Town Squares: A San Diego Neighborhoods Project

Students at HTM are selected through a lottery system and come from every zip code in the city. Our team chose to use photography and writing to explore the wonderfully diverse neighborhoods that make up our school and town. We learned about elements of photography from Outside the Lens, researched the history of our neighborhoods, took many photographs of where we live, interviewed several residents, and wrote our “One Neighborhood, Three Things” to describe three places that are unique and special to our neighborhood. Our final artistic piece was a canvas “square” of our favorite photo accompanied by a unique phrase both carefully chosen to represent our neighborhood. We exhibited our work at the Outside the Lens gallery for the “Friday Night Liberty” art-walk where students were able to share their photography and writing with the public.

Teacher Reflection:

It was interesting to see the students explore their communities and capture some amazing perspectives through photography. We all learned a lot about the history of San Diego through their research. Many students really took the opportunity to see and describe familiar places in new ways. It was awesome to see students’ pride as they exhibited their photography in a “real” gallery space, and the wonderful diversity of our school and city was evident in the collection of final photographs.

Student Reflections:

I found out a lot of good things while I was writing about my neighborhood because before I had always thought my community was a bit boring.

—Natasha

I learned a lot about OB’s past and I also saw my neighborhood with different eyes as a photographer.

—Elle

What I liked about this project was how we got to see where everyone lives in San Diego.

—Regan E To learn more about this project and others, visit https://millerwilliams.weebly.com/projects.html