Photography students' work featured in documentary

Four students in Photography teacher Franklin Stallings' class had their work featured in an informative documentary about the Thomas Day Education Project (TDEP), and 10 students, including those four, will have their work displayed on the TDEP web site.

The students whose advertisements were featured in the documentary are seniors Heather Baker, Lisa Howe and Nathaniel Lichten and junior Katie Frank.

Stallings attended a teacher's workshop during the summer of 2004 along with other teachers of different disciplines from across the nation. Stallings learned from the workshop and was given work to take back home. "It was for a week. [It] involved the history of Thomas Day, who was a free black man and entrepreneur cabinet maker," he said. Teachers were expected to take the information from the workshop to their individual districts and "come up with a lesson plan they could implement." His students "had to develop an advertising poster for Thomas Day's cabinet-making business."

Every student was presented with the challenge of finding and using fonts, language and visual props appropriate to Day's era. Howe believed the hardest aspect of the project was getting her thoughts together. "I started by just brainstorming what I wanted it to say [and] what I wanted it to look like because I wanted everything to look like it was from the era," she said.

Students involved with the project put their images onto a CD, and the final product was sent to the TDEP. Stallings was only required to turn in his lesson plan but submitted his students' work as well. "They decided our product was so good that it should be shared," Stallings said. "They're going to use it for advertisement to promote [the program]."

To see all of the ads online, click here.