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.

Gracie the Cat: A Visual Essay

Prologue

Gracie is curious. “What’s to come?” she wonders.

She doesn’t know.




















Chapter 1

Gracie looks around. “Where am I?” she ponders.

The world looks different here.

Chapter 2

Gracie purrs from atop the table. “No, bad Gracie!”

That is not where she belongs.
























Chapter 3

Gracie gets off the table. But where did she go?

The world looks different again.

Chapter 4

Gracie sees her reflection. “Who are you?” they all want to know.

That is easy to ask.

Epilogue

Gracie decided. “But what is next?” she wonders.

The world will tell her.

Confessions of a Former Blog-Fearer

At the beginning of our program, I would’ve definitely identified as being hesitant and skeptical about integrating “Technology” into my English classroom. I doubted how realistic it would be, given issues of access, time, and money, and I questioned my own ability to use whatever said “Technology” there was to incorporate. Plus, I had never been in a classroom that actually used any sort of "Technology," save word processing, surfing the internet, or watching a movie, so I couldn’t really even imagine what a class like that might look like.

Oh, how times have changed.

Well, to be honest, I still have moments of doubt. But when I read Beach’s article this week, there was no ignoring the fact that I was all into it and tried to figure out how I might have my students at North use blogs during my student teaching. I never saw it coming: I’m excited about blogs.

The American Literature class described in the article devoted one class day a week to writing in and responding to blogs during class, and that seems like a really good schedule to use. That way, students who really don’t have access to the internet at other times have a solid hour each week, but it doesn’t bog down the rest of the class. Plus, it seemed like students were talking about their blogs and comments as they were working, and that seems great. If blogs are completely an out-of-school task, it seems we run the risk of having them be a completely separate and detached part of the class (WebCT, anyone?). That’s one part of this Teaching Writing class that is modeled particularly well, I think—we write blogs outside of class each week, but we devote some class time to discussing them by highlighting the “blog of the week” and some cool links. As with any type of "Technology," (sorry if that's getting annoying) it seems to work best if it’s built into the class rather than an extra part, just one more thing to do.

I think I’ll still need a lot of help to envision successful units and lessons that successfully incorporate “Technology,” (last time, I swear) but it doesn’t seem so scary anymore. I’m convinced that there definitely are benefits to be gained—especially student engagement, if it’s done correctly—by using digital writing, but maybe even more than that, I think we have a responsibility to include it in our classrooms because it’s such a part of life now. It’s just as an important skill as any other kind of writing, and maybe even more important in some aspects.

In keeping with the blog theme of this blog post, my resource link for this week is called The English Teacher Blog. It almost didn’t make the cut for my resource link, because really, who among us needs one more thing to read. But, I just spent a couple minutes browsing around on it, and it just seemed really relevant—so I went with it. The posts are clearly organized into categories, each post is fairly short, and many entries include practical suggestions for lesson plans and other activities. Plus, I found this gem: the Educational Jargon Generator. Jargon is funny to me because it's made of the kind of words that take themselves too seriously—and they’re the kind of words that people who take themselves too seriously love to hear.