It’s commonly said that pictures are worth a thousand words. As our nation’s Semiquincentennial approaches, young people around the country are doing the talking through multimedia portraits of their local communities.
The Smithsonian’s Creating Portraits of Community curriculum teaches middle school and high school students how to capture the communities around them through photographs, videos, and oral narratives. Over the course of four 45-minute lessons, students learn to use photography and oral history to record and analyze their own social, cultural, and historical contexts.
The curriculum was developed in 2024 as a collaborative project among three Smithsonian museums—Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), National Portrait Gallery, and National Museum of American History—along with Smithsonian affiliate museums and teachers in Kansas, Kentucky, and Washington, DC.
The lessons in the four-part curriculum are intended to be taught in order, but each lesson can also be taught independently.
Lesson 1: What Is Community to Me? leads students on a deep dive into their own identities and their places within their local and global communities.
Lesson 2: Reading Portraiture 101 builds students’ visual vocabulary to help them discuss and analyze portraiture.
Lesson 3: Visual Analysis of Photographs prompts deep discussion and examination of historical photography through the thinking routine “Lenses for Dialogue.”
Lesson 4: Using and Creating Oral Histories uses historical transcripts and recordings to investigate storytelling and teach students how to ethically document the narratives of community members.
Teachers are invited to submit student work created as part of the Creating Portraits of Community curriculum to be exhibited in SAAM’s digital gallery. Student work may take the form of photography, audio recordings, documentary video, written artist statements, or transcribed interviews. More information about submitting student work is provided here.