Picture Writing

Strategies for Teaching and Learning

I present here two techniques for learning. One requires little or no technology, but can be readily employed with an interactive whiteboard or similar projector-screen technology. The other allows students to use their own smart phones for educational purposes.

The Freidlaender Method

Linda Friedlaender is Curator of Education for the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She has developed a system using art appreciation to increase the observational awareness of medical students. Evidence suggests her method of training observational skills substantially increases students' attention to detail and powers of observation, thereby reducing physician errors and medical harm to patients. ³³

Her method, which I have experienced, is relevant not only to medical students but to anyone seeking to increase his or her ability to attend to visual information. It is simple. Students are divided into groups of five or six. Students stand before an image—in her particular setting, a notable work of British art—with no label or with the label covered. An electronic image, as on an interactive white board or projector screen, may be used. Students are given ten minutes to observe the image, and in my class they will be encouraged to take notes. At the end of ten minutes, a facilitator (the teacher or a student trained in the method) asks open-ended questions to solicit the students' responses to the question, "What do you see?" In my classroom, this will be done in Spanish. Students will comment on what they have observed and will be instructed to comment without interpretation. Once students have given a detailed description of the image, they will be asked for their interpretation of it. They will be asked to give groups or clusters of observational data in order to support their analysis. The teacher will be alert to details they may have been omitted. ³⁴ In the end, the teacher or facilitator will reveal the provenance of the image and ask the students to discuss its significance.

Using QR Codes

QR codes are a means of encoding data in a printable black-and-white image—in many ways similar to a bar code, but with a much greater density of data. This allows QR codes to encode things like a text passage or an Internet address. QR codes look like square blotches of digitized black-and-white spots. It is very simple to create your own QR codes through free sites that will allow you to encode text or Web addresses and save or print your own QR codes for classroom use. Free and readily available applications exist to allow users to read QR codes using their cameras and links to Web sites. (See the section "Resources" below for recommended QR code applications.)

Students may use QR codes in a variation of the classroom gallery walk. First, the teacher prepares an image to post of a significant artifact—say, for example, one of Franco's medals. Then the teacher compiles a list of Internet resources that would help the students figure out the meaning of the artifact and prepares and prints a QR code for each one. Students then use their smart phones to access and interpret the information to which each QR code links. Generally, students will work collaboratively in groups since not every student will have a smart phone to use.