As we search for love and acceptance, the need to stand out increasingly dominates our behavior. In our second unit, students explore the relationship between attraction and beauty from a variety of evolutionary, social, and psychoanalytical perspectives, including the works of Freud and Sartre and the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In this documentary, the entire senior class participated in a solutions-based learning experiment in which they developed hypotheses regarding the causes and effects of beauty, attraction, and the search for acceptance on a high school campus. Inspired by “Beauty Culture” and the Annenberg Space for Photography, this award-winning documentary showcases the students’ conclusions. Consuming Beauty combines ethnography and critical research with photography and candid interviews to explore the search for beauty and the price of becoming beautiful to attract the eyes of others.
To view Consuming Beauty in its gallery format, please follow this link.
In 2012, our students examined what it means to love and be loved. The students’ collective project, “Love and Longing,” takes a two-fold approach to the problem of love, researching its origins, existence, and impacts on our behavior as well as dramatizing its many effects on our lives.
Students conducted original research, forming hypotheses, carrying out qualitative research, and documenting their findings in a series or short documentaries. Cherry-picking takes a candid look at attitudes toward virginity, including its social construction, effects on self-esteem, and pressures within relationships.
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Love 2.0 is a fascinating examination of love and relationships online. How do we construct virtual identities, and what does it mean to willingly participate? At what point does the virtual become real, and what really is the difference? What effects do new digital technologies have on human concepts of sex, romance, and love?
Dramatizing the pressures of love in high school, Chemistry is an award winning short film that explores our need to be loved as a beautiful object and how that need affects our identity and self-esteem.
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To see seniors entire project, “Love and Longing,” in its gallery form, click here.