Visual Literacy
Our Digital Writing professor asked us to pretend to be museum curators creating a photography exhibit on a theme of our choice. You can view the slide show of my exhibit on flickr. The entire assignment is described in Writing New Media, "Toward New Media Texts" by Cynthia L. Selfe. In this chapter, Selfe offers a working definition of visual literacy as
Given this visual orientation for literacy, Selfe describes in this chapter how she encourages her students to create new media essays and arguments that have coherence, salience, and impact. I wasn't able to reorder the images in flickr, so I dragged them into iPhoto and played around for a while trying to get to coherence, salience, and impact. (Maybe it's beyond my capability, but I also wasn't able to include attributions unless I blogged the images one by one from flickr. See the bottom of this posting for attributions in order of the photos in the exhibit.) I ended up balancing black and white/ color, repeating rounded shapes bookended by straight lines, dispersing direct images of faces and heads with reflections and shadows. Working with the images in a visual medium as visual text before trying to complete the second part of the assignment, the word text, was important to my deliberation of the exhibit's theme and title....the ability to read, understand and learn from visual materials (still photographs, videos, films, animations, still images, pictures, drawings, graphics)--especially as these are combined to create a text--as well as the ability to create, combine, and use visual elements (e.g. colors, forms, lines, images) and messages for the purpose of communicating. (69)
Self as Other
The habit of self-portraiture is unique to humans. I once heard that chimpanzees are the only other creatures able to recognize themselves in mirrors. Still, as I was searching for images for this exhibit, I was surprised by the number and variety of ways that artists were able to reflect/project themselves: onto ordinary objects like a fork, carafe, or colander; in unusual mirrors; in artful spheres; in shadows; and in the synecdoche of forehead, bubble wand, pendant, brow. What do we gain from from these artists who publicly step outside of themselves? Is it a challenge to do the same? A cushioning of our egocentrism by its transformation into art? An understanding of self in context? An autobiography of the artist? For all that these photographs share in common, in form, each depicts the identity of its artist mediated by the viewer's experience...
Implications
Anyway, I'm starting to bloviate in my role as curator. As a student, in crafting my museum exhibit and analyzing it for my commentary, I followed all the steps in the writing process that we composition teachers love. As a teacher, I like to think I'm dynamic, but I'm still stuck considering the usefulness of this new media composition in light of the traditional linear essay. This kind of assignment, in other words, would seem useful to me if its process lessons were transferrable to word-based text.
It feels like a risk to say that a visual essay or new media project in itself is sufficient for formative or summative assessment in a high school language arts class. Selfe offers some examples of evaluation techniques. But unless reading images and design--really, visual rhetoric--are included in curriculum, new media projects would be nothing more than the looks-like-she-spent-a-lot-of-time-on-it sort of magazine collages we get now in our short story units, the ones that look good enough to hang on the wall but remain ambiguous. What was the student thinking? What did she learn, exactly?
Selfe knows me and teachers like me who "have continued to privilege alphabetic texts over texts that depend on visual elements...because such texts present familiar forms, forms with which we have developed a comfortable, stable intellectual relationship" (71). She borrows from Sean Williams' 2001 article in Computers and Composition to twist her rhetorical knife in my side:
I want to believe them both. I really do! But last night another English teacher friend of mine dropped over to return a shovel, and I started showing off all the cool stuff I'm learning. She said, "But doing so much visual work would be irresponsible, wouldn't it? We're still responsible for teaching them how to write essays, aren't we?" I couldn't answer her question. Either way, I was afraid of the answer.Restricting composition to verbal media and reproducing the verbal bias in our classrooms is perilous...because it contradicts the critical thinking skills that we as composition teachers strive to teach...If composition's role is to help students acquire skills to lead a critically engaged life--that is to identify problems, to sole them, and to communicate with others about them--then we need to expand our view of writing instruction to include the diverse media forms that actually represent and shape the discursive reality of our students. (72)
Working on this new media assignment in the role of curator was thought-provoking and fun. What is holding me back from heading in this direction with my students?
Photographs:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fod/190865284/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolebriant/1277703509/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/_fabrizio_/221956315/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/audrix/1392925455/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_pdub/194281367/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hopkinsii/308466555/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/samikki/26790988/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawnchin/49747509/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pbeens/341951819/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/r0b1/1489940037/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/keepingitrealblog/319279482/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/monicasemergiu/70786388/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clutterbookandi/223128356/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpb1978/1500863162/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolebriant/1246932448/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/riverdaleto/420614739/
