Teaching Strategies
Image Annotation
English teachers know the importance of teaching their students to annotate texts, especially those challenged with literacy or critical reading skills. More advanced readers still benefit from the process as it encourages them to do more with challenging texts or find subtleties in their usual reading practice. Whenever possible I give my students a copy they can write on and keep to refer back to. When I teach my students to annotate a text, I pull out examples from my shelves and files, where I have asked questions, illustrated something, agreed or disagreed with the author or text. I might find an exclamation point or angry face. Different colors of ink may have significance in a text I find especially challenging. There are endless possibilities for the ways in which a reader may interact with a text. To begin, I tell them to mark key words or terms; write brief definitions for words they don’t know; react emotionally; seek patterns (especially in poetry or argument) and discrepancies; ask and answer questions of the text; trace lists or processes. What they should not do is use one single highlighter to mark a text. When they have systems, such as circling and underlining for separate purposes or creating their own notations systems, they have to make critical decisions about the text using additional parts of the brain, making them far more likely not only to recall but to make sense and meaning of what they have read.
The same processes may be used to annotate an image. Because I have small classes, I am able to print color copies of images we use. A larger class or group could also do this activity with an interactive smartboard though intimate, personal interaction with the text would be lessened.
With pencil—or whatever—in hand, students can study an image with the same intensity as a text, by asking questions, making lists, contemplating color—or lack of it, questioning facial expressions, style, or empty space. Facing an image with the intention of interacting physically with it almost forces the viewer to seek details he/she would have missed otherwise.
Visual reading
This drawing strategy will be a nice break for some students and a very effective reading strategy for my more struggling readers. Drawing key elements or figures from a poem (or other text) forces a reader to create mental images. The first benefit is that the words take on meaning. The second is that the reader now has an image to do the action in her head through the rest of the story. I have learned that many of my readers are not able yet to visualize a text mentally as it plays out on the page, so they miss the visual hooks that help them retain the words and information they read. The act of drawing forces students to visualize imagery, setting, character, and action. After drawing the images as they see them, they can turn around and describe them again, this time with their own word choices, adding layered and more individualized understanding of the scene or character. How are their word choices different from the writer’s? What is the text image saying to them? I’ll use this strategy to introduce a few of Plath’s stanzas. While we study metaphor, we could do this activity, reducing the text only to a comparison.
Turning the Tables
To put what we’ve learned about ekphrasis and confessional poetry to use, we will turn the tables to look at paintings created by artists suffering from depression or other mental illness. We will speculate how and whether or not their mental health status influences their work as we speculated it did with Sexton, Lowell, and Plath. In the paintings I’ve chosen there is depth of emotion, genius, and often raw accessibility. They range from well-known painters like Van Gogh to the new and far less renowned like George Harding. It may be that my students will want to spend time looking for their own inspiring works of art. Turning the tables this time and starting with an image alone, we’ll use activities like image annotation and brainstorming prompts (including some from units by Fellows in this seminar) to create, revise, and publish our own ekphrastic poems. I’m starting with five possible paintings, all of which can be found through google: a self-portrait by George Harding; Bedroom at Arles by Vincent Van Gogh; Self-Portrait with Easel by Otto Dix; When Are You Getting Married by Paul Gauguin; and finally, a seemingly untitled painting of two red figures chained in a blue room by Kim Noble.
The Scream by Edward Munch is a possibility, but it lacks the ambiguity of the others.
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