There are many ways in which people have described or categorised the use of images to support learning and I want to see if my catogrisationsfor the use of images in literacy match with any others.
Becta’s description of the use of images in RE focuses around reflection and understanding and lists
support for concept development as well as knowledge and understanding – a prompt to encourage research into all aspects of a topic
stimulus to help pupils to identify feelings, emotions and mood, and to respond to these in appropriate ways
a point of interest and focus to inspire discussion of a topic, enabling pupils to interact, respond appropriately and create their own responses
a stimulus for writing to task and bearing an audience in mind, therefore enhancing creative and language skills
support for individual, paired and small group work, and therefore fostering collaboration and the sharing of a learning experience between pupils while also developing their ICT skills
a lead into follow-up tasks – researching and sourcing other images relevant to the religion, concept or theme being explored.
The links with literacy are met mostly through the first bullet point.
The nrich sitefor maths discusses the use of images as being internal and external and here there are many links with literacy. Both readers and writers use images. Readers create them in their heads when reading and writers describe the images in their heads when writing (visualising). In order to show children this, we have to externalise those images at first to show how to work with them and then children can use them internally.
Inspirations, the company that produces Kidspiration, the mind-mapping tool, categorises using images to:
Make abstract ideas visible and concrete (making literary techniques visible)
Connect prior knowledge and new concepts
Provide structure for thinking, writing, discussing, analyzing, planning and reporting (sequencing and structuring)
Focus thoughts and ideas, leading to understanding and interpretation (attention to intention)
This resonates very strongly with the categorisations for literacy. We may use different language but mean the same things. Our words are in brackets.
We have catgorised the use of ICT to learn (as opposed to learning to use ICT) as being bringing the outside in or the inside out. It sounds like the hokey cokey but is a way of trying to explain the role images play in learning.
What does bringing the outside in and the inside out mean?
Bringing the outside in can be as simple as going on a trip and bringing the images back to use as a memory jogger back in the classroom. It can also be a search on the internet to find some information to bring back and share with the class. But bringing the outside in can also be taking new information in and adding it to your schema or understanding.
Bringing the inside out can be a concrete experience such as creating a film on Moviemaker which shows what you understand about the theme of a poetry or novel. Here the images are used to help explain, structure and describe a child’s thinking. Other words that could be used to describe these process are internalise and externalise.
What does it look like in practice?
These two do not usually work in isolation but form a circle of one leading into the other. As an example a work of art was shared with a class of reception children. They studied it carefully, explaining everything that they could see and what they thought the story behind it might be. This would be using talk and an image to bring the outside in - internalising an understanding of the image.
A group of children then went outside and using materials chosen by themselves created their own version of the picture. This is externalising or bringing the inside out. The children asked an adult to take a photograph of their creation and showed this on the interactive whiteboard and the whole class discussed how accurately they had created the image. Here the use of the photograph to discuss accuracy of creation was reinforcement of their understanding and was used as an outside in or internalising.
The whole class then looked at the image and compared the two. Here in looking and describing the image the children have
A writer wants to convey or create images in the reader’s mind. In fiction this image is the writer’s creation which can be conjured up in the reader using any number of devices. In non-fiction it is not an imagined image which is being conveyed but an actual image. When writing a non-chronological report about tigers and their conservation it is not enough to describe the image in the writer’s head. It must be accurate and the language and devices used must be to convey clarity and precision. It must also out of necessity be technical.
In fiction an activity freqeuntly used it to take a piece of text, even that which is well written, and look at word choice and offer alternatives that could be used. In a piece of well written non-fiction this activity is almost impossible. To say that a bird ’swoops’ when it siezes prey should describe exactly the shape of the flight path taken by the bird and also conveys something about the speed of it. It would be hard to replace this word with any other that so precisely describes both aspects. If the word ‘dives’ were used it would bring an image of a different flight path and speed.
To support non-fiction writing it is therefore essential that we use first-hand experiences but also capture images to help us describe what we see accurately. These images may be still or moving depending upon what is being written about.
The purpose of the image is to be able to look at it again and again to find the exact words that can be used to describe precisely so that the reader can ’see’ the object, process, activity with clarity. For example in instrucions you may say something such as ‘Whisk the batter until it has the consistency of thick milk.’ The addition of the batter’s consistency helps the maker of the batter to be really clear about what their batter should look like and implicit in it is the fact that there are no lumps. Children do not always include this type of detail in their writing and so we need to use images to revisit the experience to draw out the particular type of language needed.
One of the most successful activities to develop this type of language is to use the phrase ’say what you see’. Children could look at a picture and be given a short amount of time to jot down what they can see in the picture to describe it. The teacher can then intervene and take the children on a journey around the picture asking questions – how could you describe the……, what shape are they making, look at the …….., could you use a simile here to say what this looks like, what pattern would you call this ? The children can then look again at the picture and spend 3 or 4 minutes jotting down further phrases. The time element (or lack of it) is important here as it creates a tension which produces unusual combinations which can be played with later. Words and phrases can be shared and a zone of relevance can be used to plot the examples.
A zone of relevance is a series of concentric circles arranged to look like a bulls-eye target. The bulls-eye has the highest relevance which decreases as you move out. A part of the image is chosen such as the way the tiger moves when hunting and all the words and phrases for that are measured for clarity and precision and are placed in the circles with the best on the bulls-eye.
Visual literacy is a necessary part of life nowadays. It stands alone as an area in its own right but it can also be used to support the teaching and learning of reading and writing. This post is an attempt to describe how we do that. We:-
use images to support understanding of literary techniques, e.g. putting title slides in a film that has been run through Moviemaker to show where there would be paragraph changes if it was a written text
use images to demonstrate understanding, e.g. collecting a group ofimages that reflect the meaning of a poem or the theme of a story (focus on images that show not tell)
use images to support memory and create a shared understanding, e.g this is most frequently used after a trip or a visitor to the classroom
use images to suppport vocabulary development, watch the film for an example of this
use images to support understanding of text structure, e.g. through sequencing activities which can develop to show flash backs and other time management techniques
use images to help create the message for the reader, e.g. choice of image in a persuasive text or an explanatory text
