Abalastow Compendium

Sometimes teachers have their students do the strangest things... check out Abalastow Compendium, for example. Weird.

My BWCA Experience

Visual Essay: Reflection

When I first sat down to do this mini-project, I didn't do anything for about 10 minutes. I usually can just jump right into things, so that got me wondering-- why is this so hard? I thought I was starting to get the hang of this visual literacy stuff! But then it dawned on me: I didn't know what my essay was going to be about. Before I could search for images, I needed to know what I wanted to say. Once I pinned down what I wanted my essay to portray, I sprang into action. I'm curious how other people approached this assignment, though: what do people's "pre-writing" stages look like when working with visual texts?

However, once I decided on my essay, I think I may have gone about it in the wrong way, because I included words. I just didn't feel like the images were explicit about what they were portraying-- and, actually, I'm not sure it's any clearer with the added text, because I don't ever let the audience in on what inspired me in the first place. Creating this was actually kind of fun for me, but I think it was more of a personal experimentation more than anything else-- more attune to a diary entry than a 5-paragraph essay, you could say. I think it would've been helpful for me to view other examples of visual essays as I was creating my own, just because I wasn't sure what the end product could/should look like. More and more, I'm becoming convinced that literacy is interactive-- using examples of other peoples' texts as models, inspiration, and critical thinking adds so much to my personal experience with literacy.