“Teach This!” is devoted to the real-life pedagogical value of our project. The goal is to inspire students and teachers to see how art is “good to think with.”

College teachers and students may want to download the Study Guide, “Responding to the Challenge of DIGNITY & A Person’s Worth via Rousseau” (pdf). Each page includes a quote by Rousseau and two images: a photo from DIGNITY and a drawing or photo from A Person’s Worth (artwork representing the poor from the 18th to the 20th century).

School children from the South Bend area enjoyed the DIGNITY exhibit through workshops that inspired their own creative reactions to the artwork. For a glimpse of some young visitors at work, see these photos, courtesy of the Good Shepherd Montessori School.

Enjoy these photos of young participants in the DIGNITY workshop from the Robinson Community Learning Center’s photography class, taught by Jacqueline Dickey.

A selection of reflections on DIGNITY and Rousseau by children and students ages 7 to 22 will be included in the book-in-progress, Art in the Service of Humanity: DIGNITY and Rousseau (to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press). For details: jdouthwa@nd.edu.

We invite other teachers and visitors to DIGNITY to share their ideas on using this art for creative teaching and humanitarian action.

CONTRIBUTIONS

• To launch the dialogue about what DIGNITY means to us in the US today, Julia Douthwaite has posted an article on violence against women, Connect the Dots: A Woman’s Story.
• Laura Haigwood, Professor of English at Saint Mary's College, has devised a novel combination of literary and human rights study in her course, Rousseau and Human Rights.
• The debate over whether photography actually serves humanitarian purposes or provides mere poverty porn is one of the issues that Prof. Julia Adeney Thomas (History, Notre Dame) is pursuing in her course, “Photography as History: Personal and Political.”