Visual Literacy

I chose to examine themes surrounding the divisive and unifying events of Richard Wright's Black Boy. I wanted to show Wright's personal experiences through a visual display of moments in time, song, and artwork. Together, these images reflect the social powers that directly challenged Wright's sense of individuality. He is labeled a "Nigger" in the South and a "Trotskyite" in the North; nowhere is he free to define himself as a free and independent thinker.

Visual Impact
"Strange Fruit" is a terribly visceral piece, combined with the subsequent images of "separate but equal", the first half of the essay illustrates the racial hatred of the South. The last two images portray the unifying forces behind the Communist Party, Wright's words add to the impact. In a longer piece, I would show his eventual disillusionment.

Visual Coherence
I used solely black and white images, partly because of the time period and partly because of the visual effect.

Visual Organization
I used Wright's experiences as a means to chronicle the images. He flees the Jim Crow South for northern opportunity. In Chicago, he faces disaster during the depression and for various reasons falls in with the Communist Party.

I hope that my students would be able to construct a similar project in order to achieve a visual understanding of a work's historical/social context. I believe these images are every bit as powerful as a piece of writing and should be interwoven with the text, not regarded as auxiliary information.

"Whether it be children on a playground acting out and deciphering the complex universe of Pokemón, or Orville Wright pretending to be a buzzard gliding over sand dunes, or Einstein imagining himself to be a photon speeding over the earth, role playing enables us to envision and collaboratively theorize about manipulating entirely new worlds" (Jenkins 30). While this point has been echoed in previous classes (i.e. "Play Fighting" duet in Rodgerson's class) the opportunity for students to try on another identity is paramount in my conception of the importance of the Language Arts classroom.

Adolescence is a period for exploration and gross confusion of identity. I remember deciding to grow my hair out long in the last days of 6th grade and forgoing gel for the first time in over two years (my infatuation with Courtney Smith had required that I pay particular attention to the angle and rigidness of my bang curl). When I returned to 7th grade, I had triumphantly buzzed the sides of my head but kept the top long in a "punk" style because I was now a skater. Never mind that I lived on a dirt road and couldn't ollie to save my life. A year later, my board was gathering dust in the rafters of my garage and I was wearing only plain, mono-colored shirts and black jeans because any logo whatsoever was too "trendy". I relished in the fact that Courtney wouldn't even glance in my direction. I was trying on and collecting identities like half price Dockers gear at a pre-student teaching sale at Kohl's, eventually settling on the "anti-identity". Each stage was an important stepping stone towards to the cohesive, grounded coolness I presently exude. Imagine all of the time and energy I could have saved if I only had an avitar . . .3rd life anyone?

I also was taken with the concept of appropriation and how students, "learn how to capture the voice of a character by trying to mix borrowed dialog with their own words. Mapping their emotional issues onto pre-existing characters allows young writers to reflect on their own lives from a certain critical distance" (32). This concept resonates with multi-genre writing by allowing for student choice and by providing a built-in scaffold around which students can build their messages. Something as outwardly simple as the "Found Poem" can completely transcend its original meaning through a student reinvention. As a teacher, I will have to take care to explain to students that re-organizing a Spark Notes essay on Gatsby doesn't cut it, but analyzing the themes of the text through hip-hop certainly would. Appropriation and Collective Intelligence reminds us that it is not necessary to constantly re-invent the wheel, rather our energy would be better spent encouraging our students to know how to access and process information as a jumping-off point for their own explorations.


From the Revolution website:
John Lamb has lived all his life in Williamsburg. His father was a carpenter, and John followed in his footsteps. John, however, had more interests beyond mere carpentry, and quickly gained a knack for other manners of woodworking, such as cabinet-making, barrel-making, basket-making, and wheel-making. He has therefore gained a reputation as a sort of jack-of-all-trades in woodwork. His mother recently passed away of smallpox, a long and arduous experience that left he and his father in a dismal depression. John’s father took up drinking, and spends most of his time at the local tavern. John on the other hand threw himself into his work and is now feeling better by keeping busy. He has also spent much of his time attending rebel meetings, as he tends to side with the politics of colonial patriots. This is something his loyalist father does not approve of, causing tension between them.

Hmmm. . .John's father an alcoholic loyalist and John a hardworking patriot-lets get our game on!!

We real cool

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.



We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

I love this poem, the undeniable energy, the mood it invokes, the voice. "The Pool Players" also speaks directly to the importance of vernacular dialect in written language. Yesterday, we talked about the need to let our students in on the "game" of Standard English. Going one step further in her essay, Christenson argues that we should make the power structures that influence society explicit, thereby empowering our students with socially mobility, but also with the context necessary to critique the system. Knowing the rules is one thing, understanding how to change the rules is another. I certainly hope to spark this meta-awareness in my students in regards to dialect and manners of speaking, but also in terms of their education as a whole. I see great promise in letting my students in on the "game" of the rubric and assessment. As Dornan et al. suggest, "Before they begin each new assignment, the class might talk about the categories that should be included in evaluating it and how to distribute the assignment's points with the appropriate emphases" (195).

Listen to Gwendolyn Brooks recite "The Pool Players" at poets.org. I love her reference to the scandalous element of "Jazz" and her jab at the anthologies that represent each author as the sum of only one or two selections, but most of all I love how she reads. Her poem becomes a song, a sharp staccato note punctuating the end of each line, the first words stretched into a melody. . . Even with the form of poetry encouraging the reader to linger here, or speed up there, reading silently does little when compared to hearing Brooks' recitation. As Adger et al. explain, "the fact that writing is received visually means that the kind of information that can be conveyed orally through vocal shifts in stress and intonation has to be provided in another way" (114). Form can go a long way, but there is still an undeniable power in the authenticity of voice.

On writing and mud pie

I am currently reading Richard Wright's Black Boy and came upon this passage yesterday on his philosophy of writing early in his career:

"My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living."


Leaving Wright alone for a moment and considering the readings for this week, each author presents real-world activities for teaching voice and organization. While I generally find myself in agreement with Dornan et al., one of their proposals for the classroom left me scratching my head . . .They suggest, "projecting a paper on the overhead and inviting students on an 'error hunt' to produce an error-free final draft in Standard Edited English." Hmm . . .they also said that this activity would be "fun" and noted that students, "kept inching their moveable desks further and further forward to make sure they caught everything and engaged in some good-natured arguing about spelling." Really Dornan? Did that really happen? Where you able to captivate a middle school classroom with an projection of a paper and an erasable marker? Okay, okay, they continue with activities that I plan on adopting in the future.

The standout reading for me this week was Harper's "The Writer's Toolbox". I was excited to read about the "tools" she designed with her students so they would not only have a shared language, but concrete strategies to apply to their writing. Her methods break the writing process down into manageable structures that when applied breathes life into what is otherwise uninspired writing. Her Snapshots and Exploding a Moment ideas will make students excited about writing, reading and editing
. . .though probably not as much as an 'error hunt'.

For Wright, writing consumed his very being. His words ceased to be individual patterns of thought and became a powerful vehicle to convey understanding. How do we get our students there, where writing is not work, but a salve to be spread on the wounds of injustice, a tool for change, a window to the fundamental elements of their subjective realities? Culham, Harper and Dornan all have their theories on voice and organization, but until writing becomes a visceral enterprise, full of guts and passion, we are just putting frosting on mud pie.



My Link is to Paul Shambroom's website. Currently on display at the Weismann, Shambroom's work explores the dynamics of power in present day America. Some pretty chilling snapshots . . .

Multigenre writing

Gillespie’s article on multigenre responses to literature reinforces what I imagine will be an excellent resource for the classroom. Let’s face it, we will be working in an educational environment that has to compete with i-pods, IMs, i-friends and yes even cell phones (though David has a pragmatic solution to the latter). In this context, educators can choose to adhere to the antiquated FPT, or can open the door to student creativity. It boils down to our philosophies as educators. If we truly believe students are constructors of knowledge, then loosening our strangle-hold on rigid, formulaic organization will produce magnificently unanticipated results. Multigenre projects will be more difficult to grade(how do I grade a map anyway?), but Gillespies’ experience illustrates the importance of letting students direct their learning on an individual level.

Students constructing . . .
multigenre responses
have captured their minds

Does this mean that the five paragraph essay is completely irrelevant, or that explicit instruction on organization should be disregarded? The answer of course is a resounding "no". On both sides of the white board, the FTP works well. Students have an effective tool with which to organize thought, the teacher has a concrete method to teach and a rubric to grade objectively. The pitfall lies in students misunderstanding the uses of the FTP. In the classroom, this format should be used as a starting point with which to build from, not an absolute to be turned to at every opportunity. I agree with Wesley in that the teacher should be focusing on the fundamental structure of expository writing, the introduction, the body and the conclusion. The FTP is merely one variation of this structure.



Educator's Podcast Network From the site: The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

Writing Process

Seamus Heaney's writing room.

After reading about the writing process in the Dornan et. al selection, I was initially struck with how familiar it all sounded. In high school and college, my creative writing teachers employed what is more or less the "process" (prewriting, writing, post-writing etc.). It made a lot of sense then as it does now reading the passage. The main element missing in my experience, and one could surely argue that it is the most important, is the structured peer-review time. My high school teacher, Mr. Beckman would sooner have shaved his famously thick and bushy sideburns than let us actually converse about our writing. When the door closed, he was in charge, the sole possessor of good taste and style. However, he provided us with opportunities to prewrite in a number of ways, I actually remember doing the bubble exercise where we connected different concepts together for future writing exercises. We also learned a good deal of editing techniques. On the other hand, I realize how much I missed by not sharing my work with my peers and look forward to future classroom experiences where I can experience the strikes and gutters of writing with my students.

I really liked this article in the Guardian that featured writing rooms of famous writers. Be sure to check out Jonathan Safran Foer.