and Juliet.

Each student has supplied three magazines for general “consumption” during the making of theme collages.

For a week, we have been discussing the point behind our impending collage-making, and we now take a few minutes to review it. The students are to create collages that reflect 1. our core concepts of loyalty, family, and love, 2. particular character(s) in Romeo and Juliet, 3. particular scene(s) in Romeo and Juliet, or 4. any combination of the first three. We discuss the details of what might appear on a collage – pictures of people from magazines, text from magazine, individual letters from the magazines, arranged to spell thematically-appropriate messages, or supplemental pictures from the internet. Students meet in their graffiti teams and create their collages.

I am pleased at the variety of production from the students. Collages range from the literal to the metaphorical, from entirely-pictoral representations of the play’s characters to “bibliocollages” that spell out “Loyalty,” “Family,” “Love,” Family Feud,” “Dateless Bargain,” etc. Some students have taken the initiative to provide pictures from the internet especially for this project. The young men favor pictures of boxing rivals and corporate moguls glaring at each other; these chosen extracts receive penciled captions such as “Romeo and Tybalt,” “Capulet and Montague,” and “It’s my territory!” I had anticipated a certain degree of disorderliness, but the students seem engaged and intent on their work; the noise level is lower than I had expected. My mentor-teacher comments afterward that the manual manipulation and creation is attractive to the young men, and thus instrumental in the on-task attention.

I am seeking an available hallway bulletin board on which to post their work.