The course was structured in two stages of 32 hours each one: a first “in-person” stage that took place from October 26^th to November 9^th, and a second distance learning stage; from November 10^th to November 19^th.

The face-to-face training was restricted to 15 students in order to ensure all the safety measures for COVID-19 prevention. A total of 45 participants enrolled in the course: 15 pupils for the on-site stage, and 30 users for the e-learning in the Moodle platform.

As usual, these groups of participants, as all the people who showed interest in the course, were a reflection of the range of people covered by Arrabal-AID. But also of the greatwork that our spanish partner does, striving towards the involvement of people from different social circumstances.

This is also a mirror of the society we live in where it is more and more necessary to have a proper knowledge of digital competences. Most of the students that attend the course are people who struggle with new technologies (including ‘digital natives’). They barely know how to use it, so they cannot work with it confidently and they complain that they cannot manage themselves when ‘something unexpected occurs’ or that they do not know how to use ‘some software’ beyond its basic tools.

As before, the face-to-face stage combined in-class lectures with outdoor practices. We redesigned the course schedule to take the most the sunlight during the outdoor practises. Due to the intensive qualities of this stage, the course kept the structure of 50% lectures and 50% practice, but now we organized some sessions to be entirely outdoors.

The photography assignments for this second edition were fully focused on elements of cultural interest of Málaga, looking forward to the ‘Open Photo Contest’ which is under development and will be launched in the near future.

So we established paths of cultural heritage attending to two main factors: the time we had  to complete the path, and that these elements were not placed in narrow alleys. So we designed the path looking for heritage that were placed in wide-open spaces. Some of them had to be interesting locations to phograph during the daylight; and others during the night.

Students were able to know about many other locations of cultural interest through the official website of Cultural Heritage in Málaga: http://cultura.malaga.eu/es/patrimonio/ , where they can design their own paths. The main subjects of our path were the Roman Theatre, the Alcazaba, the Incarnation Cathedral, the Episcopal Palace, the Museum of Málaga and The Lighthouse among others.

The e-learning stage provided access to 30 students more to the Moodle platform where they could find all the documentation about the course, as well as different assignments to prove the learned competences. At the same time, our mentor worked to provide suplementary information such as references and examples from photography or recommended books.

During the distance students had the opportunity to participate in a virtual meeting with our mentor. This was one of the ways to offer a closer mentoring. Students participated actively, exposing individualized issues that were realated to common ones. Seeing photographies of each one of our students provided them the abilities to provided constructive commentaries about others work.

The participative attitude of our students amazed us. They were plenty of questions and so filled with the desire to learn more and more about photography and digital devices. Also they were very respectful with all the COVID prevention measures.

Each one of the participants who completed the course in any of both stages have received a certificate of course completion, providing and accreditation of the successful conclusion of the CICERO program.

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Students were very active, with a really participative attitude, letting us to know every question they had and each issues they found while approaching the different tools, such as photo editing tools (Pixlr E).

Notwithstanding the difficulties, we found really satisfactory results while reviewing students’ knowledge and assignments. All participants who have completed the course have received a certificate accrediting the completion of questionnaires and activities of the CICERO program.

PARTICIPANTS PICTURES

More pictures here

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During this distance-learning phase, we reviewed more than 66 tests, analyzed and commented 198 photographs, and given over 5 hours of mentoring solving over 40 questions with personalized answers and reference examples according to each students’ interests. As well as we produced illustrative content to clarify any question our students may have.

Also, we provide students with additional learning content such as professional references on photography, and analysis of relevant photographs from professional photographers (as well as of the own teacher’s pictures) in order to raise their sights on the field of Photography.

#StayAtHome

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This group is a reflection of the wide range of targets covered by Arrabal-AID, as it put together a huge variety of ages (from under 18 years old to over 60 years old) as well as it involved people from different social circumstances: people over 45, long-term or youth unemployment, illegal immigrants,  etc.

In-class structure

During the first two weeks of class it was imparted two days a week, structured on three hours classes that were divided on indoor lectures and outdoor hands-on training. Most of the people were beginners on photography and wanted to learn the basis of how to deal with their photographic devices (such as DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) and smartphones cameras) as well as with some technical issues as “how to modify a picture’s size” or “which is the best file extension for uploading pictures to websites”.

We knew that most of the people would not have DSLR cameras, so in first instance, the course aimed to photography throughout smartphone’s cameras. In spite of this, we found out that almost the 40% of the students had a DSLR and they were interested in learn how to use it as they wanted to take advantage of most of their device’s features. We had to adapt the course to each student circumstance so we explained the differences and similarities between devices and creating different groups for the practical session where at least there was one person with a DSLR camera so everybody had the chance to contrast the results produced for each device.

Also, we attended and explained the difference between some smartphones, paying attention to its features and showing some examples of smartphones that have more than one lens, introducing people to how it works.

The students generated a friendly atmosphere of cooperation and communication as they had a keen concern for photography and they felt confident, not only to ask our teacher Alejandro López, but also to talk between them and discuss about different photographic issues and interests.

Parallel to the physical attendance, we proposed to the students to make a WordPress blog about the course where they would be able to upload the photographs taken during the course and leave comments on them. With this section they learned to: create pages and entries on WordPress platforms, choose the most proper size for their pictures to upload them, make a proper description of their photographs (indicating technical data such as the device they used, the lens aperture, the shutter speed value, ISO value, date of the picture, name of the author and title (if given)). The blog can be visited on https://proyectociceroarrabal.wordpress.com/ .

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