Masks Project: See the Trailer Here
Our first project of the year, the Mask Project was a success! Students wrote a research paper investigating how socialization has affected their identity, and made a plaster mask which they painted with symbols representing their various identities, struggles, and successes in the process of becoming their true self. This project is a cornerstone for all Animas students during their freshman year. Through the research process, students become more self-aware and develop critical thinking skills to examine their own sense of self and how their interactions with others can create either a positive or negative culture.
Everything we know and believe has been formed by our interactions with other people, even though many of us are unaware of it. What we wear, the careers we choose, and the people we date, how we treat each other, the language we use, our core values, and literally everything else we do we learn from other people. This process is called "Socialization" and is a key concept for sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and other professionals in the social sciences fields. As students learned more about how they have been socialized by others, they were also challenged to break harmful cycles of socialization by resisting or moving past negative social forces in their lives.
Students presented their work at the La Plata County Fairgrounds at the end of October. You can read the coverage by school journalists at the Animas Quill here.
Brave New World:
A Graphic Novel Project
The second large project of this first semester focused on Aldous Huxley's classic novel Brave New World, which envisions a futuristic totalitarian society in which happiness literally comes in a pill and the individual is nothing more than a cell in the "social body". As the protagonist Bernard Marx struggles to find his identity in this oppressive culture, he encounters a variety of characters who espouse differing views on questions of meaning, technology, beauty, and truth. From the docile but sincere Lenina, to the passionate outcast John, Huxley introduces us to a wide range of possible answers to these questions.
The task of the students in the project was to recreate a scene from the book in a graphic novel form. Most students were paired into teams of authors and artists, though several worked alone and handled both aspects of the task. The authors wrote a script using description and dialogue from the book, and paraphrasing when necessary, and also created a page-blocking outline which focused in on key choices of moment, frame, image, word, and flow. The artists were tasked with producing graphic novels that accurately and creatively made use of the author's vision.
The final products were beautiful depictions of key scenes from Brave New World. Through recreating the scenes themselves, students grappled with the same literary and artistic questions that authors, graphic artists, and storytellers of all kinds confront in their work. "How do I include only the key moments of this scene and cut out irrelevant details?" "How do I show the emotion of the characters effectively?" "How do I ensure that the progression of the images and words is clear and easy-t0-follow?" Judging by the final results, these two classes did outstanding work in answering these questions.
Check out two of our student's exceptional pieces by clicking on the link below and scrolling to the bottom for a full slideshow of their graphic novel.
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