MY USE OF VISUAL RHETORIC
FLICKR SLIDESHOW
VOICETHREAD
Throughout this series of images spanning across the campuses of Castle Elementary School and the University of Minnesota TC, it was my attempt to express to the viewer my overall development in both the physical (e.g., height, body, maturity...) and non-physical (e.g., intellectual, mental, psychological, emotional...) domains.
To accomplish this purpose, I started by visiting the neighborhood elementary school where I was a former student in Mrs. Tonn's 5th grade class nearly 16 years ago. To establish a clear sense of physical development, I decided to utilize a sort of visual contrastive technique, sharply contrasting my current height / size / weight as a 25 year old male with the surrounding furnishings scaled to the sizes of the school's smaller, younger students. Although this contrast expresses a sense of growth via what the viewer can explicitly see (e.g., the appearance of my current self contrasted with my past surroundings), this contrast also expresses a sense of growth as the viewer is encouraged to visualize what is not necessarily present on the page; my physical appearance as an actual elementary student in the SAME setting 16 years ago. This overall contrast is then possibly further emphasized in the viewer's mind's eye as a constructed image of a short, small elementary student is contrasted with the image of the 25 year old man visible on the page.
Establishing a clear sense of abstract, non-physical growth was a bit more difficult. However, I decided to rely on the same visual contrastive technique to do so. As an initial point of reference, I captured images expressing what I believe to be overt, almost manufactured, senses of simplicity, routine, and structure inherent to the life of an elementary school student (e.g., the overt displays of children's literature, rules, and school policies). I then contrast this initial point of reference by using images captured of the UofM's TC campus expressing what I believe to be an overt sense of "bigness," as well as more covert senses of drastically diminished structure, rules, guidance, and so on. As the viewer experiences these contrasts across the two campuses, the implied meanings are that I no longer have overt rules and expectations "laid out" for me; instead, it is now MY responsibility to successfully navigate my world and figure them out on my own.
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STUDENTS' USE OF VISUAL RHETORIC
Although I feel as though our Flickr activity due for today is a great way to have students explore visual rhetoric by CREATING a piece of their own, I feel as though some initial scaffolding may be necessary before students will be able to take on such a creative project. Before I continue, what does everyone else thing about this? Would jumping right to this type of project be unwise? Or do you think students could "handle" it right away?
To start, I personally would bring in textual, visual, and or video texts including product / service advertisements, book / magazine covers, movie posters / trailers, and so on to begin identifying elements of visual rhetoric, analyzing them, and exploring HOW they are used to express certain intended meanings and purposes. After students have had some practice with deconstructing texts OTHERS have created, they could then begin to CREATE texts themselves, ranging across all the aforementioned, and more, multi-modal texts.
Students could then write an accompanying reflective piece identifying and analyzing...
1.)Their intended meaning(s) / purpose(s).
2.) HOW their use of images helps achieve these intended meaning(s) / purpose(s).
As far as specific CREATIVE activities, I think it would be very interesting to have students respond to a unit's essential question(s) via images. For example, if your unit's essential question is something like "Which is stronger, love or hate?" students could respond by collecting Flickr images, other online images, or their own images to provide some sort of tentative argument. For example, in the context of this particular question, students could find old images of their grandparent's wedding day, people doing altruistic things, and so on to represent love, and / or images of war, discrimination, and so on to represent hate. Students could then either reflect on these images individually or compile them into a slide show, later reflecting specifically on HOW the image(s) use specific elements of visual rhetoric to respond to the unit's essential question.
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1 comment:
Rick, although it seems simple, you gave me some good perspective by discussing how the students can use Flickr. For whatever reason, my mindset all along was, "How can I create something on Flickr for students to access", instead of, "For what type of assignment would Flickr be useful for students?". So thank you for that.
I teach AP Language, and being able to interpret visual rhetoric is becoming a bigger part of that class, and your blog post has helped me see the useful of these tools in creating those types of assignments for my students.
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