Lily Kazemi
News Editor
In order to draw attention to the revised Core Values, Beliefs and Learning Expectations poster displayed in all classrooms, the library designed a contest in which participants must identify the 14 students and 10 faculty members depicted on the poster. This contest, open to both students and staff, will end Apr. 30 and all submissions with the 24 correct identities will then be entered into a raffle for a $50 Amazon gift certificate. A form to fill out the answers is located on the library’s homepage.
The concept for the contest was thought up by English teacher Darcy Smith after the library’s scavenger hunt in December.
According to Library Department Chair Michelle Luhtala, the poster, as a part of the review process for New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), was created to raise students’ awareness of expectations. “We sort of created a composite ideal New Canaan High School graduate and from that we derived a list of six 21st century learning expectations,” she said. “It’s important that students are aware of these learning expectations, so in order to make students more aware of it, we created posters. We know that students can tend to overlook that kind of thing, so in order to direct students’ attention to the posters we’ve included images of teachers and students and what we did was we basically made a collage out of several photos taken throughout the school year and then we traced the people’s faces.”
Ms. Luhtala admits that the contest is a bit challenging, but said that it is meant to start discussions among the students and faculty as they try to discern each face. “It’s a pretty tricky thing to try and figure out who’s in the poster,” she said. “Now, because it’s such a challenging poster, all the people on it have been notified that they are on the poster, but they are asked not to share the information of who else is on it. It’s purposely obscure. The idea is to get people to look at it a lot and also to have conversations about it. It’s not just about the poster contest, we want students to be aware of the learning expectations and the core values statement, but we thought this was a good way to engage learners.”
