3 posts tagged “artful writing”

This is a placeholder post because I don't have time to fully think about this right now.  I came across this idea of a pedagogy of interiority while listening to a podcast interview with Irish poet John O'Donahue.  He was being interviewed about his philosophy of beauty and its intersection with faith and religion. Not really relevant to my classroom, but then he brought up how the American education system doesn't seem to have a lot of room for beauty because of our surface orientation on accountability.  Well, that's not exactly what he said, but that's what he made me think about.

I'm currently researching why my use of visual art in literacy curriculum has been so motivating for my students.  After O'Donahue called for a pedagogy of interiority, he recalled the experience of attending a violinist's debut in New York.  It was so beautiful, he said, that even the most hardened New York critics were moved to tears and a standing ovation after the first movement.  He said the audience that night had shared an aesthetic event, one that may have touched an inarticulate place in the soul visited most often only in prayer and meditation (that's my interpretation of what he said).  So in bringing visual art to the most routine of parts of my instruction, reading and writing, have I been creating aesthetic events for my students, arranging meaningful connections between them and what I ask them to read?

I am, as Louise Rosenblatt would say, an aesthetic reader.  I hate having to use study guides and give tests or using methods like TPCASTT for analyzing poetry.  The soul of the writing just gets sucked out of it when it gets reduced to multiple choice questions and busy work.   Of course, my students may just be responding to my enthusiasm since I'm choosing to teach how I love to read.

Aesthetic theory is another up and coming area in schools of education.  I suppose I should get a handle on it before it gets packaged as a curriculum reform.

In "The Sticky Embrace of Beauty" from Writing New Media, Anne Frances Wysocki challenges traditional notions of formal beauty that have placed special emphasis on self, center, and universal meanings.  She writes,

And what sort of self is at that center?  In the telling of Arnheim and Bang, it is an almost character-less self, looking out from a body whose actions are constrained only by gravity.  This is a body without culture, race, class, gender, or age.  This is a body with ten fingers and toes, able legs and arms, good strong posture, no genitalia; this is a body born to a mother remembered as nothing but soft and warm curves, a body that simply opens its eyes to see with unmediated understanding.  (157)

Over the past three years, I've been using a thinking routine called Critical Reponse Protocol. As a process of visual interpretation, it is similar to Visual Thinking Strategies, Discipline Based Arts Education, and others that don't even have capitalized names like "dialogic looking."  CRP offers a way to mediate meaning, incorporating both formal and experiential interpretation.  I was first introduced to CRP by Melissa Borgman from North High School and her student Alston.

Meet Alston

1.  What do you notice?
2.  How does it make you feel?
3.  What does it remind you of?
4.  What questions do you have?
5.  Speculate.  Answer these questions.

Like most teachers, I'm a good thief.  You can certainly learn more about CRP by visiting the Weisman Art Museum website and exploring the Weisman's Artful Writing curriculum or contacting the Education Director Judi Petkau. But perhaps the best illustration of CRP is Melissa leading Alston through the protocol on a class field trip to the Weisman.

Critical Response

Alston critical response

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

...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