Response to my initial post on Polaroid’s discontinuance of some popular products led to subsequent posts (and extensive commenting) on several other aspects of Polaroid’s significant impact on the field: the uncertain future of the Polaroid Collections, and Polaroid’s Artist Support Programs. You’ll find links to all of these at the end of this post.
Polaroid Teachers' T-Shirt
Now I add yet another, this one devoted to the Polaroid Education Program. Aside from serving on a consultancy panel with Chris Enos and others in the 1980s — created by Polaroid as a think tank for the program’s possibilities — I had no involvement with the education program. So I don’t have much to contribute to any discussion of this initiative, in terms of direct personal experience.
However, I do have an ongoing interest in the general area of photo education, having observed and commented on that corner of the field since beginning my own work in the late 1960s. That interest includes a particular concern with K-12 photo education, a crucial but much-neglected area. (Indeed, in spring 2006 webmaster John Alley and I inaugurated The New Eyes Project, an online resource intended to serve all those involved in K-12 photography education: teachers, students, program directors, sponsors, arts-education theorists, and anyone else interested in teaching photography to young people around the world.)
Polaroid Teachers' T-Shirt Message
Because I know many people who teach photography at all levels, from K-12 through post-secondary, I heard a lot of stories about Polaroid’s support for teachers and students over the decades. The Polaroid Corporation gave away tons (literally) of free film to teachers, particularly those teaching kids in K-12 programs in schools and in after-school/alternative programs. The company also lent and often donated cameras (especially SX-70s) to such programs. They offered workshops for K-12 teachers in how to use photography (and especially instant photography) in teaching different subject areas within their curricula. They published a substantial workbook filled with ideas and assignments. They gave away free subscriptions for teachers to their in-house journal, the handsome Polaroid Close-Up (edited by Constance Sullivan), and then created the Polaroid Newsletter for Photographic Education (edited by Jim Stone) specifically to serve that constituency. (I published several articles therein.)
Polaroid Close-Up No. 1, April 1983
This education program ran parallel to the Polaroid Artist Support program, and some people participated in both — meaning that some of those who got Polaroid support for their teaching activities also got Polaroid’s help with the production of their own work. Still, it makes sense to me to open this up as a separate post with its own Comments thread. When a company makes a substantial contribution to the field of photo education we need to acknowledge that fact, and applaud it.
Polaroid One-Step 600 camera
At the moment, the only trace of this program that I find at the Polaroid Corporation website is a page with links to several dozen classroom assignments and projects that use Polaroid materials, plus chapter-by-chapter PDF downloads of Polaroid’s Visual Learning Newsletter and two workbooks:
My Learn, Grow, and Know Activity Book, by Sheila Ellison, and Reading Words & Images: Photographic Solutions for Visual Literacy, by Phillip Seymour. If these interest you, I advise downloading them now; with the parent company in flux, there’s no telling how long they’ll stay online. Nor can we know how the leaner, meaner Polaroid Corporation that will arise from the ashes of the old at the end of this reconstructtion will approach its relationship to the photo-education community specifically and the education community as a whole.
Reading Words & Images, by Phillip Seymour
Whenever the Polaroid Corporation emerges from its current legal limbo and starts to reconfigure its outreach to various constituencies, public recognition of its service to the education field can only encourage it to consider re-starting and/or continuing such programs. So here’s a discussion space for those who were involved in those programs, either as recipients of this beneficence or as facilitators of Polaroid’s generosity, as well as for anyone else with something useful to contribute.
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For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.
Hi Allan — thanks for making the space for this kind of communication.
I was one of the ones who was involved in both the artist and the education programs. The education program was a mixed bag. I first started using Polaroid materials in the late 1970s when I was teaching photography in Apeiron’s (remember them???) photo- education program in upstate NY. After moving to NYC, I secured Polaroid cameras and film for ICP’s community-education program in the 1980s, and then, eventually, I became one of the NYC consultants in the Polaroid Education Program overseen by Phillip Seymour in the 1990s.
While Polaroid’s interest in education was sincere and substantial, the free advertising that was achieved by the use of their product was equally important. The educational materials that Polaroid put out at the time were very conservative in their approach and geared toward not threatening the powers that be.
My experience speaks of the public-school experience in NYC specifically. I don’t know what happened in other parts of the country. In the workshops I did for teachers in the NYC public schools, literally thousands of cameras were distributed and an equal number of filmpacks were sold to shoot during the workshops. Many of these workshops were done as mandatory staff-development sessions.
I don’t remember the details, but the cameras were offered to the schools that participated in these workshops for $10-15 each. They paid for the film at cost.
Unfortunately, many of the teachers who participated saw the workshops as a cheap camera sale (Christmas was a favorite time for these events), and often I felt like I might as well have been demonstrating the latest vacuum cleaner. Occasionally, though, there would be someone who really saw the possibilities and you knew would run with it.
Expanding on my earlier comments on the Polaroid Education Project, it may be helpful to see it in the context of the 1960s and ’70s discourse on educational reform as a way to improve educational outcomes, and efforts to humanize education. Some of this response was partly due to the potential growth of programmed instruction delivered through educational television, SRA kits, and other programs. We can point back to the “Skinner Teaching Machine” as a marker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXR9Ft8rzhk).
The ’60s and ’70s were a time when voices were stretching to be heard. Photography and filmmaking were more than vehicles for self-expression; like today’s “I-Reporter,” they could taking a willing audience into worlds outside their own frame of reference, confirm their own beliefs, and create new ones.
It was also the time of the introduction of the SONY Portapak video camera (that was not so portable), better cassette tape recorders, etc. Media production was placed into the hands of the population, though without the distribution network now offered through the “net.”
In education we witnessed the growth of film-study courses in high schools and higher education. Photography made it way into the art departments and was a legitimate area of study/activity in journalism programs. High schools, and some middle schools, started their own news programs on the school network. Media and media production, in various formats, not only became a point of study, but was seen as a response to the systemized “cold” structure of schooling. (See the films “Blackboard Jungle,” 1955; Frederick Wiseman’s “High School,” 1968; and Arthur Hiller’s “Teachers,” 1984.)
Efforts were made to humanize the elementary and high-school classroom by introducing the small inexpensive camera into the curriculum (see Susan Meiselas’s 1975 book Learning to See, published by Polaroid). Kodak, with its Instamatic camera, and Polaroid, with its instant-processing camera, developed programs for in-classroom work. Not only did Kodak and Polaroid produce curriculum, they also provided publications to steer the use of their product.
The Polaroid Education Project emerged out of this history. It was the merging of developments in image-making technology and the perceived needs of education to humanize. The project (whose early roots were in the Meiselas book mentioned above) provided curriculum guides to teachers who attended a workshop led by consultants, who were photographers and educators. The workshop cost $10 and required the participants to buy/bring 2 packs of Polaroid film; for that small fee the teachers received a Polaroid 600 camera, curriculum books, and an interactive workshop which disseminated ideas and methods for using images in the classroom. ( I was a curriculum developer and teacher in the program.)
The workshops served a number of purposes: teachers were introduced to the use of images in the classroom and various curricular areas; participants were taught how to use the camera; Polaroid moved the camera into the hands of users — where the real purpose was to sell film (similar to the Kodak “Cameras in the Classroom” project, which used the inexpensive Instamatic cameras); and cameras and images found their way into the hands of students.
To echo what Sharon said above, the Polaroid workshops did offer the opportunity, and opportunity is an important word here, to bring “ideas” and “visions” for using images in the classroom, and to humanize the daily patterns of classroom life for both the student and the teacher.
I was first introduced to the Polaroid workshops when I ran conferences on visual literacy (late 1980s) at Cal-State Pomona. I was teaching in the field of educational technology at the time. When I moved to Cedar Falls Iowa I began to offer workshops for Polaroid at that time. Sharon is correct: many times you did feel like people were just there for the camera, and maybe the CEU credit if it was offered.
On the other hand, (in this case my right hand), I not only used the “opportunity” to talk about the image experience on both sides of the camera but also stressed the need to change the culture of the classroom. Since I was teaching at the Univ. of Northern Iowa I offered workshops for teacher-education majors. This again was an opportunity to offer alternatives to what they had already experienced as students in public education.
Two workshops do come to mind as I write this and my memory kicks in. One was with migrant teachers — teachers who followed the migrant workers’ movement through the mid-west. They worked with the children in these portable camps, trying to provide them with an educational base. The other was a inner-city middle school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There the teachers faced every day the challenges that all teachers face: how to make coming to school a meaningful experience. Media in the classroom, audio, video, still images, performance, all provided environments to give the students a voice and a sense of belonging. (I remember my 2nd teaching in Buffalo, NY, a school in a economically depressed area. My “kids” brought an album — that’s 33 rpm vinyl, for folks born after CDs arrived— of the Jackson Five. We played it almost every day before the “bell” rang. It got to the point where they came to school early.
Media worked the same way. Students and teachers began to find the school day more engaging, the media project — placing the media into the hands of the students — changed the culture . . . that is, until an administrator saw the pre-school music as disruptive. (Remember, this was a time of the Black Panthers, the Vietnam War, Attica, etc.)
Sorry for going off like that, but it is important to keep projects like the Polaroid and Kodak photography-in-the-classroom projects in a context, in the same manner as we begin to understand the “I-Reporter,” the text messenger, Facebook and Twitter, and the social-networking environment. All of these change the relationships between people, knowledge, power, and control.
Does anyone know if copies of My Learn, Grow, and Know Activity Book, by Sheila Ellison, and Reading Words & Images: Photographic Solutions for Visual Literacy, by Phillip Seymour, are still available anywhere? I’d love to take a look at them to complement an educational photography project we are working on at our center.
Thank you!
These were online as free PDF downloads at the Polaroid site when I published this post on July 26, 2009. “New” Polaroid — the corporation now marketing both digital and analog products under the Polaroid brand name — has since stripped all prior content from its site, including these texts.
As I understand it, “new” Polaroid owns all of the intellectual property of the original Polaroid Corporation, including the various publications sponsored and funded by “old” Polaroid. That would include the several workbooks you mention, Polaroid’s Visual Learning Newsletter, Polaroid’s Newsletter for Photo Education, and Polaroid Close-Up. Nothing prevents them, as I see it, from putting this material online for use by the photo-education community.