Today is the third stop on author Johanna Riddle’s book blog tour for Engaging the Eye Generation: Visual Literacy Strategies for the K-5 Classroom.  A number of colleagues and  Technology in the Middle readers submitted questions for Johanna, and her responses are simply delightful.

If you have not yet had an opportunity to read Johanna’s work, you can browse the entire book online and gain some valuable insight from our Q and A session.

Enjoy!

In the Introduction, you frame a brief yet persuasive argument for incorporating visual literacy into the classroom.  In your experience, how responsive are teachers to making visual literacy part of their students’ “daily educational landscape”?

Teachers and media specialists have been including visual literacy reflexively for a long time, in the way that they urge young readers to frame context and make sense of textual information through the accompanying imagery of illustrations. Art teachers try to pass that skill along, too, in the ways that they encourage students to interpret, and create, works of art. I think of those approaches as “traditional visual literacy”, and I believe that most teachers can identify with those techniques. The world of multimedia has broadened the concept of literacy-including visual literacy–exponentially. Today’s teachers have a full plate! They need to understand the relevance behind the concepts they are asked to embrace. If you teach teachers the why and how of visual literacy, they will find ways to incorporate it, because they will understand it’s place in the world of meaningful learning. It is my opinion that visually literacy training is a natural incorporation in project based learning initiatives and technology and information literacy courses. I hope to see more of it appearing in pre-service teacher training courses across the globe.

You have experience as an art teacher and library media specialist; how can teachers without those skill-sets become “visually literate”?  Does it require substantial professional development or can it simply be learned through practice and experimentation?

There are combinations of factors at work in knowledge gathering. If you reflect on your earliest remembrances, you may recall information gleaned through combinations of traditional and visual literacy. That osmosis might have taken the form of associating the familiar golden arches with French fries (visual literacy) or the letters O-A-K with a street sign that pointed the way home from the park (visual/textual literacy). My point is that there exists some inherent response within humans to meaning making through a range of literacies. But, for most of us, sophistry in those forms of communication requires learned skills, and thus, the teaching of those skills. That’s education.

In my book, I compare visual literacy training to reading instruction. I learned to read early in life, because I was able to make sense of the alphabet, it’s sounds, the assemblage of words, and connect that to meaning. I needed a teacher to spell out diphthongs, blends, and other anomalies of the English language in order to grow in traditional literacy. And I am absolutely certain that the required hours of reading courses were instrumental in preparing me to pass on, through sequential teaching and scaffolding of skills, the art of reading to my students. Visual literacy works the same way. While visual literacy is included in current literacy standards, there seem to be few formal training programs in visual literacy techniques for classroom teachers.

I think that many educators are acquiring visual literacy skills informally, through independent study such as that provided by the Center for Media Literacy (http://www.medialit.org/ ), and integrating what they learn into their classroom environment, with varying degrees of success. And, believe me, the success will vary! I could write a sequel to Engaging the Eye Generation entitled It Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time!

How does a school go about establishing a cohesive, spiral approach to literacy that follows a natural progression from kindergarten through fifth grade?

That’s such a great question! I have a very low tech, low cost response, based on my own experience as a media specialist. I unrolled two expanses of butcher paper (the kind we use to back bulletin boards), laid them across several 6-foot tables, and labeled the whole shebang “Literacy Skills”. I divided the paper into 6 parts, labeled each section vertically from K-5, and penned a question at the top of each swath of paper: “What do you want your students to know when they enter your classroom?” and “What do you expect them to be able to do when they leave?” Over the course of several weeks, classroom teachers dropped by and filled in the blanks. I measured their responses to national and state standards in literacy—using language arts standards, technology standards, and visual art standards—and shared those results with my faculty, filling some suggestions for gaps and scaffolding. When we came to agreement, I put it all together, and shared the results with my school community. That little piece of work formed the backbone of the multiple literacy work that we undertook through our media programs, and set the stage for an environment of collaboration and broad thinking about what literacy really means in our current age.

The text and still image examples that you provided were very powerful.  Does visual literacy extend to video? Have you tried any lessons/projects that utilize video in the classroom?

Moving from still images to digital story making to video production seems like a natural progression to me. My students and I began with our morning news show, which was, at its conception, a live broadcast interspersed with short video clips from students—interviews, announcements, and so on. Video became part of our wider classroom experience after we had worked with sequential stills for a while. We began with short, whole group projects, such videotaping a science experiment and outlining the scientific process. As the students gained skill with the production process, they began to collaborate on small video projects, such as the persuasive shorts described on page 113. Originally, we used Premiere Elements—it was smooth transition from Photoshop Elements, and included in the classroom pack we purchased. Later on, the district supplied each media center with a Mac and imovie. We submitted some of our work to the International Student Media Festival (www.ismf.net). Winning projects were uploaded to School Tube, courtesy of ISMF. Others were included in Best of Festival collections produced by the same entity. Adobe also came and made an educational short about the students’ work with Elements. You can view that at http://21centuryconnections.com/node/34

You address research in chapters four and five; at what age/grade level do you feel students should move from working with teacher-selected material to locating their own resources?

My fifth grade students participate in independent research projects. An essential part of that experience is locating, evaluating, and selecting their own resources. We dedicate some time to learning how to analyze resources in our media classes. It is an important aspect of giving students control over, and responsibility for, their own learning. That is foundational to the ultimate goal of creating life long learners. When students begin to select their own resources, I encourage them to “rate the resource” and explain why that particular source was effective or ineffective for their needs. And you know, they are not always going to select the best resources. Our philosophy about selecting resources is that “we have no failures, only successes we’re not too proud of.” When students have the skills to understand that a resource isn’t working for them, analyze the reasons, and make a deliberate substitution based on that analysis, they are heading in the right direction– acquiring a valuable skill It’s all about research and learning for understanding, versus “grab and copy” that students sometimes mistake for the research process. Like all authentic learning, it takes time.

I prepare students in the lower grades by providing a range of resources on a topic—for example, field guides in varying balances of textual and visual information, written on different grade levels, and let them select and evaluate the guide that is best for their personal use. In tandem with that is practice in making sure that students understand what they have read, and can communicate that information in a way that others can understand. Again, we are a talking about a literacy—information literacy. Like other forms of literacy, information literacy is a learned and sequential process.

Technology-facilitated learning often focuses on the appearance of the final product at the expense of establishing a meaningful process.  What advice can you give teachers in regard to ensuring a balance between the two?

My years in the field of visual art have left me well acquainted with this reality. As teachers, we are dedicated to student learning. Learning is process driven. Yet, skill and craftsmanship are part of that process. In addition, there is an art form involved in creating visual literacy, which means leans in favor of right brainers, and may tempt us to be subjective in our evaluation. After all, we know what we like! The rubrics that I describe in my book went a long way toward helping me, my colleagues, and my students find that balance between process and product, skill and art. When teachers and students work together to consider the multiple goals of a technology infused project, and spell out the objectives, they are creating, in effect, a road map for integrated, project based learning that will ultimately lead them to an excellent product. I consider revision and re-learning an important part of the process, so our rubrics always include a space marked “Not Yet”. That allows the student to go back and revisit some aspect of process that they may have failed to address, and to include that skill or concept in their final outcome. Each product will look different, because creative processes result in many outcomes, but the standards established for measuring will allow the students and teachers to stay on track, and analyze their work objectively. It’s important to remember that we are looking at this kind of learning through the lens of communication. Those “fuzzy shots” or jumping images a’la MTV can be richly communicative– if the student is able to explain the intention behind such “artistic” choices.

Many thanks to Johanna and Stenhouse Publishers for visiting Technology in the Middle and making this great opportunity available to educators everywhere!

Posted: 03|9|09 at 7:45 am. Filed under: Books, Literacy.
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