Rationale
"Frontloading" and the Common Core
When Forge was announced as the district's replacement next year for the historical novel/research unit used in my previous two years of teaching eighth grade, my first instinct was to plan an elaborate research unit about colonial slavery and the Revolutionary War era with an extensive visual introduction, similar to the contextualizing, pre-reading, and research we used for the superseded unit on Apartheid. In the previous years, teachers supplied nonfiction texts about Apartheid, showed PowerPoints with documentary photographs, played pieces of videos, and assisted students in choosing, researching, and writing projects about aspects of that history, all before we read a young-adult novel set in that fascinating recent time and place. We told the students that the plot resembled real-student uprisings, and we prepared them for a resolution not as happy as our usual Hollywood expectations. In other words, we frontloaded like mad.
I had never used the term. Certainly, teachers in my district were told during several 2012/2013 professional development (PD) sessions that a pedagogical shift required by the Common Core – coming this year to Pennsylvania and many other states near you – is to limit pre-reading, anticipatory set, contextualizing, or informational scaffolding, whatever you call all the good things we've been taught to do, before reading complex text. In fact, many teachers of disadvantaged children believe fervently in these practices, feeling that providing contextualization helps to level the playing field for children for whom there might be a "knowledge deficit." 15 All this suddenly was "frontloading," and it was firmly discouraged, or at least so the local PD sessions claimed. I believe that professional development is going on around the country repeating the belief that the shift of Common Core State Standards requires that pre-reading strategies be eliminated, therefore confusing many teachers. Since all this was happening just as a unit concept for the "Picturing Writing" seminar was due, a unit in which I had fully intended to, well, frontload, especially with images, my first research goal was born. What really do the Common Core guidelines say about pre-reading or frontloading, and how can they be applied to a new unit?
One of the architects of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, explained this pedagogical shift, stating that "text should be central" in instruction, "and surrounding materials should be included only when necessary, so as not to distract from the text itself." Educators "should be extremely sparing in offering activities that are not text-based." 16 In addition, Coleman created a video demonstration using "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in which he demonstrated close reading of this text without using any of the usual contextualizing materials, explanations, or, notably for this unit, visual images or photographs. Coleman did not even begin with a "prior knowledge" conversation. He recommended simply asking readers to begin reading and to lead students into rereading the text for themselves. 17 There was immediate reaction in the educational press, as Coleman's example runs counter to many techniques recommended to teachers of reading for drawing out or enhancing students' prior knowledge. Because of Coleman's prominence in creating the standards that are being adopted by nearly every state, his advice is heeded and discussed. It certainly has confused me in the context of this unit.
Articles appeared in support of ditching standard practices of introducing a text. "Too often, well-meaning teachers are giving students a predigested version" 18 amounting to "spoon feeding" answers to students. Frontloading might let kids off the hook by putting most of the heavy lifting of reading on the teacher's shoulders. 19 By the time they actually read the book, "there wasn't a single shred of an idea in there that the kids didn't already know…." What they were learning was that reading [the text] wasn't really necessary." 20 Yet the Common Core designers backed off their original claims a bit, saying that "scaffolding" is acceptable only if it does "not preempt or replace the text by translating its contents for students or telling students what they are going to learn in advance of reading the text." In other words, frontloading is still to be avoided. Writers jumped on the bandwagon started by the Common Core creators that material presented before, or even during, reading should not "become an alternate, simpler source of information that diminishes the need for students to read the text itself carefully." 21 The consensus this past year is clear: most pre-teaching is out with the tide.
But in opposition to this pedagogical current is not only the memory of my own teacher training and experience, but many articles I researched, which espouse the pre-teaching of context when preparing to read texts, visual or not, in the classroom. For example, Maureen Bakis, before asking students to read graphic novels set in revolutionary Iran (Persepolis) or in a fictional London future (V for Vendetta), provides articles, images, and discussion in front to help students picture the setting in advance. Marsha Ehler provides outside historical photographs and history before her students read historical fiction novels. 22 The examples are too numerous to mention. English Language Arts pedagogy is steeped in them. Like these teachers and curriculum writers, I want to frontload. I still want to pack the beginning of the unit with pictures and explanations of the exotic, at least to twenty-first century students, setting of Revolutionary America. I want to introduce the students to the contradictions of slaveholding founding fathers spouting the rhetoric of equality and freedom so they can see the hypocrisy in case they might miss it in Forge. I want to show images of cruelty to enrage the students and engage their incipient sense of social justice so they will judge Forge's characters with passion. But I stop myself. Students are "supposed" to read the text and pull all this out for themselves. But will they? In the Strategy section, I will discuss how I have decided to handle this dilemma – wanting to be sure all children can visualize the Revolution and wanting to make up for gaps in their reading skills, but worried that I might remove their need to read or overwhelm their internal visions built the novel with outside pictures – and I also add a few places I turned for advice.
Image/Texts
What sort of relationships will words and images have in this unit's classroom? Students may not remember whether they saw the image of barefoot soldiers in Valley Forge on a computer or if bloody footprints were vividly described in the book, possibly leading to confusion over the author's described setting. These are not picture-book images designed to tell the story collaboratively with the text. These images will necessarily live outside and sometimes in a strained relationship to the primary text. I have decided to call my image and text pairings "image/texts," after W.J.T. Mitchell's classifications of word-picture relationships. In image/texts, words and pictures remain in tension with a "problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation"; 23 they never meld together into imagetexts, in which words and picture complete each other. The paintings and drawings that can be related to Forge will be image/texts that might provide an artistic portrait of one of the real people mentioned in the book, General Lafayette for example, but with few assurances that the fictionalization resembles the actual historical person. Or the students may see the image of an eighteenth-century compass, which could be like the one used by the fictional main character, but there is no way to know if that is the case. Other images will be creative art, mediated by a painter's vision, produced for entirely different purposes more than two centuries ago, neither as "reality" nor as illustration. Calling these pairings image/texts reminds student and teachers that these juxtapositions may jar, or inspire, but they will rarely be a perfect fit.
American Icons
Another quality affecting many of the images in this unit is their potential "iconicity" for some students in the class and their unfamiliarity to others! Since only limited historical images of the Revolution and of slavery of that era exist, some of them have necessarily acquired iconic status through repeated viewing in American myth and media, in much the manner of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother photograph stands for the Depression or Grant Wood's American Gothic painting represents the Midwest. These images have been kept "in circulation, thereby perpetuating pictorial and social clichés. 'Whatever reality its subject first possessed has been drained away and the image become icon.'" 24 This status enhances their power, so that I fear that several of the unit images will be so deep in students' cultural subconsciouses, especially the Trumbull paintings, that the internalized images will resist alternate readings or connections to our novel. Alternately, for some students — new to this country, grown up in minority or non-mainstream communities, or from a media-poor environment — may feel the lack, as Ehler says, of the "'standard collection' of American images gleaned" from standard American culture "to match the historical events described in their textbooks." 25 George Washington, Valley Forge, General Lafayette, or runaway slave posters may be iconic to the point of emptiness for some, but essential American "reading" for others. This disparity in our students' cultural backgrounds brings us back to the debate over prior knowledge and the urge to "level the playing field" by frontloading with background context, visual or otherwise. When teaching American icons, as with other background knowledge, a teacher must weave a delicate dance between the jaws of too much or too little.
Reading Pictures
One assumption being made in this unit is that pictures can be "read" in some fashion to create deep connections to related text and that skills used in that reading can enhance close readings of text. This investigation begins with one caveat: perhaps "reading" is too restrictive a concept. As Albers queried, has "the interpretation of pictures been illicitly invaded by models of reading based too narrowly on the kind of meaning written words have? Is there a mode of meaning specific" to the image, and "therefore irreducible to any words, however eloquent?" 26 Again, this unit is an experiment, looking for what meaning students make of images they "read" alongside text in the classroom.
Teacher/researchers disagree on how much the practices of reading written texts and reading images differ. "Written text and visual images are governed by distinct logics," believes Frank Serafini when he discusses "multimodal" texts that combine words and pictures. "That is, written text is governed by the logic of time or temporal sequence, whereas visual images are governed by spatiality, composition, and simultaneity." 27 Serafini and Suzette Youngs have analyzed the ways that middle-school students make sense and improve their interpretations of illustrations in historical picture books. The researchers divide the teaching process of working with image/texts such as picture books into three phases: 1. Previewing, Noticing, and Naming; 2. Moving Beyond Noticing to Interpretation; and 3. Moving Beyond Interpretation to Critical Analysis. During Phase 1, teachers ask students to notice and name elements and genre features of the image/texts, avoiding as much interpretation or analysis as possible. Only after much noticing, naming, and listing would the discussion or writing proceed into interpretation. 28
This process is much like the one followed by our seminar professor, Janice Carlisle, as she asked our class to notice visual features and elements of a painting at the Yale British Art Museum without allowing us access to the painting's title or wall notes. Only after extended noticing and naming of what we could see, were we encouraged to interpret, analyze, and finally view the wall notes about the painting. Our discussion of this painting was much deeper, more insightful, extensive, and exciting than of other paintings where we did not follow this process. Carlisle's process was based on that of Linda Friedlaender, who with others, trains medical professionals in the art of close observation by asking them to work first with art objects, leading to sharper, deeper observations in medicine. 29 If similar results can be seen with middle-school students, this process shows great promise. In fact, parallels can be drawn to the rationale behind the frontloading controversy in the Common Core. Asking students to read closely first before encouraging them to interpret - or worse, before offering an easy, outside interpretation – can lead to deeper insight and more motivated reading. Why this runs so counter to teachers' instincts in teaching reading, whether of texts or images, is the question.
Historical Contradiction and Social Justice
One inspiring quality of many upper-middle schoolers is their developing sense of social justice. Issues that reveal how unfair the world is or was are engaging if students are given a way to express their outrage, their sensible faith that something ought to and will be done. In this case, the injustice is the racial inequality built into American society from its earliest moments, hypocrisy even more startling as it comes from the mouths of the very creators of our founding sentiment, "all men are created equal." Although this fact may be apparent, it confronts readers urgently in a novel like Forge, in which the protagonist is a lively, intelligent, humorous, loving teen our students might aspire to be – and he could be hunted like a dog at any moment on a continent with no space for this fought-for freedom. The reality of the slave-owning founders of our signers of the Declaration, including George Washington, who freed his more than one hundred slaves only after his own death, hits hard in this novel, even though their actions are not its central thrust. Students are also developing greater social empathy, which will be challenged as they are asked to both condemn and excuse our founding fathers for their flaws. Historical contradictions and injustice will form the foundation of several larger writing assignments during the second half of the unit, keeping students engaged in the slower later parts of Forge.
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