Bringing Visual Literacy into the Classroom

I suppose it’s okay now to admit that I did my math homework—even calculus—in front of the TV in our den watching “The Soupy Sails Show.” So, I’m not surprised by the results of a New Jersey Department of Education survey that indicates 57% of Jersey teens spend 3 hours each day doing some sort of electronic viewing: watching television, playing video games, and being on the Internet ("High School Students Devote More Hours to TV, Internet and Video Games," The Star-Ledger, July 3, 2009). In fact, I’m almost surprised that the statistic is so low.

However, if the teens we’re teaching, or the preteens or college students, are spending so much time watching electronic screens, what are we doing in our classrooms to help these students develop critical viewing skills? “The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies” calls for students to ”manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information” and to “create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts” in order to be literate in terms of this century. The companion guideline--NCTE’s “21st Century Curriculum and Assessment Framework”—gives us a way to look at how we work with students in our classrooms in light of the definition. Even so, sometimes it’s difficult to begin.

We might start with the news which is replete with articles about students and technology tools—how they’re using them at home or could be using them at school. The blog of NCTE’s Assembly on Media Arts is one place to keep up with this news.

We might also learn from the many teachers at all levels who integrate visual literacy into their English or language arts classrooms. Abigail Kennedy, 2007 winner of the NCTE Media Literacy Award is one of these teachers. Samples of her winning videos give us one of those a-picture-is-worth-1000-words glimpses into how we might use visual literacy in our classrooms.

NCTE has several resources on the subject.

Books: Lesson Plans for Creating Media-Rich Classrooms; Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction Texts; Great Films and How to Teach Them; Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom.

Many articles in NCTE journals.

ReadWriteThink lesson plans.

A kit: Engaging Media-Savvy Students.

A CD-Rom: Study Guides for 12 Great Films CD-ROM.

An On-Demand Web Seminar: On Demand Reading the Media: Helping Students (and Teachers) Become Media Literate by Teaching 21st Century Skills.

How have you worked visual literacy into your classroom activities?

Finding Safe Videos for the Classroom

Video and film play a vital role in the 21st century classroom, and online access makes them easy to find and use. This 11th grade modernization of Snow White on YouTube demonstrate readers theater and could be used before students composed their own modern readers theater versions of fairy and folk tales:

My very favorite Schoolhouse Rock short, Conjunction Junction, is available on YouTube anytime I want to do a mini-lesson on conjunctions work “hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” If I’me teaching Hamlet, a quick search on YouTube will turn up Sir Laurence Olivier’s performance of the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy, ready to share with the class.

The problem with YouTube, as I’m sure almost everyone knows, is that there are also a lot of very inappropriate videos on the site. It’s a difficult site to turn students loose on because of the amount of guidance needed. In many districts the site is banned outright by network firewalls.

This is where sites like TeacherTube and Teachers.tv come in. Think YouTube for teachers, and you have the idea. Teachers upload student-created videos, their own instructional videos, tutorials, in-service and conference presentations, and demonstrations. TeacherTube has an American feel. Teachers.tv is the UK spin on the idea.

You’ll find resources like a book talk on the 2008 Newbery Award winner, a promotion for book clubs, and the Alphabet in American Sign Language on TeacherTube. And you’ll find a collection of videos for English and media instruction on Teacher.tv.

In addition to these two general sites, there are some specific online video collections that can be used in the classroom:

• The Moving Image Archive at the Internet Archive
  Find collections of videos arranged by genre. Some will be inappropriate; however, specific collections such as Youth Media, Classic Television Commercials, and the September 11 Television Archive have materials you can embed and use with students.
  
  
• C-SPAN
  The C-SPAN website offers more than just political news and current events. Booknotes and BookTV have video interviews of non-fiction authors. C-SPAN Classroom is includes videos on Civics and U.S. government that can provide background information and content-area resources. Presidential Libraries offers biographical information through recordings of twelve presidents.
  
  
• Google Video
  While the main Google Video site is open to uploads, you'll find specific collections suitable for the classroom behind the front page. The National Archives videos include NASA History, World War II newsreels from United Newsreels, and Department of the Interior Motion Pictures from 1917–1970. The University of California, Berkeley videos include a handful of recordings from the Lunch Poems series, featuring readings by poets such as Li-Young Lee and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Here are some final tips to help ensure that everything goes smoothly:

• Always, always, always preview the entire video before sharing it.
• Be sure that you’ve obtained permission from families and your administration.
• Watch for “related” or “popular” video links that may appear near the video you plan to use.
• Embedding a video can avoid some problems, but remember that sites like Google and YouTube include links to “Related Videos” in the video screen as well.
• Check the comments that accompany a video. The video may be suitable, but spammers and trolls may have filled the comments with inappropriate language or links.
  
  

More Resources for Exploring Movies and Literature

The English Journal article “Literature into Film (and Back Again): Another Look at an Old Dog,” written by NCTE Consulting Network member and NCTE author John Golden, describes ways to explore movies based on short stories and novels in the literature classroom. While the examples in the article are targeted at secondary students, the techniques can be applied at any level. All you have to do is change the texts. The general questions remain the same.

The key is to focus on analysis of the director’s choices, rather than on general review or comparison of the choices. Try asking students questions such as “Why did the director delete this scene? What difference does this choice make?” rather than “Which version is better and why?” ReadWriteThink has lists of films and texts that can be used in the elementary classroom and at the middle level that you can use to supplement the lists in the English Journal article.

Further, ReadWriteThink includes these lesson plans that explore literary elements in films and other videos:

• Decoding The Matrix: Exploring Dystopian Characteristics through Film
• Decoding the Dystopian Characteristics of Macintosh’s “1984” Commercial
• Exploring Irony in the Conclusion of All Quiet on the Western Front
• Exploring Satire with Shrek
• Exploring Satire with The Simpsons
• Lights, Camera, Action...Music: Critiquing Films Using Sight and Sound
• Writing a Flashback and Flash-Forward Story Using Movies and Texts as Models

Finally, in the EJ Extension “Who Wants to Be a Director?” Golden shares additional creative writing activities that students can complete to consider the ways that print texts are turned into movies. Golden suggests, for instance, that students choose songs for a movie soundtrack version of a print text that they have read. The ReadWriteThink lesson plan On a Musical Note: Exploring Reading Strategies by Creating a Soundtrack includes additional resources teachers can use as they try this creative writing technique.

The ReadWriteThink lesson Literature Circle Roles Reframed: Reading as a Film Crew offers a creative reading approach, by substituting film production roles for the traditional literature circle roles. After reviewing film production roles—such as director, casting director, and set designer—students work together in cooperative groups to read and discuss a piece of literature, each assuming a film production role.