Reading between the pictures
Here is my picture!
flickr photo shared by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license
What can you see?
I bet you’ll answer it’s Italy at night from space.
Wrong! That’s the generic of Universal studios according to my Grade 4 students.
How disappointed they were when they realized they weren’t to watch a movie but we would talk about this picture.
First thing first! As I didn’t make any connection between this photo and the generic, we watched the generic to see the difference between the two.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFa_Lbqgun4[/embed]
Visual Literacy strategy in action
Then, we went back to our picture. I showed them this picture as we are in the cultures unit and I wanted them to learn about Europe and the European Union. (NOTE: Luxembourg is really in the middle of Europe).
I really enjoy this kind of activity where the students do the questions and answers, when they can freely express themselves. Here are some quotes:
“It’s seen from a bird’s eye”
“It shows global warming”.
“It’s weather forecast”.
“It’s Santa Claus who took the picture.”
After some laughs, I guided my students with some of the visual thinking strategies.
What’s going on in this picture?
What do you se that makes you say that?
What more can we find?
As Todd Finley explained in Common Core in Action: 10 visual literacy strategies, the purpose of visual literacy (VL) is to explicitly teach a collection of competencies that will help students think through, think about and think with pictures. The strategies are simple to execute but powerfully effective in helping students interpret images.
We are born curious, so what happened?
What does teaching Visual Literacy do? It’s obviously maintaining a sense of curiosity. Garr Reynold said in Nurturing curiosity and inspiring the pursuit of discovery:
The problem for a lot of us — teacher and student — is school, especially large institutional schools. Our methods of instruction — or perhaps it is just the system itself — do a poor job of nurturing students' natural curiosity. This is nothing new. Einstein said many years ago that "it is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry....”
He carried on : “I don't know all the components of a good teacher (or a good presenter), but certainly a necessary element of good teaching is curiosity.”
If we nurture students’ curiosity it’s more likely that they will be engaged and involved in their learning.
To make sure that we, educators stay curious we need to be aware of the curse of knowledge. Christopher Reddy described it in his article:
We do not remember what it is like to not know what we are trying to teach.
We cannot relive the difficult and lengthy process that learning our content originally took.
As a result, we end up assuming that our lesson's content is easy, clear, and straightforward. We assume that connections are apparent and will be made effortlessly. Assumptions are the root cause of poor instruction. And acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Amongst the seven ways Christopher Reddy explained there is the novelty.
I completely agree that novelty and curiosity work together.
And you what do you do to nurture your students' curiosity?
Featured pictures: flickr photo by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center https://flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/14788794355 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
Hey Magali,
ReplyDeleteLove this. Love, love, love that one of your students thought Santa took this picture from his sleigh. And love that they really thought this was the intro for Universal Pictures. In fact, when you said it wasn't Italy at the begnning (according to your kiddos) I thought, 'what?!' Clever. :) This week I remarked how my students weren't at all curious about my pictures due to a lack of background information, which I found so interesting. Additionally, thanks for the Edutopia link; it's the second time this week I've bookmarked a page you've shared. :) As a librarian, I am working constantly to understand Visual and Information literacies, adn found this article, which I think will be helpful for Option 3 of the final project: https://designerlibrarian.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/infographics-the-intersection-between-information-literacy-and-visual-literacy/. Do you have an idea which project you'll choose at the end?
Thanks for the great post and be well,
:)Wendy
This made me laugh. Kids are the best. And as you say, sometimes we just assume kids know things and then when actually asked their context is totally wrong.
ReplyDeleteIf interested, Project Zero has some great thinking routines dealing with visuals that you might be interested in. https://pzartfulthinking.org/?page_id=2
Thanks!
Hello Rebekah
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment and thank you for the link. I found the use of colour so powerful!
Magali
Hey Wendy,
ReplyDeleteThanks to you for stopping by and thanks for your comments!
Thank you for the link about the infographic.
I still don’t know which option I’m going to choose. I hesitate between the about me page as it would be a good reason to work on my CV (in a not-so-boring way) and the digital storytelling as it would be a great thing to have my students using it in French lessons.
Magali
Very interesting post. When I was perusing through this week's readings, the first thing that came into my mind is using digital images as an anticipatory set, which is exactly where you took this lesson. Teaching English, there are so many analytical skills we can foster through looking at images, and this is even encouraged by the IB through the visual elements of texts that have come up for the students to analyze.
ReplyDeleteWhat really makes this idea, in my opinion, is the use of the visual thinking strategies and questioning. This is where we take the students, engage them with an idea, and then guide them to further explore this idea. In my mind, when it comes to the questions you presented in this post, there would be little difference between the visual strategies of a 4th grade or an 11th grader. Although my kids may take the analysis further, it is interesting that the starting point is the same.
I think the point you conclude with regarding curiosity is essential. This year, I have made a point to include more visual stimuli in my classroom through advertisements, charts, graphs, and political cartoons. This piques my students interest and teaches the same analytical skills in a different and exciting way. Thanks for the read!
Hello Kyle,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments!
I agree with you, visual strategies could be applied to all students regarding their age. What takes time however is to find the appropriate visual, picture, image, icon, ad, newspaper….
Magali