Teaching with visual texts.

Asha, Jennifer

The nature of electronic and paper media is increasingly visual with the popularised use of the personal computer, internet, image capable mobile phones and digital cameras meaning the way we communicate, shop, socialise, keep records, gather information, manage our finances and entertain ourselves is highly visual. As these visual texts become more prevalent in our society our notion of what it means to read and be literate is affected. Teachers are beginning to learn more about visual texts and aim to instruct their students in the comprehension and construction of them. I would like to share what I have learnt over the last ten years of explicit teaching about visual texts to children and teachers. My approach applies what teachers already acknowledge as best practice regarding teaching reading with conventional texts to teaching with visual texts.

Pedagogical foundations

My philosophy of reading teaching and learning is grounded in a deep affection for picture books and a strong belief in the idea 'that 'real' books are good reading texts for learners' (Meek, p. 39, 1988). I believe in the benefits of using picture books across key learning areas and across all primary school grades for teaching about both the verbal and visual text. Lessons learnt within the familiar and comfortable 'environment' of a picture book can later be applied to visual texts that may not have children's best interests at heart.

I think it is important for teachers to note the evolution of texts and their increasingly multimedia nature. (Unsworth, Thomas, Simpson and Asha, 2005) Students are growing up in the midst of new technologies and readily adapt to their use, however they need to be taught to be discriminating readers of the texts that new technologies provide. (Walsh, Asha and Sprainger, 2007).

I encountered Freebody and Luke's views on literacy teaching and learning early in my teaching career and have adopted their model in my teaching of literacy. The Four Resources Model (Luke and Freebody, 1999) encourages me to incorporate and integrate 'a broad repertoire of textual practices' in my teaching of reading, to meet the needs of my students. Using activities and practices that involved students in breaking the code, participating in meanings of texts, using texts functionally, and critically analysing and transforming texts allowed me creative freedom to respond to my students' needs and interests.

Teachers and students need a way of talking about visual texts

Researchers have acknowledged the multimodal nature of texts (Callow, 2008, Unsworth, 2006) and the way that the visual and verbal interact to create meaning. The use of a commonly understood metalanguage is advocated in order to have a shared way of naming and discussing the meaning making codes within visual texts.

as with the teaching of reading and writing, (when teaching about visual texts) the use of a metalanguage to talk about and critique texts needs to be introduced not only at point of need, when students are constructing their own projects, but also as part of the scaffolding around any literacy experiences where students encounter multimodal texts. (Callow, 2008)

Kress and van Leeuwen's work on reading images (1998) details a metalanguage of visual texts. Like many teachers, when I first discovered Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar I quickly incorporated it into my classroom use of picture books. Their metalanguage gave my students and me a shared way of talking about what we saw, how we understood and how we responded to visual images. Kress and van Leeuwen outline three categories for describing the meaning making codes within visual texts. Firstly, the Representational Features, which are the visual representation of the participants or objects involved, the actions they undertake and the setting in which the actions occur in a visual text. The Interactive Features describe how the relationship between the viewer and the represented participant is visually constructed. And the Compositional Features describe how the visual information is distributed and therefore 'read'.

The facets of visual literacy

With the aim of describing the skills of a visually literate reader I have incorporated the principles of the Four Resources Model with the explicit teaching of visual grammar. By attempting to understand how visual texts are read and comprehended my teaching of visual literacy is guided. No single category stands alone and they shouldn't be viewed as a hierarchical list. However the importance of metalanguage is notable in each of the four elements that follow.

 Breaking the visual code
 using the language of the visuals, the
 metalanguage specific to visual images.

 Making meaning from visual texts
 recognising visual elements in texts, naming and
 describing aspects of the visual text using
 metalanguage.

 Visual Text User
 using knowledge of visual elements to create new
 visual and verbal texts.

 Visual Text Analyst
 recognising the purpose behind visual choices,
 recognising that visual images are created by an
 illustrator with a purpose to generate a response
 from the viewer in order to serve certain interests.

Classroom practice

The best way to describe more fully each of these facets of visual literacy is to outline some classroom activities and illustrate a small number of work samples that are designed to encourage children to using the metalanguage of visual grammar in different settings.

Breaking the Visual Code of Modality

This activity was conducted with a Year One class who were learning about fiction and non fiction books. By teaching them the term 'modality' I hoped to give them a way of discussing the images they encountered when reading both fiction and non fiction texts. To date they had used terminology such as 'cartoon like', 'photographs' and 'real pictures'. By introducing the modality 'scale' I was striving for a shared way of discussing the realism of images.

I used a range of picture books and information books from around the classroom to introduce students to the term 'modality' and describe what I meant. I used categories such as colour, outline, shading and shape to explain the ways images can be shown as highly realistic through to very abstract. I then laid out the picture books and information books across the floor to demonstrate this modality scale.

Next, I asked groups of children to find pictures in magazines that I provided, showing a range of modality. On completion the children shared the pictures they had found and we created a whole class modality scale using their cut outs. This part of the activity proved particularly useful in consolidating the children's understanding and confidence in using the new term 'modality' as they had to explain and argue their choice of place on the modality scale. Comments like, 'this picture has realistic shading', 'it is lower modality than that picture' and 'my picture is very clear, it is higher modality' were elicited with my assistance.

I was very encouraged to see that children were on the way to using the metalanguage of visual grammar after just one lesson. The children seemed just as excited as I was to be able to talk about pictures in this way. An example of the learning of at least one child came a few days later during a library lesson. The class were seated on the floor in front of the librarian and I was perusing the bookshelves unnoticed by the children. When the librarian whipped out a picture book that she had promised in a previous lesson to read to the class she asked, 'What do you think of this?' She was puzzled by the response of one child who yelled, 'It's high modality!'.

Making Meaning from the Visual Text of The Polar Express

After reading, discussing and generally enjoying the verbal and visual elements of The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg with a group of Year Two students I embarked on an activity to encourage them to use their emerging knowledge of visual grammar to extract meaning from the pictures in the book.

The students had previously participated in lessons introducing them to some visual grammar such as Reading Paths, Modality and Vectors. I distributed copies of the book to small groups of students and asked each group to discuss and record their observations of the images. Each group was assigned a different image to discuss and they later reported back to the whole class. The group assigned the last image in the book recorded an observation (shown below in Work Sample 1) about the modality of the image that showed both their competency with the use of visual grammar and their understanding of the story told in The Polar Express.

Work Sample 1:

'The bell is high modality because Santa is real and the bell is too, it's from Santa.'

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For the reader who is unfamiliar with this picture book it is important to explain that The Polar Express is illustrated in a soft focused realistic style with the exception of the last image which is shown through photographic realism. In the terminology of visual grammar, the images display relatively high modality with the last image being higher modality still. The verbal text tells a story of innocent belief as a young boy taken on a train trip to the North Pole on Christmas Eve receives the first gift of Christmas from Santa, a bell from Santa's sleigh.

Creating new visual and verbal texts

A personal development lesson using the picture book The Princess and the Perfect Dish by Libby Gleeson capitalised on the Year 4 children's understanding of the visual element of framing. The Princess and the Perfect Dish is illustrated by Armin Greder with a combination of strong frames, partial frames and no framing at all. The illustrations combine with the verbal text to tell an unconventional fairytale about a curvy princess who likes her food and knows her mind. The princess puts the culinary skills of her suitors to the test in an effort to replicate a childhood memory of the ultimate taste and find a husband. Aspects of the story are traditional and the accompanying images are noticeably framed. As the storyline deviates from familiar fairytales the images become more 'out of the box' and less strongly framed.

After reading the picture book and discussing the images in the manner outlined above I asked children to recall times in their lives when they had acted out of character, when their behaviour was 'out of the box'. We discussed why people act out of character and the possible positive and negative outcomes of such behaviour. The children then illustrated their recollections using the visual element of framing as a metaphor for their behaviour. The visual and verbal text in Work Sample 2 shows one child's attempt at this activity. Timid Kayla had recently attended school camp and had taken a turn on a flying fox after much encouragement from her peers and teachers.

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Work Sample 2: 'This (is) going out of the frame because I do not like flying foxes.'

Kayla and her classmates' ability to use visual grammar to understand and construct visual texts also allowed them a medium to better understand themselves in the context of this activity.

Visual analysis of election campaign advertisements

The conclusion of a Stage Three unit of work on Democracy allowed my Year 6 class to consolidate their learning of visual grammar and demonstrate their ability to understand the purpose behind the visual choices in advertising material surrounding a political campaign.

Firstly the class viewed and discussed a collection of visual texts associated with a recent election campaign. The visuals of politicians were analysed in terms of social distance, power relations, and contact. The students noted that most politicians preferred intimate or close up social distance to their viewers in the campaign images. By analysing the power relations of the images, the students noticed that the politicians were shown on equal standing, eye level with the viewer. In addition, the visual contact made between politicians and viewers was in the form of a demand with the politician looking directly at the viewer, often with a smile on their face.

This threefold analysis was followed by a discussion of why the campaigning politicians would choose to have themselves shown in this way, what they were possibly trying to say through their visual choices. As well as what was not being said.

Lastly, children created their own campaign poster as part of a larger project in which they were campaigning for the right to be 'Principal for a Day' at the end of the term. Sally's poster shown in Work Sample 3 shows an understanding of visual elements and an ability to make her own visual choices with the purpose of winning over voters. Her understanding of how to manipulate her viewers is also shown through the cunning way she made sure her campaign poster got into the hands of her voters and created positive connections with them.

Work Sample 3: 'Vote 1 Sally "Principal for a Day". Colour in my face as best you can. The entry judged to be the best will win a great prize! Place entries in our (3A's) classroom.'

Conclusion

The visual text is a dominant part of our society's information and communication environment. Research shows teachers the importance of metalanguage when teaching about and with visual texts. But teachers don't need to abandon their established methods for teaching reading, nor is the establishment of completely new processes necessary. By adapting what we already agree is best practice to suit teaching with visual texts we can enrich our literacy programs and help our students to become discerning readers of visual texts.

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By engaging children in activities that encourage them to break the visual code, make meaning from visual texts, be visual text users and visual text analysts, teachers will be using the metalanguage of visual texts to add to the literacy repertoire of their students.

References

Callow, J. Talking about visual texts with students. http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp? HREF=callow/index.html accessed 3.12.2008

Gleeson, L. and Greder, A. (1998) The Princess and the Perfect Dish, Scholastic, Lindfield.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London.

Luke, A. and Freebody, P. (1999) A Map of Possibilities: further notes on the four resources model, Practically Primary, Volume 4, Number 2, ALEA.

Meek, M. (1988) How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, Thimble Press, Exeter.

Unsworth, L. (2001) Teaching Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum:Changing Contexts of text and image in classroom practice, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Unsworth, L., Thomas, A., Simpson, A. and Asha, J. (2005) Children's Literature and Computer Based Teaching, Open University Press, Maidenhead.

Unsworth, L. (2006) Towards a metalanguage for multiliteracies education: Describing the meaning making resources of language-image interaction. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Volume 5, Number 1 http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/ 2006v5n1art4.pdf (accessed 3.12.2008)

van Allsburg, C. (1985) The Polar Express, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York.

Walsh, M., Asha, J. and Sprainger, N. (2007) Reading Digital Texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy Volume 30, Number 1, ALEA.

Jennifer Asha is a literacy educator in primary and tertiary settings. She has particular interests in technology and visual literacy and has been involved in several publications and research projects in this area. Jennifer has her own business producing teachers' resources in the area of visual literacy.