PICTURING PEACE

Picturing Peace is an arts program that has been conducted in 21 elementary school classrooms in the U.S. and Northern Ireland. Our goal is the development of peace-loving students and emerging peace-building citizens. While conceived in the School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine as an emotional healing response to 9/11, the program has evolved into a community-oriented and intensive vocabulary and visual pedagogic approach. From its inception, Picturing Peace has used the family of synonyms associated with peace, such as unity, harmony, and care to focus students’ attention on photography of the concept in a variety of social and physical settings. Primary school children proved to be the most engaged emotionally in the program, old enough to recognize the importance of peace in getting along with peers and young enough to embrace photography as a fun method for turning words into images.

In 2003, Picturing Peace was invited to Northern Ireland to assist in community building after the Good Friday Accord achieved peace in that troubled country. The photographs produced by 4th grade children and exhibited with the support of the Lord Mayor in the Belfast City Hall were viewed and celebrated by the Catholic and Protestant families who interacted and spoke for the first time in living memory.

Throughout the first decade of this century the program was introduced into Wisconsin primary school classrooms. As our pedagogy and research evolved it became apparent that these young kids were capable of making sophisticated conceptual leaps from words to pictures. Recent research in vocabulary learning has emphasized the use of families of words such as peace synonyms and the benefits in reading comprehension to students when text and illustrations are integrated. Forging connections between the dual codes of verbal and visual information processing may serve students to enter into careers that involve the design and production of media involving writing and visualization such as movie making and videogames.

Picturing Peace has now happily arrived at The Matt where it will pursue its artistic and educational goals for the students of Waterbury. As you view their photographs, please notice how they translate words into pictures and how they express the feelings and values associated with peace as moral ideas. Their pictures suggest how people should act if they are to keep the peace. While pictures are said to be worth a thousand words, consider also that these young photographers visualize the same peace words in many different ways.

Robert & Jill Beck

April 25, 2018