Picturing Peace is an ArtsBridge program, created by Dr. Robert J. Beck, Visiting Professor of Education at Lawrence University, in which college visual arts majors teach elementary and middle school students to use digital cameras in order to communicate their feelings, values and intentions to promote peace both in their local communities and globally. After exploring the diverse verbal meanings of peace, students work in teams to arrange and photograph social situations and visual symbols that reveal their personal and cultural understandings of peace.
Picturing Peace is a one semester curriculum for teaching creative photography, peace values, visual literacy, cultural understanding, and technology. In the program students begin by learning to use digital cameras and to keep records of their photographs and meanings. Then, students are encouraged to use photographs to communicate peaceful feelings through portraits, peaceful places through landscapes, and impressions of peace and peace symbols through abstracts. The program follows with spiritual photographs of peace in which students act out scenarios with the Spirit of Peace as a character.
The Picturing Peace Curriculum is available without cost to schools and teachers. Registration is required so that ArtsBridge may consult with and assess the range of educational settings in which the program is being implemented.
From 2002-2006, one semester Picturing Peace programs have been offered in 13 schools in California, Wisconsin, and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Five exhibitions of student photographs have been mounted at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine (2003), Belfast City Hall (2005), Paper Discovery Center, Appleton, Wisconsin (2005), Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin (2005), and the Jane Addams Hull House Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (2006).
ArtsBridge programs create partnerships with university students (ArtsBridge scholars) and K-12 teachers to implement visual and performing arts projects that link the arts to the core-curriculum through hands-on experiences in the arts.
Picturing Peace provides K-12 students an opportunity to develop their creativity and imagination, improve their language skills, and reinforce their values of peace, community and diversity. Picturing Peace scholars work with K-12 students to develop their skills in photography, technology, literacy, and positive social values. Photographs taken by the K-12 students are included in the Lawrence Collection of Peace Photography.
Common symbols used by young students to communicate their diverse meanings of peace include:
Nature
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Light 
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Community
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Environment
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Peace Signs
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Play
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Spiritual
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Diversity
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Body
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Innocence
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Lawrence Collection of Peace Photography
Picturing Peace Articles and Research
Picturing Peace Lesson Plans
- Picturing Peace Project Curriculum: Lesson Plans, National Contest Standards, and suplementary materials
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