Exploring History through Visualization, Interpretation, & Poetry Making

This is a slideshare I will be using with middle school history teachers later this week.


Blurb from Slideshare: In this informative slideshare, uses drawing to explore the Ballad of Birmingham. This is followed by an interpretation of the poem as created by a student for her AP class. At the conclusion of this slideshare are methods to create blackout newspaper poems and found poems using a newspaper account of the Birmingham Church Bombing from September 1963.

Make Me Look. Make Me Understand. Visual Representation and Science

Felice Frankel co author of No Small Matters (with chemist, George Whitesides) explains how important the thinking that happens alongside the making of images/models are. She explains how reating representations yields critical thinking. Making representations (photographs, drawings) gets "me to thinking about how to create that representation had to force ne into understanding the stuff better."

A talk by Felice where she explains on this idea follows.  During the talk, she mentions Picturing to Learn.

Schema Theory & Transmediation in Action: Conferring with a Fourth Grade Writer

Alejandro's Drawing (September 2012)

Learning with Alejandro

Alejandro, a fourth grader, is struggling as a reader and writer to express ideas. On the day I met him, he had completed writing a personal narrative and was trying to use the comments from his teacher to revise/edit the text. The problem though was that Alejandro's reworked narrative remained very difficult to understand given the significant syntax issues (incorrect word order, fragments, missing words, incomplete sentences). My work at Alejandro's school for the next year is to support intermediate and middle school English Language Arts teachers by collaborating with them during a weekly 2-hour  PLC and modeling, coaching, and co-teaching during class time. As such, I asked Alejandro's teacher if she wanted me to confer with a few students while she observed.  (I previously posted about one editing conference here). She selected the students I would work with and observed the conferring sessions.

Conferring

I often begin conferring seated alongside a child and ask him/her to read the text or section of the text aloud. I most often ask the writer to make sure she or he has a pencil/pen at hand.  As Alejandro began reading, he too had difficulty discerning what he had written. In order to curtail his frustration, I asked him if he would get a blank flip book that his teacher had made for another activity the children would be doing later that day.  Alejandro brought me the blank flip book and I explained that sometimes when we draw it helps us to recall experiences and organize them.  I opened to the first two-page spread, and indicated that Alejandro would make a drawing of what happened at the beginning of his story about his bike mishap.  Beneath the drawing, I explained that he would then write what happened. We continued through the flip book and I marked the place where he would draw the middle and the end of the story and where he would write. I suggested that he not copy from the written text he had already produced. Alejandro was excited about the task and immediately returned to his desk and began working by himself.

About 20 minutes later, Alejandro returned to where his teacher and I were working (with other children) to share his completed work.  I found it interesting that he initiated sharing his work.  This time when I conferred with him, I began by asking him to tell me about the first picture he had drawn.  As he talked, he added the straight line beneath the image of him on the bike, indicating that he had been on a sidewalk.  I asked him what he might have drawn behind him and he quickly described that his story happened during the summer and that he had been at an uncle's home in the same city where he lives.  "They have just three houses on the whole block," he told me. We next looked at what he had written and what was interesting was that most of the syntax errors that had been so severe in the first draft were largely missing in the flip book. This is a phenomenon I have seen before.  As writers gain control over what they want to say (in this case by first drawing) their syntactical control increases as well.  As we worked together, Alejandro was able to talk about his drawings, imagine scenes he had not drawn, read his story aloud, and add details to the written text and he worked.  As he did all of this his confidence increased.  In the final written version of the story Alejandro wrote a brief narrative about a time during the summer when he had lost control of his bike, fell, and got back on his bike. Teh text made sense and was readable.

Schema

Today I conducted a two-hour professional learning session with Alejandro's teacher and her third grade colleagues. I introduced the teachers to schema theory and made use of the conferring session with Alejandro to illustrate three modes of learning: accretion, tuning, and restructuring. When new information is remembered in the context of an existing schema, without altering that schema, accretion occurs. Alejandro's teacher had written comments on his draft in the attempt to guide his revision and editing.  Her comments were cogent and meaningful and she anticipated that Alejandro would be able to make use of the comments to guide the revision. A challenge for Alejandro though was that he did not seem able to integrate the comments into his existing schema about personal narratives. Further, the situation did not simply call for Alejandro to modify his existing schema (tuning).  Rather, Alejandro needed to restructure the concept of personal narrative which he seemed to know as an act he routinely failed at doing.  He seemed unable to sufficiently call forth, create, and organize important details and images of his story through written text alone.  He seemed to have difficulty seeing scenes using only written language, nor did the written comments by his teacher sufficiently guide him to better see.

Transmediation

David Rumelhart and Don Norman (1976) write when "existing memory structures are not adequate to account for new knowledge restructuring occurs" (p.14). By drawing first, Alejandro was able to use another symbol system to help him write about the bike accident. When students use multiple symbols systems (in this case visual and written) as potential ways of learning, they engage in transmediation.  Less clear is whether this experience might help Alejandro begin to restructure his understanding of the personal narrative.

In the article, Saying What You See in the Dark Engaging Children in Art, I wrote (2009):

Teaching that makes use of transmediation (Cowan & Albers, 2006; Eisner,

1994, 1997, 2002; Leland & Harste, 1994; Siegel, 1995, 2006; Suhor, 1992; Tierney, 2005) potentially produces more flexible thinkers, an important cognitive prowess. Eisner

(1997) contends that “different forms of representation develop different cognitive

skills” (p. 349). The work described here produced the potential for learners to not

simply transfer their understanding as they engaged across sign systems, but rather

to develop new understandings. Eisner states that “the choice of a form of representation

and the selection of materials to be used both constrain and offer possibilities

we use to represent what we think influences both the processes and products of

thinking” (p. 349). I suggest that by thinking about the given topic through multiple

representations, the end products were enhanced (p. 78).

The important work in the conference was not only about helping Alejandro write a better narrative, but more so I wanted Alejandro to develop some new understandings about how to compose a narrative and the importance of seeing/imagining scenes while writing.  This latter outcome is bigger than a single text and will serve Alejandro well as he continues to develop as a writer.


Work Cited:

Rumelhart, D.E. & Norman, D.A. (1976). Accretion, tuning, and restructuring: Three modes of learning (Report  No.7602). Washington DC: ERIC.

"When I Make Art My Head Gets Calm"

I. An Art Story

I entered a second grade classroom today and witnessed a boy hit another child and yell when his group moved away from him.  The teacher, an experienced and excellent one, was engaged with 6 or 7 children at the time and hearing the outburst said to the boy, "Come and read with me. We'll work together."

The boy, though, was having none of that as he too was hurt as the group members had moved away from him and one had said he said a curse word which he was vehemently denying. He told the teacher no and began to run from her.   I gathered from the teacher's look and a quick exchange that the outburst and what one might read as defiance was more common than not.  I asked the child what his name was and he said, Charlie (pseudonym) and I introduced myself.  I then asked what work he needed to do.  He shook his head and ran from where I was standing.  I sat next to his desk and he quickly sidled over and when I asked if he had a notebook he said yes and took it out to show me.  I asked if he had a pencil and he said yes again and again pulled it out of his desk and showed me.  I asked if he liked to draw and he asked me if I did and I told him, 'Yes, I like to make art.' He told me he liked to 'make art' too.

Can you make a daisy? he asked.
Sure.
Can you make it in my book? he asked opening his notebook. As he handed me the pencil he cautioned:  Be careful with the pencil, it's my last sharpened one.

I drew a daisy on one page and he drew an approximation of what I had drawn on the next page.  We went back and forth this way drawing a daisy,  a daisy caught in a fence, and a sky with clouds and sun--all things he had determined. He did not copy what I drew, but improvised.

Oddly, we seemed to be having a conversation as we traded images back and forth.

It was then that I recalled taking a picture of a daisy with my phone and pulled out the phone and asked if he wanted to see a photo of a daisy.  He was eager to and as we scrolled through images in the photo stream, he indicated which ones he wanted to see. For the next 10 minutes he would select an image and then create a version of it in his notebook.

The whole time Charlie worked he stood or leaned on his desk. Sometimes he looked like he was dancing as he put his whole body into his drawing.  For example when he had selected an image of a tree in fog, he made very light pencil strokes across the page and as he worked he narrated.

This is like fog. See it's light. I made the pencil light. 

The images he selected were interesting to me.  For example, he came upon a photograph of a red square and was captivated.  We talked about how making that image in pencil might not work as well and so we found a red magic marker and he made a large red square in his notebook.  This was followed by a black rectangle and an orange square.  I asked him if he liked the look of the blocks of color and he said he did.

I then pulled up a few images by Mark Rothko.  He wanted to see who the artist was so we looked at a photo of the artist and then spent the next five minutes looking at Rothko paintings--images he looked at with great intensity.

As we were making art a child Charlie had the altercation with came over and told Charlie that he was sorry for telling the teacher that Charlie had said a curse word when he hadn't. Charlie said he was sorry for hitting him. As Charlie's classmates made their way to the rug, I asked Charlie if he felt he could rejoin his class.  He told me not yet and continued to look at the Rothko paintings.

"I like these," he told me and then indicated one of the paintings he wanted to make.

He asked if I might start the drawing as he couldn't see it all.

I know it's not just red. You see, he said pointing to the edge of the work. But I can't figure it out.
You're right, it isn't a solid color, but a mixture of colors.  That's good noticing. 

I started and Charlie finished the work. He began what was his last drawing and said he was going to make it gold, not the colors Rothko used.

It's better this way.

When he completed the drawing he indicated that he was ready to rejoin his classmates and said,

I figured this out. When I make art my head gets calm.

Sounds like a good thing to know, I told him and watched as he took himself and his drawing to the rug.

II. Planning

When I was designing the summer literacy project, I did not imagine Charlie.  And frankly that's a problem. I wonder how many developers ever conjure Charlie when designing.  While Charlie's peers were working cooperatively to answer text-dependent questions based on a read aloud, Charlie was making his head calm.  I think about the grand schemes and plans that get made (like the one I did) and how the lived moments in the classroom must trump the pre-made plans. This is important to know, especially for administrators who often are entering into a scene already underway. 

With what eyes do we read this scene?   
What has happened before our arrival?  

Imagining the beginning coinciding with our arrival is to be mistaken.  We are always entering into a lived space.  Some caution is needed in order to recognize how partial our undertsanding of what we are seeing actually is.

Whereas many school officials are placing emphasis on CCSS-inspired tasks, we need to make sure that there is enough room for the teacher and the child to detour from the made plan.  This is so very important and once again highlights the necessity of teacher and child agency.  I think of this as in some districts, teachers are required to copy the standard(s) they are attending to on the board for other adults and/or children to view.  I'm sure this is well intended, but do wonder who is being served by this structure and what then might an outsider make of Charlie and his drawings. Is there enough room for novel learning in the classroom based on external standards?

There are all kinds of things to learn and I couldn't help but think that Charlie's insight was far more critical than responding to a text dependent question based on a read aloud.  I'm curious as to how you read it.

Transmediation in Action: Drawing, Talking, Listening and Performing to Comprehend Literature

In order to facilitate comprehension of poetry, I engage students in a drawing activity to enhance their understanding of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “The Haunted Oak” and to ready them to read Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till. To facilitate the drawing, I distribute an 11” x 17” sheet of white paper and a drawing pencil to each student. I then ask students to fold the sheet to make 8 equal size boxes. I already had divided the stanzas to Dunbar poem into eight sections and will use a PowerPoint to display each section. I explain to the students that I will show the PowerPoint slides and read aloud the stanza or stanzas from the poem and that they should quickly sketch what they image in one of the boxes.  I remind them that goal here is not to create stunning art, but rather to try as quickly as possible to represent what they visualize.  I model this process on large posted sheets of paper with a marker for the first stanza and invite students to work along. We then work through the whole poem: I project the words, read them aloud, and students and I each make drawings. My drawings remain public. In total, each of us makes 8 drawings.

At the conclusion of that process, I give each pair of students a copy of the poem and ask them to reread it.  Students work with their partner to reread the poem and to view one another’s drawings.  I invite students to discuss their emerging understanding of the poem. After discussion and viewing, I ask the students to flip their sheet of drawings to the blank side and to draw one scene that best illustrates their understanding of the poem. I let them know that we will be posting these drawings in the classroom as soon as they are finished. Students work for about 5-7 minutes to draw and then post their work. We tour this gallery of images and I ask students to notice what is similar across the drawings.  Students indicate that most often there is a leafless oak tree, a hanging body of an African American man, & the presence of the judge, doctor, minister, and child. 

I next play a video of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” for the class. 

Students quickly make connections between Dunbar’s poem and Holiday’s song. These connections give rise to questions such as: How prevalent was lynching in the U.S.?  Who is lynched? Has lynching ended in this country, or is it still going on? Have “pillars of the community” been the ones who lynch, as Dunbar portrays them in his poem? 

I conclude the class by having students practice reading chorally the second sonnet in Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till.  Each students is assigned a part and given a copy of the poem that I had arranged for choral reading. 

The next class, students practice individually again and then as a large group.   By the second reading the choral quality of the work is significant and powerful.  Each pair of students is assigned a number 1 from 15.

Students assigned #	Reads….
All Read	Pierced
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10	by the screams
11, 12, 13, 14, 15	of a shortened childhood,
15	my heartwood
13, 14,15	has been scarred
14, 15	for fifty years
15	by what I heard,
8, 9, 10, 11	with hundreds of green ears.
All	That jackal laughter.
12, 13	Two hundred years I stood listening
9, 10, 11	to small struggles to find food,
7 ,8, 9, 10, 11, 12	to songs of creature  life
13, 14, 15	which disappears and comes again
1, 2, 3	to the music of spheres.
1, 2, 14,15	Two hundred years of death I understood.
3, 4, 12, 13	Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night,
1, 2, 5, 6, 7	Shivering
1	the deep silence
1, 2	of the stars.
5	A running boy,
6, 7, 8, 9, 10	five pale faces in moonlight.
10	Noise,
2	silence,
3	back-slaps.
4	One match,
6, 7, 8, 9,10	five cigars.
ALL	Emmett Till‘s name
1, 2, 3, 4	still catches
1	in the throat.

Students quickly see the allusions to the Dunbar poem and the Holiday song that are present in the sonnet. As we have previously done work related to Emmett Till, students are familiar with who he is and what happened to him.  I ask students to work in small groups to prepare a choral reading script for one of the sonnets they chose, to be performed in class. It is in this manner that we enter A Wreath for Emmett Till.

THE HAUNTED OAK 
By Paul Laurence Dunbar


    PRAY why are you so bare, so bare,
        Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
    And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
        Runs a shudder over me?

    My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
        And sap ran free in my veins,
    But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
        A guiltless victim's pains.

    I bent me down to hear his sigh;
        I shook with his gurgling moan,
    And I trembled sore when they rode away,
        And left him here alone.

    They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
        And set him fast in jail:
    Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
        And why does the night wind wail?

    He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
        And he raised his hand to the sky;
    But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
        And the steady tread drew nigh.

    Who is it rides by night, by night,
        Over the moonlit road?
    And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
        What is the galling goad?

    And now they beat at the prison door,
        "Ho, keeper, do not stay!
    We are friends of him whom you hold within,
        And we fain would take him away


"From those who ride fast on our heels
        With mind to do him wrong;
    They have no care for his innocence,
        And the rope they bear is long."

    They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
        They have fooled the man with lies;
    The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
        And the great door open flies.

    Now they have taken him from the jail,
        And hard and fast they ride,
    And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
        As they halt my trunk beside.

    Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
        And the doctor one of white,
    And the minister, with his oldest son,
        Was curiously bedight.

    Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
        'Tis but a little space,
    And the time will come when these shall dread
        The mem'ry of your face.

    I feel the rope against my bark,
        And the weight of him in my grain,
    I feel in the throe of his final woe
        The touch of my own last pain.

    And never more shall leaves come forth
        On the bough that bears the ban;
    I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
        From the curse of a guiltless man.

    And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
        And goes to hunt the deer,
    And ever another rides his soul
        In the guise of a mortal fear.

    And ever the man he rides me hard,
        And never a night stays he;
    For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
        On the trunk of a haunted tree.