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FotoFest provides curriculum, cameras, supplies, educators, and artists to guide education projects, literacy workshops, and art talks and tours to students and teachers in classrooms, FotoFest's galleries, and online.

The Learning Program

The Learning Program combines photography and writing to create education projects, literacy workshops, and art talks/tours for K–12 students and educators year-round. The Learning Program team includes professional teaching artists and educators who utilize FotoFest’s Literacy Through Photography curriculum to present students with a creative outlet that fosters self-expression and self-determination. More than one thousand students and educators engage with the Learning Program activities annually in Houston-area classrooms, at FotoFest, and online globally.

Literacy Through Photography

Literacy Through Photography is a performance-based curriculum aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards. Students perform the knowledge and skills they acquire through discussing art, making images, and generating writing. Using photographic artworks that examine various social, cultural, and political histories and contemporary life as objects for critical analysis, students are guided through making original mixed media artworks that share their perspectives and activate their voices. The Literacy Through Photography curriculum commits to developing student’s visual, verbal, and cultural literacy while strengthening their personal agency.

History

Since the 1990 collaboration between photographer and educator Wendy Ewald and FotoFest Co-Founder Frederick Baldwin, the Learning Program has grown from a series of Literacy Through Photography workshops to a year-round program. The FotoFest Learning Program partners with K-12 public, private, charter, and afterschool programs in Houston and beyond, engaging an average of 30 classrooms, ten field trip groups, and new school partnerships every year. A year-end museum-quality exhibition of student work in FotoFest’s gallery celebrates these school partners, their students’ work, and our longstanding history.

For more information about the Learning Program, please contact Chelsea Jones, Learning Program Manager, at chelsea@fotofest.org or 713.223.5522 ext 11.