Earlier this month I had the opportunity to be attending and presenting at The Image Conference which was held in Athens during the weekend of 06-07/10. It was a weekend that had it all – mini reunions with friends and colleagues, moments of fun, and above all, inspiring educators and wonderful ideas that made us all think more of the impact our teaching has on the lives of our students and the community in which we live and teach in.
My workshop “Images as Creative Writing Prompts” was inspired by the realization that when we talk about the use of images in creative writing we almost always think of abstract or fantasy images/artwork that can be used mainly for story writing. Considering though that the expression “creative writing” serves as an umbrella term for more than 10 different types of written expression, I thought that this use of images limits not only the imagination of our learners, but ours too.
Then, as I explained at the beginning of my workshop, my “dual” professional identity (I’m an audiovisual translator apart from an ELT teacher) always made me explore the changing notion of what an image and a text are (taking us all back to the study of semiotics), how their definition has evolved and what that implies for our teaching practices. I’ve always used in my teaching images that are heavily loaded texts and texts that are in the form/shape of images (like shape poetry or texts resembling pointillism art).
On the day of my presentation, I was blessed to have a group of excited participants who took part in 3 of my experiments that ranged from writing free poetry using Instagram picture filters to creating blackout poetry using a book chapter. As a typical teacher I had overplanned therefore we weren’t able to do the last 2 tasks of the session which is why I promised to share the ppt in a blog post! 🙂
If you want to learn more about my session, follow the link below to download the slides to my presentation!
Image Conference_Maria Theologidou
I’d like to thank everyone once again for attending my session and Kieran Donaghy and Sylvia Karastathi for making the conference experience unforgettable for everyone who was there!
