(Filed under Fun with Art)

Teaching and learning doesn't always have to be drudgery, right?

I came across this site via my anonymous friends at Fipi Lele, a web/art collective that doesn't really exist (long story).

The series of photographs from the site Henry VIII's Wives are entitled The Iconic Moments of the 20th Century. The site and photos are the brainchild of a group of  pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow.

From the site: A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. Each of these images represents an immediately recognisable cultural leitmotif of its époque, the representation that overshadows the event it documents.

These photographs offer us a chance to purposively remember and reflect on iconic events that shaped a generation and those that followed. The site urges us all to "remember the unclothed nine-year old girl Kim Phuc, the subject of the photo Napalm Attack, which toured the world inciting numerous political controversies: the Canadian photographer who took the picture won the Pulitzer Prize; the girl became the star of numerous humanitarian events and anti-war campaigns and also the hero of a bestselling book Girl in the Picture*."

The pictures also suggest an underlying sense of humor about them. While the moments themselves were emotional and iconic, there is something a bit subversive and silly about they way they are recreated by the pensioners. The stories and lives they represent are no-less important but he photo's message is somehow shifted a little, transposed onto another world and other lives.

As a teachable moment this site serves at least many purposes: one, to remind us of the importance of historical events and the impact they have on our perspectives and collective/individual psyches; and two, as a chance for students to study and recreate their own culture in more detail. This exhibition could be recreated as a teaching and learning activity wherein participants have the opportunity to share and publish the fruits of their vision and understanding.

What do you think? Let me know if you're familiar with similar such projects, slide shows, or digital storytelling that's tied to teaching and learning. I'd like to put together a wiki with such projects.

(* References: Quotations above excerpted from Jelena Velcic in Breaking Step—Displacement, Compasion and HUmour in Recent Art From Britain, Catalog, 2007 Belgrad.)