Visual Literacy: Seeing is... Thinking!

A filmstrip projector, with filmstrip

When I was in elementary and middle school, teachers would occasionally show us filmstrips. The teachers hated to do this because it meant lights off and extra effort to make sure we learned something from the visual images, so they could not monitor the hooligans who made jokes and silly noises throughout the film.  Inevitably, someone fell asleep with the lights off, motivating many teachers to provide a pop-quiz the next day to make sure we paid attention. Is it this memory that prevents some teachers today from showing videos? Are we afraid that videos are a form of “cheating” or shortcut that will rob students of valuable learning experiences?

I think teachers who have similar memories to mine many need to rethink our stance on using videos in our instruction. This video about the importance of visual literacy is powerful and inspiring. Perhaps it is a disservice to our students NOT to include video and other imagery these days.

Last week I read an article by Seglem and Witte (2009) about using visual literacy to boost writing skills and have been raving to my classmates and colleagues about the ideas in it.

The part that keeps rolling around in my head addresses how we teach students to write research papers. We tell them to “use your own words” without really giving them tools or time to process their research, so we end up with student who carefully follow our steps for writing loosely plagiarized reports. Seglem and Witte describe “collages,” a method of using visual literacy to get kids to critically think about the information they've found so they can find their own meaning and make connections as they report out. I want to follow their suggestion of having students use magazine photos to create collages on index cards (instead of taking notes) after reading a resource from the library or the Internet. Students must access prior knowledge and make personal connections as they seek images that will express the message they’re trying to get across. These index cards with one idea per card can then be organized in whatever makes sense to the student as s/he writes his actual report. The images remind the student of the ideas, but not of the specific words and phrasing they already read, so it is easier to “put it in your own words.”

Seglem and Witte are my new heroes; they describe four other brilliant schemes for using visual literacy to improve writing skills that I want to steal also. You may need access to ERIC or another university library service to access their article, or you may be able to get it from a local library through this link: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/44993768/you-gotta-see-believe-it-teaching-visual-literacy-english-classroom Get it! Read it! Do it!

Having access to the Internet makes it so much easier to incorporate visual literacy into everyday lessons, and I love taking a four-minute break while students gaze raptly at an instructional video. Instead of berating myself for sitting down on the job, perhaps I need to pat myself on the back for providing students with skills they need for this world we’re living in now. And maybe it’s okay to let the play some online math games too!

But my favorite way to use Internet in the classroom is for collaboration. I love Google Apps and Wikispaces and the potential for communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication that these offer. Now if I can just convince my colleagues that using technology is not taking away from instructional time, but is enhancing it...

Teachers collaborating with Wikispaces

It's About Time: Why a Variety of Instructional Strategies is Essential to Learners

As a child I was an avid fan of Little House on the Prairie and was enthralled by the school scenes. The idea of carrying lunch to school in a pail, of sitting on a bench at the front of the class with no desk to hide behind, and of standing up to recite memorized passages all seemed so catastrophically embarrassing to me. I was a painfully shy student who was grateful for the 70s and 80s teaching strategies that allowed me to quietly do my own work and never interact with other students. I rarely interacted with teachers either, even when inequitable access to technology negatively affected my social studies grade in sixth grade: my family did not buy newspapers, so I was unable to cut out weekly current events and write summaries of them.

Instructional strategies have flourished since my days in American public schools, and I believe our students are the beneficiaries. I might have blossomed with an elementary teacher who used a bit of behaviorist theory and gave me positive reinforcement for being a good student; instead I learned that being good was expected and did not make me particularly special. I wonder how my life would be different if my middle school teachers had used cooperative learning techniques and forced me out of my shell, as shown in this video.

Perhaps if a high school teacher had implemented some constructivist theories and allowed me to pursue my own interests or create my own meaning, I would not have skipped so much of my senior year that one more absence would have meant graduating a year later. 

This little guy with the abacus accurately represents the difference between my school experience (top) and that of my children (bottom). Students in the 21^st century know themselves as learners, and teachers implement various instructional methods to address their needs. This is so much better than the one-size-fits-all model I saw on TV and experienced to a lesser degree.

As a first grade teacher, I helped my student discover their preferred learning styles using the site http://www.bgfl.org/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks1/ict/multiple_int/what.cfm. This bit of technology helped me develop lessons to meet the needs of all learners in my classroom. Thanks to the abundance of technology available in my school, I can direct visual learners to videos, tutorials, and mind-mapping programs while kinesthetic learners can practice skills with educational games and simulations. Musical learners can listen to music while working on tasks and can use rhymes and songs to learn facts. Technology is an essential tool for implementing the various instructional strategies to our diverse population of learners. 

Photo credit: http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/old-and-new-math