The first day at St. Mary’s for observations I was very involved in the classroom environment. It was a chaotic day to meet the students, because it was the one hundredth day of kindergarten. I was helping students make hats to wear and helped them build a tower out of one hundred cups. Being so involved during observations helped me understand planning my first lesson with student interest in mind. While working with the students, a conversation arose in a small group about emoji’s. When I asked one of the girls what her favorite emoji was. She giggled as she said “the poop emoji”. I laughed lightly with her and knew that this was a great way to connect with students.
After seeing the skill set of students, I noted that a lesson on symmetry in the future would be best for students. While the teacher of the classroom was preparing my Power point presentation, she asked students to share with me what they did over the weekend. The eager students were itching to tell me what they did. One girl had told me that she watched the Emoji Movie over the weekend. Right after she said it, many kids chimed in and shouted “Me too!”
Midway through the lesson, we arrived at a slide in the Power point presentation that I predicted would spike student interest. Displayed on the screen was a slide of six emoji’s (see image below). Many of the students burst with excitement shouting “Emoji’s!” as their eyes widened. Every single student was engaged in deciding whether the emoji was symmetrical or asymmetrical. I knew that after seeing the level of interest and amount of students who were interested, this was a topic I needed to explore further than just little images I insert into text messages and send to my friends. So one Saturday afternoon, I went on Netflix, sat down and watched the hour and twenty three minute long Emoji movie. Despite its poor reviews from critics, I enjoyed the movie more than I anticipated I would. I took many notes about the affects the movie has on visual culture.
Emoji’s are extremely current in a world where technology is introduced to students at such young ages. The beginning of the movie starts by emphasizing that technology is important given the context of time we live in. The main character Jean rhetorically asks that in a fast paced world, “who has time for words?” Although the promotion of visual culture is important, students should also be aware that their words are just as important. I would like to note that emoji’s in general help students with the development of their prefrontal cortex as they learn distinctions in facial features to understand others emotions. Many of us have heard of the “Mona Lisa smile”. Emoji’s have a significant role in art because they help close the gap between fine art being a distant concept and the common reality students experience everyday. Emoji’s emphasize the need for expression and the detection of subtly that helps students analyze Mona Lisa’s famous smile in fine art. Use of visual culture helps students use language to understand connections with fine art. The Emoji Movie promotes the ways in which students can infer others emotions to make meaning by analyzing their facial expressions.
To summarize the movie, it is about Gene, a “meh” emoji (center of image below) living in the city of Textopolis who is trying to work his way into the cube. The cube is like a broadcasting network of emoji’s who appear on the users phone to be selected. Gene struggles to fit in because he cannot seem to keep his “meh” face on all the time. He likes to explore his emotions and express them. When Gene finally gets his chance to be on the cube, he “malfunctions” by expressing other emotions rather than just his “meh” face. The studio gets ruined and he embarks on a journey to the Cloud where his malfunctions will be fixed. Once he reaches the Cloud, he becomes “meh” simply because there was no reciprocation of romantic feelings with someone he encountered along the journey. Once Gene returns to Textopolis he is needed to save Textopolois from being shut down. Jean is able to revive many of his feelings and malfunctions for the good of the town.
Throughout the journey, many parallels are used from the world we live in to the town of Textopolis. They use references of the popular page for emoji’s as a desired club to be involved in. They also have a loser lounge for the emoji’s who don’t get picked often. This shows the need of popularity in social structures for students. Gene and his two friends also visit the Facebook app on their journey and explain that the app is based on likes and that a lot of people aren’t truly friends in real life. This teaches students the dynamic of technology with social networking. High levels of symbolism are used when referring to internet trolls, spam, and viruses as characters in the movie. Students can learn to understand that the ugly, green, grumpy, trolls are bully’s associated with bad things on their own phone or parent’s phone. In my opinion, the best part in the film to help students with visual connections is when Gene gets stuck in the game Candy Crush and is mistaken for a yellow candy. Children learn how to find the similarities and differences among the yellow candy and the emoji. This teaches children how to categorize things which aids in their cognitive development. These are just a few of the parallels within the movie that help students make meaning of the world around them.
The movie concludes with the emoji Gene had feelings for admitting that she reciprocates those same romantic feelings. The importance of her revel lies in the meaning. She states that she loves how he expresses his feelings. Art is a medium in which we promote students to express their opinions and ideas. Knowing that children were so interested in this movie made me realize that they value art around them and technology must be utilized while learning. Multimodal art helps students come in contact with art more frequently than without. Teaching visual culture allows more opportunities for students to become engaged in the content learned in the art classroom and makes the skills they develop more applicable to the world around them. I advise all art teachers to teach with a visual culture approach to help increase intrinsic motivation in the arts.