Jamie Lang

Kansas State University

EDCI 718
Rationale Paper
Understanding By Design

My UBD project is a unit in a high school photography class focused on photo retouching. The students
will learn how to whiten teeth, smooth skin, brighten eyes, and remove blemishes in Adobe Photoshop. They
will be required to troubleshoot any issues in the process, analyze their photographs, and adjust the amount of
retouching based on what they feel is both best for the photo and ethical. I will explain why I chose these topics
for my UBD project and the underlying educational theories that support my instructional design.
I selected this topic for my UBD project because photo editing, and retouching specifically, is integral
component of any professional photographers workflow. However, retouching is a controversial issue because
often photos in the media are retouched to an extreme. By using UBD, I can ensure that I am focused on the
learning outcomes and essential questions throughout the instructional design process and that technology is
fully integrated into the unit. We will explore both the boundaries between ethical and unethical retouching as
well as the process of retouching itself.
The first major way that I leverage technology is through a Prezi that highlights some of the major
issues with photo retouching. There are time lapse videos embedded in it that show the process of
transforming a photo in Photoshop. These videos are the basis for our classroom discussion of the ethics of
retouching.
The second way that I leverage technology is through a modified flipped-classroom model. I plan to
give students class time to watch the instructional videos that I created, but they can do so at their own pace. I
have videos created for blemish removal, teeth whitening, eye brightening, and skin smoothing. While videos
themselves are linear ways of covering a topic, they are always available for on-demand learning. Horn states
that by using videos, students have the opportunity to hit rewind and view again a section they dont
understand or fast-forward through material they have already mastered. Students decide what to watch and
when, which, theoretically at least, gives them greater ownership over their learning (2011). The students are
free to analyze their photos and then choose which technique would be appropriate to use. Once they find the
appropriate video, they can attempt it while the video is playing. They have the opportunity to pause and
rewind if needed. Tucker explains that teachers who use a flipped model find that students are asking better
questions and thinking more deeply about the content (2012, p. 82). Instead of wondering how to retouch their
photos, my goal is to have the students thinking about what effects are appropriate for an image, and,
eventually, is retouching itself appropriate and ethical?
Choice and individualization is a key component of discovery learning. Students are required to learn
how to retouch a photo. However, if they decide that they dont want to whiten teeth, they only want to remove
blemishes, they are free to do that. The focus is on their own interests and discovery throughout the unit.
Hammer states that the coordination of student inquiry and traditional content objectives need not be
understood as simply a matter of making decisions about content, coverage, and method or as a uniform
decision for the class as a whole (1997, p. 494). The unit is designed to give students choice in their learning
within the confines of the topic of studio photography and retouching.
It is not enough, however, to just watch the videos. Students are required to actually edit their photos
and complete a guided notes worksheet along the way. Austin, Lee, and Carrs meta analysis shows that

students who take good notes tend to perform better on exams (p. 319). Furthermore, their research shows
that one of the main reasons for underperformance and a deficiency of notes is a lack of training in note taking
skills (p. 318). By providing students with guided notes, it helps them focus on the important points of the
videos and trains them on good note taking skills.
The choice to include a unit about photo retouching in this course was intentional, but controversial.
Kee and Farid have developed a quantitative method for measuring how much a photo has been altered
because thanks to the magic of digital retouching, impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle-free models routinely grace
advertisements and magazine covers with the legitimate goal of selling a product to consumers (2011).
Retouching is a huge part of a photographers job, so it is important that my students know how to do it.
However, it is often used to an extreme in the media. By allowing students choice in the retouching methods
and how much retouching is done, they can draw their own conclusions about what is appropriate and ethical.
Hopefully by seeing how much of an impact a high school intro to photography student can have on an image,
they will realize that much of the media they consume isnt truly realistic.
This unit is designed to immerse students in the ethics of portrait retouching, leverage key tenets of
discovery learning by giving students choice and the opportunity to experiment, and require them to use
industry-standard technology along the way to create images that demonstrate mastery of portrait retouching
techniques.

References
Austin, J., Lee, M., & Carr, J. (n.d.). The effects of guided notes on undergraduate students' recording of
lecture content. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 31(4), 314-320. Retrieved from
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ryt1/blogs/totos_tidbits/Effect of Guided Notes .pdf
Hammer, D. (1997). Discovery learning and discovery teaching. Cognition and Instruction, 15(4),
Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3233776
Horn, M. (2011). The transformational potential of flipped classrooms. EducationNext, 13(3). Retrieved
from http://educationnext.org/the-transformational-potential-of-flipped-classrooms/
Kee, E., & Farid, H. (2011). A perceptual metric for photo retouching. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(50), Retrieved from
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/50/19907.full
Tucker, B. (2012). The flipped classroom. Education Next, 82-83. Retrieved from
http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_20121_BTucker.pdf

Appendix A - Supplemental Materials

PreAssessment
Prezi
Guided Notes
Retouching Videos