Ways to Create a Tribal Atmosphere
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Posted by Jo Murphy Jan 30, 2009 |
Create a Photoshop Club that is empowering for students and teachers, using the methods outlined in the articles How To Learn Photoshop Online and How to Design a Photoshop Club
Set up the club so that members become a strong empowered, motivated tribe. Show them how to be capable of achieving varied styles of inspired activities, whilst maintaining an attitude of camaraderie.
Create a Tribal Atmosphere
An attitude of gratitude would result in the feeling that “Life is Great!” It should not be hard to convince students that access to Photoshop and free instruction of the quality offered by Watch and Learn Photoshop.com is something to be grateful for.
This attitude of gratitude will motivate students and help them to feel welcome. Well spaced, well paced lessons will also incrementally lift the bar of achievement thus create an ethos of empowerment.
Stage 4 :”We Are Great!” (Tribal Leadership)
Creating images for “our” magazine, creating a community library together that will be valued for time to come brings about a feeling of belonging. Members of the club can work together to preserve history of the past and conserve images and memories of now for the future. This will build pride and an ethos of valuing community members.
With thorough preparation and planning the club could easily oscillate between stage 4; “We Are Great!” and Stage 5; “Life is Great!”
Creating a Shared Language
The activities engaged by the club facilitated by Photoshop will create common group languages
- visual language,
- technical language (Photoshop) will become common among the club members
- local knowledge and ownership of the locale will be strengthened
- because the libraries are housed publicly this too will create a group language, a sense of pride and ownership of the process (this might come about even for people who are not in the club as they may still view the images and ask relevant questions)
- perhaps a college in-house style of visual graphic presentation will emerge
An Evolving Learning Community
It is possible within this scenario to value both the personal individual at the same time as the communal colective achievement of the project.
The structure of the learning community means that teachers can be quite comfortable if they are learning along with the students. If they don’t know as much as, or more than the students, this can be seen as a good thing. The context of equality will not be marred or hampered by a lack of knowledge because of the structure. Teachers can share the gift of discovery with their students
A sense of equality and egalitarianism will be further enhanced, because all images will be housed in online galleries. This means that there is no need to grade them - all can be equally valued. All images created can be enjoyed as different from but not better than those of their peers.
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