"A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words"

     As a Literacy Facilitator, I have been trained to help children develop strategies for learning to read and write.  As I move forward in becoming a classroom teacher, I am realizing that literacy involves so much more than just strategies for becoming a proficient reader and techniques for writing.  This semester I initially questioned, why am I taking Art Methods for Teachers as a class?  Digging deeper into how children learn to read, I am starting to understand the benefits of drawing...or pictures...and art in a young child’s life.  

     In the January issue of Language Arts magazine, Drs. Jerome Harste and Gunther Kress discussed semiotics and children.  Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they are used.  Harste’s background is in elementary education, and inquiry-based learning. He spent many years researching what children ages three to six knew about reading and writing before they went to school.  His research sparked his interest in semiotics.  Kress’ background is in linguistics, but he noted that his interest was pique  when in his research he observed six and seven year olds, “that they took as much care with their images as they took with their writing.” He also comments that he observed when children are older, say ages 13-14, and studying science, it is not uncommon for a teacher to say, ‘Write down what you did and draw what you saw.’  Kress goes on to suggest that drawing an image causes deeper thinking. If a student is told by their teacher to “draw a cell with it’s nucleus on the board,” the child will have to ask, or will have had to learn, how big the nucleus is, and where in the cell it may be located.  Drawing may offer more detail than solely writing...’a cell has a nucleus.‘   

     In a second article I recently read on images, called The Writing behind Drawing: Lessons learned from my Kindergarten Class by Wing-Yee Hui (2011), Hui used her own classroom as a study for observing drawing as writing.  From Hui’s research she notes that displayed in Olshansky’s Artist/Writer Workshops (2008) young children intuitively understand the meaning of pictures long before they master reading and writing of words on paper. Hui discusses the Reggio Emilia teaching approach which values the art languages as the way children make their thinking visible.  The light bulb just clicked on in my brain!  THIS is why I am taking an art methods class.  Art is a tool for thinking!  It allows different perspectives to be shown, emotions to be felt, and for properties of the physical world to be connected on deeper levels!  Heading into a classroom as a teacher this fall, I will now restate my writing day manta.  I used to say, “this is writing time, not art class.” I believe I will now be quicker to say, “Tell me about your drawing” or “show me what you mean with a picture.”

      Hui continues and sites Kress where he found that children were able to construct meaning naturally and easily using multi-modal symbols (multi-modality).  Multi-modality in this sense would be combining the visual (drawing) with audio (oral story telling) about what is happening in the student drawings.  In my own experience, while studying Math Methods for Elementary Teachers last semester, we placed importance on not only needing to be able to explain in words what we were doing as we solved problems in our class. We also had to draw a picture in our notes and/or on the board, as a way to make sense of our problems, and solutions.  Therefore, I would stretch Kress’ comments that even in Math classes, we have students draw images as a way to clarify thought, and show deeper meaning.  

     In the Language Arts magazine article, Harste asks Kress his opinions on what classroom teachers should keep foremost in their minds when using images (visual literacy).  Kress responds that society, through its culture, expresses itself in many different ways.  As a future classroom teacher, it is my job and responsibility to allow each of my students to share with me all the ways they understand the topics we are studying.  

~ltk 

references: 

Harste, J.C. and Kress, G. (2012) Image, Identity, and Insights into Language. Language Arts, 89 (3) , 205-210.

Hui, W. (2011) The Writing behind Drawing: Lessons learned from my Kindergarten Class.  Journal of Classroom Research in Literacy, 4, 3-14. 

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