Kali Pawlak Pupik Dean EDUC 515 12.18.

12 Proposal for Final Inquiry Portfolio: Incorporating Visual Literacy into an English Classroom I. The Proliferation of My Topic of Inquiry My original plan for inquiry involved weaving in primary sources to a high school English course, providing students with tangible data and a visual experience that developed a sociocultural and historical context for the work of literature we would be studying. This original plan emerged after observing my Classroom Mentor (CM), Mrs. Moore, provide students with primary sources to introduce the social context of gender and class roles during Shakespeare's time before the class began reading Taming of the Shrew. However, these primary sources consisted of blog entries and articles from hardly credible sources that provided no citable or tangible historical data. It became clear to me that the understanding and inclusion of primary sources has seemingly become defunct in the classroom learning environment. The rich learning that stems from physically, visually, and emotionally connecting to historical artifacts to gain a preceding perspective and context on a piece of literature was reduced to merely studying a poorly written and hardly credibly blog post. In my Social Students Methods course, I received great inspiration to teach under the conceptual framework of utilizing the richness of primary sources, especially from the advice from Daniel F. Rulli (2003): [Primary sources] can easily be integrated into the curriculum, leads to larger issues, is relevant to students, has context that can be easily established, relates to other content areas, quickly covers a great deal of information, is legible, and allows investigating students to become historians, (378). Not only does including primary sources into a classroom allow students to make a more genuine connection with the content (by genuine I mean visually seeing historical realities through photography, reading peoples' emotions through journals, viewing a signed Constitution, etc),

but this also provides a great opportunity for inter-disciplinary study, making direct connections between the literature at hand and the historical context from which it came. I am a strong advocate for interdisciplinary learning; I completed two BA's from the University of Wisconsin in English and History, creating a combined thesis that took on historical criticism from studying the literature of the time period. By making literary studies an inclusive experience (including the historical data, music, art, and personal accounts from the time of its publication) students are able to get a more holistic understanding of social messages and lessons to be learned from the text. Thus, when I began my first take over unit for John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, I began the unit with a gallery walk of photographs taken during the Depression and Dustbowl Era. Each small group of students were responsible for filling out a Photograph Analysis Worksheet where they had to identify concrete objects from the photographs, make inferences about the photographs, and then create three inquiry questions that they were interested in exploring. From this exercise, students developed their own imaginative understanding and illustration of what life looked like in the time period that surrounded Of Mice and Men. Students exhibited sophisticated connections with the time period. By visually exploring a concrete third-person perspective of this era through photography, students were able to consider and digest the fear, the hopelessness, and the loneliness that enveloped the human experience of this time in history. I could not have asked for a better introduction to a novel, and I see the success of an exercise like this as twofold. One deals with a conceptual framework of education introduced by Noam Chomsky (2003):
Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves....clearly it requires that whatever it is you're looking at has to somehow catch people's interest and make them want to think and make them want to pursue and explore. And just regurgitating 'Good Books' is absolutely the worst way to do it that's just a way of turning people into automata. (27)

What my goal for teaching literature to students is evolving into is making sure my students grasp the human experiences that are being told, universal or not, and what there is to learn from these outside

perspectives. Showing students the visuals of human suffering that took place during Steinbeck's time of writing evoked compassion and a human desire to connect to the experience throughout the reading of the text rather than simply printing an article for them to read about unemployment rates and migrant workers. The other successful component of this exercise was its ability to captivate my students' multiple intelligences. Michael Nakkula (2006) states, ...Disengaged students can and will succeed in high school and college if provided with new and challenging activities, and nicely articulates the sincere motivation and attentiveness my students exhibited during that lesson (56). By stepping away from a class solely based on written materials, my students were able to explore a different process to learn, bringing them to a different level of reflection, analysis, and interdisciplinary connections. While the focus in an English class has traditionally been heavily dedicated towards building reading and writing skills, students' multiple intelligences and abilities to critically engage not just with the written word, but with the audio and visual too, must be acknowledged and rewarded. Furthermore, to solely conduct a class through reading and writing, I believe, is to ignore the contemporary world in which my students live. My focus has thus shifted from including primary sources in building literary context for my students to simply engaging students with different forms of media (many of these still being primary sources) to acknowledge the way in which my students primarily communicate and learn. One question that I struggle with is How can I meet the needs of students who, from birth have learned digitally and visually, in my English classroom? The need I am addressing here is what I find to be the most salient purpose of an English class: finding ways in which I can teach students to interpret and create language, whether it is written, oral, or visual, on multiplatforms (physical documents, digital articles, blogs, twitter, video, etc). Thus, my main question of inquiry I would like to introduce to my teaching experience is: How can moving beyond the written word by incorporating multi-media materials enhance students' skills with communication (expressing oneself) and analytical interpretations (expressing one's ideas about the content at hand)?

II. Rationale for Visual Literacy I am a currently a student teacher in the magnet program for North Central high school. NCHS prides itself in its diversity: 25% of the student body are first or second generation immigrants; the demographic breakdown is 40% black, 20% white, 20% Asian, and 20% latino; students are bussed in from all over the city, not just from the surrounding neighborhoods; and a wide array of socioeconomic representations are present. Speaking for the magnet program, the lack of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic tension is apparent in students' and teachers' daily fluid interactions with one another. In my classroom in particular, students' desks are in a cluster-style seating arrangement, where students are allowed to choose where they sit and with whom. There are no homogenous desk-groups in terms of race, ethnicity and gender; there seemingly exists a level of maturity in my students to navigate around cultural boundaries, collaborate willingly with different peers, and take risks with one another regardless of who their partner is or group members are. Interacting across racial and ethnic boundaries seems to have been embedded within their social interactions all of their lives. While many researchers focus their experience with urban education and the challenges that come along with it around racial and ethnic lines, my personal experience and challenges thus far at North Central high school has had little to do with race. Instead, I'd like to argue that where a disconnect occurs between the content and way in which it is taught and the realities of my students exists on a generational boundary line. Simply put, the antiquated methods of textbook and chalkboard teaching and learning styles enacted inside of the classroom are disjunct from the digital and visual way in which my students communicate and learn outside of the classroom. Ron Bleed (2005) presents research and statistics about this generation of learners that, ethically as a teacher, I cannot ignore:
Children age zero to six spend as much time playing with TV, computers, and video games as outside.

One in four children under age two has a TV in the bedroom. Video-game play has now surpassed both newspaper and magazine reading among young males and is at parity with print media consumtion among all Americans age 12 to 64. By age 21, the average student will have...sent or received 200,000 emails; talked for 10,000 hours on a cell phone; and read for under 5,000 hours, (3).

To me, to not teach towards this digital reality of not only urban students, but the general student of this generation, would be just as criminal as not acknowledging racial and ethnic diversity amongst students. As a majority of my learned conceptual frameworks at Penn heavily involve being sensitive towards differences in culture and race, I'd like to apply this research, but with a generational lens instead. Frederick Erickson (2004) emphasizes the importance of creating fluidity between cultural boundaries and stresses the importance of acknowledging where and why conflicts due to cultural differences may occur:
Sometimes social scientific notions of culture...have provided a justification for intergroup stereotypes...Teaching about the cultural practices of other people without stereotyping or misinterpreting them and teaching about one's own cultural practices without invidiously characterizing the practices of other people should be the aims of multicultural education, (45).

I believe there needs to be a space for dialogue between youth and adults on the different forms of communication proliferating in this tech-dependent society, where each side can understand the origins and benefits of both systems of communication. Thus, when a fact like The vocabulary of the average 14-year-old dropped from 25,000 words in 1950 to only 10,000 words in 1999, there will be an interest in how and why this change has occurred rather than outrage and chalking this generation up to be apathetic and unintelligent (Bleed, 3). It is not that this generation is losing the tools (in this case, vocabulary) to communicate, they are simply finding different tools to do so, and there frankly needs to be an awareness on people of other generations to acknowledge and respect these different modes of communication. I think there is a direct connection between the power struggles of race and generation. Where Joe Kincheloe (2007) states about the racial power struggle in education, As the urban becomes more

and more a signifier of the non-white, immigrant, non-English speaking, globalized disaporic world's intrusion on 'the West,' the more the need for Disney's nineteenth century middle-American (white) Celebration community, I argue the same thing is happening with the ways in which youth are digitally and visually communicating today (11). I think there exists an unexamined fear amongst an older generation that reading a text and articulation through writing is going to be replaced by a tweeted literary criticism limited to 144-words-or-less. Schools are resisting this reality and are trying to keep the classrooms normalized in the pre-digital age, as if the digitalization of information and communication is ruining the nostalgia of classic pen-and-paper learning. Vygotsky stresses the importance of meeting students' ZPD for a fluid and effective learning experience, as Nakkula describes using a students' ZPD for optimal learning as almost a skilled balancing act on the teacher's part: In short, we must know where [students] are coming from before we can hope to take them where we want to go, (11). For me, incorporating the digitalized realities of students into the classroom would be doing just that. It is my goal to incorporate images, videos, social networking into the learning processes of analysis and critical thought. I firmly believe that by meeting with students in the middle, balancing between their worlds outside of the classroom and what they are expected to learn inside of the classroom, would promote optimal learning. I would like to create what many educational scholars consider a third-space, where state standards in terms of reading and writing skills and the skills my students express outside of the classroom can become a co-authorship. Thus, my working theory is going to primarily focus on promoting visual literacy in the classroom, connecting the student's ability to critically examine something like a photograph or a youtube video to critically examining a passage in a novel. Where I see many students struggling in their writing is with connecting their ideas about a text to supporting their ideas with textual evidence. Visual literacy should help with this skill, as students will be able to physically point to evidence in a photograph or video that can support their idea on the issue. Examining a piece of artwork or film is directly relatable to examining a piece of literature; it is becoming clear to me that with my students,

however, I must develop these skills within their ZPD of the digital and visual before moving them into a more foreign media such as a novel. A great example of this is how I have introduced the literary element of tone to my students. Rather than handing my students a list of tone words and asking them to apply these words to passages from To Kill a Mockingbird, I developed their vocabulary with and understanding of tone first with photography like Zoe Strauss' (2001) Cynthia and music videos like Joy Division's (1979) Love Will Tear Us Apart. Not only were students excited to discuss art and music in class, but they were also able to point to specific things about the photograph or the song that led them to identify the tone of the piece. After about a week of building their vocabulary of words for tone and confidence with identifying tone, we started to apply this to passages from To Kill a Mockingbird. Not only were students able to move past the simple positive and negative tone words common with beginners, but they were also able to directly identify the diction and syntax of the sentence that led them to evaluating the tone of the passage. Howard Gardner's (2008) idea that, Any person who understands a topic well can represent it in a number of ways, offers me affirmation to differentiate my teaching and assessment for my different learners (188). One concern I can foresee myself constantly struggling with in including non-traditional and modern forms of media in the classroom is keeping control of student engagement. Thus, I constantly ask myself: How can I not only convince adult administration that multi-media learning is serious and just as fruitful as the study of a novel, but also how can I convince students that this fun learning is serious learning? Another concern I will continue to address through this inquiry is how this will be preparing my students for the contemporary work force. Nakkula claims that skill development in adolescence requires a knowledgable support network and realistic connections for future planning (69). Most of my generational peers have jobs that are digitally dependent, thus requiring a need to communicate and interpret digitally; to ignore this these employment trends by not building skills for different forms of communicating would be detrimental to my students' school-to-career transition.

Where Nakkula states, For many students in large public high schools, however, the links between school and work or career seem irrelevant, disconnected from the realities they see around them, I find incorporating media studies in an English class as a great way to create a fluid school-to-career transition (235). The purpose of this inquiry is not only to make learning relevant in their lives but also to build skills for their future employment. Furthermore, this inquiry will be ongoing and changing for as long as ways of communication and expression are subject to change. As a teacher entering in the field, I can foresee myself constantly reassessing what is relevant with my students in terms of styles of learning and communicating. I sincerely believe that to ignore these changes is to create a dead-end learning experience for students. If classroom environments enact an open-door policy between the school and the students' contemporary realities, it allows students to develop pride and a desire to contribute to it rather than flee from it. I like the discussion Kincheloe (2007) has at the end of his article, where he describes the difference of life and death in the classroom:
Eros (the life impulse) and thanatos (the death impulse) and the way they circulate within both the larger social order and the individual subconscious. The right-wing standardized curriculum is a thanocentric form of education that fears eros and the sensuality it implies. This thanocentric curriculum not only kills the motivation of our urban students to learn, it kills the desire of teachers to teach, (30).

While there are many ways a teacher can breathe the life impulse into her classroom, I feel, especially with my teaching experiences thus far, that it starts with getting to know and open up to one's students, school, and community and creating opportunities for students to explore different modes of learning and communication.

Works Consulted Bleed, R. (2005). Visual Literacy in Higher Education. Retrieved from Educause Learning Initiative, Maricopa Community Colleges. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli4001.pdf Chomsky, N. (2003). The Function of Schools: Subtler and Cruder Methods of Control. In K.J. Saltman & D.A. Gabbard (Eds.) Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools. New York, NY: Routledge. Erickson, F. (2004) Culture in Society and in Educational Practices. In J.A. Banks & C. Banks (Eds.) Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives. 5th Ed. Hoboken, NJ: Bass. Gardner, H. (2008). Multiple Intelligences in Adolescence. In M. Sadowski (Ed.), Adolescents at School (185-189). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2007). Introduction: City Kids - Not the Kind of Student You'd Want to Teach. In J. Kincheloe & K. Hayes (Eds.) Teaching City Kids: Understanding and Appreciating Them. NY: Peter Lang. Nakkula, Michael. (2006). Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development For Educators. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press. Rulli, D.F. (2003) Big and Fmous is Not Always the Best: Guidelines for Selecting Teachable Documents. Social Education (67.7), pp. 378-380.