1 post tagged “art and literacy”

I haven't been posting on sabbatical related issues for a while.  This semester, I'm taking a course called Practical Research in order to dig into why visual art has been working so well in my literacy curriculum for the past few years.  (Read more about my curriculum here.)  After reading and reading and reading, I've hit upon a newish theory of reading and text.  Of course, Gunther Kress and his ideas about visual grammar aren't new to anyone on a university campus, but he and his developing academic partnership with Eve Bearne and their joint analysis of modal affordances are a breakthrough to me.

The gist of this theoretical framework for reading text (and I'm wildly oversimplifying here) is that visual and verbal texts offer different "affordances" or possibilities for meaning-making.  Some studies even suggest that reading visual text is a different cognitive process that allows for more immediate retrieval of prior knowledge or experiences than when reading verbal text.  Kress' original work suggests that may be because visual text, images or art, are spatially coherent, meaning that all elements of the text are spontaneously apparent.  Verbal text is chronologically or sequentially coherent, and thus not simultaneously accessible. 

So what?  My students, our students, have grown up in a multimodal environment, learning to "read" spatially, according to the "logic of display."  I (and many other teachers) grew up with the sequential "logic of narrative"  learning to read left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end.  The disconnect should be obvious.

I'm hoping to show with my research that a practical approach to teaching verbal text in the contemporary language arts classroom is to create multimodal environments for such texts by pairing them with visual texts, in my experience preferribly visual art.