Neil Gaiman & Lorenzo Mattotti Meet Molly Bang in Fifth Grade: An Embodied Reading of Hansel & Gretel

A child reading with a flashlight. (Reilly, Newark, NJ)

I. Seeing

So I have been thinking more about potential engagements with the Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti's text, Hansel and Gretel that I initially began thinking about here.  I wondered how students might see the text if I was to engage them with Molly Bang's ideas about aesthetics that she outlines in Picture This: How Pictures Work.  Below is a slideshare that Rob Cohen and I have used with students that incorporates ten principles from Bang that answers her question: “How does the structure of a picture affect our emotional response?"

Picture This from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Bang explored this question by creating illustrations for Little Red Riding Hood in an attempt to learn how pictures work. Bang would later send the manuscript based on her exploration of this question (what later became Picture This) to Rudolph Arnheim and he responded by writing that Bang's book "uses the geometrical shapes not as geometry, which would not be all that new, not as pure percepts in the sense of psychology textbooks but entirely as dynamic expression" (p. 7 form Bang's Picture This).

Dynamic expression.
          Something enduring.

That's what I'm after--that's what it means to guide reading--to open spaces for children to wonder. Can fifth graders after exploring Bang's principles through play with paper, use some of those principles to compose visual responses at various points during their reading of the Gaiman/Mattotti text?  Will this process deepen and complicate their comprehension?

II. Making Enduring Work

When I taught grad school, this exploration of aesthetics was work I did via an initial course on theory, An Arts Approach to Literacy.  Rob translated this work into a series of engagements with eighth graders across a school year.  Beneath both of our work was the understanding that creating mental models (Kintsch, 1998) of what is read is necessary for comprehension and that the arts offer ways to get at elemental and embodied expressions of text and self and other.

What's Your Story? (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

Earlier in the year I was playing around with the idea of story and made the image above. I was not consciously thinking about Bang or her work on Red Riding Hood and yet, some of the principles she outlined found their way into my thinking as I composed, What's Your Story?  

Memory traces. 

III. Situating Close Reading

Kintsch, in a fascinating article, Musings about beauty (not yet published), posits that cognitive science can "illuminate the concept of beauty." Kintsch writes:

In reading a text, we distinguish the mental representation of the text itself – the textbase –and its knowledge and interest-based elaboration – the situation model (Kintsch, 1998). This elaboration can be automatic, as when experts fill in the gaps and links in a text within their domain of expertise, but it also is often conscious and indeed effortful, as when we labor to understand a difficult text in an unfamiliar domain. This labor is not confined to the initial reading but may continue as we ruminate about the implications of what we have read. Thus, memory traces are dynamic, with important consequences for the perception of beauty.

Kintsch clarifies the idea of memory traces being dynamic by asking his reader to image s/he is standing on a mountain top thinking about the beauty of the landscape below.

The mental representation of that event is not just visual, but emotional (the euphoria of having reached the summit), and embodied (the fatigue of the ascent). Cognition does not occur in a disembodied mind, but in an acting, feeling, perceiving person.

Reading a scene or any text cannot be limited to the tenets of close reading as they are espoused these days as the disconnected acts from the "acting, feeling, perceiving person."  As Kintsch argues, meaning is made via neural activity and is of course, embodied.

No body. No comprehension.

He writes:

The happiness we experience looking at some picture becomes an integral part of its mental representation. Emotions and bodily events are represented in our brains as patterns of neural activity, as are visual scenes or the semantic content of a story. 

Contrary to the reductionist attitude espoused by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel that reading can be limited to "what lies within the four corners of the text"--Kintsch would tell us differently,

as did Louise Rosenblatt, 

                          as did my mom when I was just a child.

IV. What Gets Found and Remade

In those early years my mom and I went twice a week to our local library that was housed those days in an old Victorian mansion. There were window seats there, something I did not have at home, and large windows that invited a reader to look out--to pause while reading and to get lost in other landscapes and think. I spent hours there, curled up on a cushion with a stack of books at my feet, as my mom perused the books she might want to read. My mom read a book a day and taught me by example that there's no limit to where the well loved and read text might lead us.

Yes I attended (even closely attended at times) to the words I read forming mental representations of the texts, thinking how the words, sentences and images worked together and extracting core ideas along the way. All of this though was conditioned and informed by what I knew and in turn this newly made knowledge informed my thinking.

My pausing. My look out the proverbial window was perhaps an attempt to assimilate or accommodate the new with the known--to resolve ambiguities, or at the very least to hold them in abeyance.

Where in our teaching do we afford learners such time?

Kintsch asks,

Why is it that we can read a great book many times and it becomes more interesting with each reading? Because it affords us the opportunity to fine-tune our model, to construct a novel interpretation every time. The book remains the same, but we – our model – change.

Decades later the aroma of old books remains and still informs my sense of beauty--my memories of my mother.

Memory traces.

V. Postscript

When I think of the work we do with students and their teachers, I am reminded how we hope to occasion learning that leaves traces too. When we partner with children, teenagers, and teachers we want to make enduring work--beautiful work--work that often requires us to get lost, to look out windows, to wander a bit.

I'll let you know how the Gaiman/Mattotti/Bang work is proceeding.

Muscle Knowledge, Core Knowledge and Learning Science

Simulated Oil Spill

In a recent column, Just Another Brick in the Wall: How Education Researchers Ignore the Ends to Tweak the Means Alfie Kohn reports on a recent study of 24 kindergartners, Visual Environment, Attention Allocation, and Learning in Young Children When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad. Kohn writes:

A research assistant read to them about a topic such as plate tectonics or insects, then administered a paper-and-pencil test to see how many facts they remembered. On average, kids in the decorated rooms were "off task" 39 percent of the time and had a "learning score" of 42 percent. The respective numbers for those in the bare rooms were 28 percent and 55 percent.

As I read this 'finding' I couldn't help but think about all that sitting around in the name of science. 24 five-year-olds sitting and listening (or apparently for many, not). I get that Kohn is taking to task how we default in the US to the belief that any test offers us valuable insight and the truth. He wants us to scratch beneath that surface belief.  I'm with him on that. Just because the word assessment or test is used does not mean we should default to the belief that it offers us anything of value.

But that is not what compelled me.  I just couldn't get out of my mind those 24 kids--just 60 months on the planet--sitting.


Sitting.

Waiting.

Little Godots in the making.

Is there any wonder that they might NEED to distract themselves?



II. Doing

2nd graders in Newark thinking about
which objects might best clean up oil.

I've spent a good portion of this past year paying attention to science teaching in the early grades and loving the many ways that children respond with curiosity when permitted to move and touch and wonder. Now I'm not talking about fancy science experiments.  Rather most of what I observed was often nothing more than a few artifacts and an invitation to think.

For example a few weeks ago I watched as a class of 2nd graders hypothesized as to which objects would best clean up oil.  After thinking about this (having touched oil) which involved touching all of the materials (i.e., sand, 'fake' fur, hay, cotton, feathers), talking with one another and writing their guesses--the students took part in an investigation to see which of the objects best worked to clean up spilled oil. Later they read several different books about oil spills and did some more writing and talking.  Alongside this, students were also learning about observing--both in the natural world and within the confines of their classroom. These inquiries took them outside and they used simple tools (plastic magnifying glasses) to record what they were seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling in their notebooks.

It is important to note (more so than a test might tell) that the children in this classroom actually cheer when they 'do' science.

Second graders talking and then charting their collective insights during an investigation about oil spills.

III. Receiving

At another school, I watched first graders who were learning about "imaginary" lines such as the equator in a History of the Earth unit.  In this CCSS-approved 'literacy' program which some schools use in lieu of science and social studies curriculum, there were no globes on hand that day for the children to hold.  There was no child-to-child discussion.  There was no writing. There was no reading. There was a powerpoint playing on an adjacent wall and the teacher was reading a script--one she had taken time to read previously.  On that morning the teacher was doing what was expected and dispensing with a 60-minute lesson that was at best hard to grasp.  Imaginary lines and the North and South poles which aren't actually poles is difficult for six-years-old to conceptualize. The lines between real and imaginary when you are six are fuzzy at best.

Anticipating the difficulty, the curriculum developer provides teachers with the following note:

Explaining and reminding do not equal coming to know.


IV. Coming to Know

At each of the schools mentioned in this post, the primary grade students were set up to learn important and interesting content about the earth.  In the first and last scenarios, the children were read to and talked at. There bodies remained seated with the expectation that they would not be in motion. In the second scenario, the children handled materials, talked with one another, recorded their initial thoughts, and then actually engaged in an investigation where they attempted to use materials to absorbed oil. These actions required them to move. Some children chose to stretch out on the floor while others sat on the classroom carpet.  Bt they had free will to move.

Years ago, Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace, told us:

"The world is a text with several meanings and we pass from one meaning to another by the process of work. It must be work in which the body constantly bears a part, as for example, when we earn the alphabet of a foreign language: this alphabet has to enter into our hand by dint of forming the letters, If this condition is not fulfilled, every change in our way of thinking is illusory"  p.117).

We cannot forget that children come with bodies. We ought to let them use them.