Using Visual Literacy in the Media Center?

[Johanna Riddle]

I've been engaging in an interesting ning for English teachers on this topic. Many of them have come up with some creative integrations of traditional and visual literacy. I'm wondering how many of you are incorporating visual literacy strategies into your learning landscape, how you are integrating it, and what kind of impact you feel it is having on student learning. Anyone?

[Johanna Riddle]

It's always interesting to analyze book covers. Intermediate students can benefit from that, too. It's worthwhile to ask them to look at two cover versions of the same book, for example, Paulsen's Hatchet, or Fogelin's Anna Casey's Place in the World, and create some theories about the publisher's motive and which new audiences might be attracted to it as a consequence of change. That segues nicely into persuasive writing, and identifying writing tools like symbolism and metaphor. I'm attaching a couple of examples of fifth grade visual projects centered around the messaging behind book covers. One photo (The Bubble Trap) centers around persuasive writing and genres of literature, along with the messaging book covers (Jory, the author/artist chose science fiction/horror). The other deals with symbolism (there are many examples within the story line of Crossing Jordan) . The students designed their own book cover to symbolize the relationship between the two main characters. They used their imagery to cover our class set of books.We used Adobe Photoshop Elements for both of these projects.

[karenklieg]

Hi Johanna!
I met you at Internet@Schools Conference. I do use visual literacy with my students in many ways. One way is studying primary sources when doing research. In particular, I had a class researching child labor; we went to the Library of Congress site and looked at images of child labor in the U.S. - students had to analyze the image. We also looked at images of child labor around the world today. This was part of a project I created - Circle of Rights: http://eev.liu.edu/ChivySok/circleofrights/activities.htm - look at the page Lewis Hine & David Parker

~Karen Kliegman

[Johanna Riddle]

Karen:

This is a gorgeous piece of work! Compelling images for a compelling topic. And I really like the framework of knowledge sharing activities that you have developed. I immediately thought of Lyddie by Katherine Paterson. Thank you for sharing this.

--Johanna

BTW, I figured out what my "tech malfunction" was. The alt4 key on my laptop was stuck. Didn't know because I always use my wireless keyboard. Moral of the story: Check out all aspects of equipment thoroughly. Back to media 101 ;-)

[Nancy Meglio]

I am not sure if this counts as visual literacy... When I taught the Caldecott lesson last year to first grade students, I first asked them to look at the covers of the books: those who had won the Caldecott (the cover had the Caldecott seal) and those who did not. I asked the students if they could tell me what was the difference between the two covers; this was my beginning to the lesson. They enjoyed this activity; it took a little while, but one of the first grade students came up with the correct answer.
Nancy Meglio, Media Specialist, Brookdale School, Bloomfield, NJ

[Donna Forester]

We do a first grade animal research project where students answer three questions--where their animal lives, what it eats and what it looks like. I model the searching and the writing (using the contents page) for the first two questions by reading, but for the third question, we practice describing an animal by looking at the pictures in the book. We use a series set of books so every student in a class has a different animal. One little boy described spiders as "two bodies, fangs, legs." I drew a picture of what that would look like and he laughed and added the words he needed for a better description. Definitely a good exercise!