“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”
-Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, 1953. (1)
Introduction
For my twelfth birthday, my mom gave me a very important option for a birthday gift. Growing up, most of the gifts that I received for my birthday or other holidays consisted of things that I didn’t want but probably needed, like wool sweaters and new gym shoes. One time, I remember getting super excited that my mother got me a game called Mario is Missing for my Super Nintendo system. I always remember how cool she thought she was for getting a game with Mario in it. I proceeded to play it only to find out that it was really a game intended to build geography skills. Needless to say, I was still excited and hopeful about the idea of an option in her gift-giving. She had received a bonus at work, so she was excited to go all out with her gift to me that year.
So, she sat me down and said that I have two options: either she could purchase a computer or a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. After she could sense that I was less than excited about either choice, she explained to me that both were extremely expensive purchases. Until that point, I had relied on using the encyclopedia set that my grandmother purchased for my mother while she was growing up during the 1960’s. I enjoyed reading the Book of Knowledge entries despite their age. No one came up to me and said that there was going to be a technology revolution and that it is really important that you learn how to use a computer. When I was in 6th grade in 1996, we went to computer lab once a week, to learn how to type and play a computer game called Oregon Trail. In the span of the next ten years, the world changed dramatically. I got to navigate that world with a brand new set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
In thinking about my students, I often wonder about the skills and abilities that will most benefit them going forward. If anything, I want my instruction to be the right tool at the right time to project my students into the future, ready to tackle novel situations that are dramatically different from the present. To go back to my experience and think about it metaphorical terms, I don’t want to tie my instruction to an encyclopedia when a computer is what is really needed. As a result, I have thought deeply about areas in which my students struggle and how my instruction can address those areas of need.
Participating in the The Illustrated Page seminar made me think closely about the relationship between image and text. When an image and text are brought together, my students have been trained to think that the image illustrates the text. In fact, many of the early literacy experiences that students have relate to reading a picture and writing about it, or illustrating what they have written. The novel direction that the The Illustrated Page addressed is to deeply consider the relationship between image and text pairs. It has caused me to stop and look more closely when text and images are paired together to think of the intention of the pairing. It has made me wonder, does the picture always have to be subservient to the text? Another question participating in the seminar has led me to wonder when I see an image and text pairing is: in what ways could an illustration complicate or even subvert the written text?
In thinking about the seminar content in relationship to the students that I teach, students need to be primed to interpret illustrations in a more critical way. The training that they have received in early literacy experiences, that the illustration and the text are equal partners that show the same thing, needs to be reexamined with students. They need to come to question that construct and begin to wonder about the role of an illustration when embedded within a text. In order to do this, my students will need explicit instruction in looking at images and art and considering the role that images play in creating meaning. This abstract thinking is not practiced with students.
Jean Piaget is considered to be the Father of Cognitive Development. The quote at the start of this unit espouses not only the goal of this unit, but one of the goals of my professional practice. Kids need to be taught in novel ways. The most exciting part about this is that my sixth graders are ready for this type of thinking. In considering child development, it is logical that my students struggle with considering abstract relationships and concepts. Thinking of Piaget’s Cognitive Stages of Development, my students are just entering the stage considered to be the Formal Operational Stage. According to Piaget, by this stage individuals are able to use symbols related to abstract concepts, to create hypotheses based on novel information, and to consider possibilities of actions or ideas. (2) Given that my students are just entering this developmental stage, it is critical that they are given the opportunity to build interpretative skills now that they are able to think in more complex and ambiguous ways.
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