Shirley Brice Heath

VISION FOR LEARNING: HISTORY, THEORY AND AFFIRMATION

SEEING, THINKING AND SAYING

"All visual art forms push interpreters towards some sense of connection and completion"

"…the viewer of a painting, dance or drama becomes an agent in interaction with the work of art" (Turner, 2006).

- children learn to see, do and be

** "…learning challenges have to be met through honing the powers of attentiveness, memory storage, and capacity to connect, correlate, and conceptualise with appropriate relevance."

- the more the viewer is asked to engage and participate with the material, the more they connect and store new information

"…the mental visual activity that we consider essential to 'thinking', 'understanding', or 'enabling' relies on attending and acting, seeing and doing. In other words, we have to play along in order to know."

"Images do not simply give us representations of the world. They are the foundation of our understanding of ourselves as thinkers and as players - ever moving between realism and fantasy, across contexts and continuities." (Kress, 2004).

Oil'd - Chris Harmon

Oil'd from Chris Harmon on Vimeo.

BBC Knowledge - video

Great animation using graphics to support information

BBC KNOWLEDGE 60 from iamrader on Vimeo.

Infographics as creative assessment

Infographics as a Creative Assessment from Kathy Schrock on Vimeo.

Holistic Learning

POETRY AND MUSIC AS COLOURS OF THE WORLD

http://www.eqa.edu.au/site/poetryandmusicascolours.html

Holistic and interdisciplinary learning, long understood as central to early years education, has gained support in all levels of education through explicit recognition in state curriculum standards throughout Australia. Schools now strive to meaningfully balance the lifelong learning needs of children and young adults, including the development of positive values, personal and social skills, cross-curriculum skills, and discipline-based knowledge. In this educational climate, the arts provide significant ways of knowing that support integrated, student-centred and authentic learning (Hunter, 2005).

There is currently considerable scholarly support that links student ‘engagement’ with arts practices that encourage student motivation, active participation, heightened awareness and animation, deep thinking strategies and expressions of enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity and emotional connection. Engagement with the arts is considered in terms of ‘flow’ or optimal experience and as an attitude, or way of seeing the world. Through arts participation, children not only acquire arts knowledge and skills but also develop personal and social capacities, positive attitudes to learning, enhanced literacy and numeracy outcomes and improve a range of generic competencies, including problem-solving and communication skills (Hunter, 2005).

David Whitehead

Framing thought: literacy and thinking tools

Creating order of our thoughts and the information we uncover is critical for all writers. David Whitehead believes that students cannot turn their minds to higher order thinking without the help of tools that give power to their thoughts. Here he explains how one such thinking tool, the Concept Frame, can benefit students.

Literacy and thinking tools are construction tools for the mind. Just as carpenters use tools to construct furniture, literate thinkers use tools to construct new understandings. Just as a screwdriver is built to slot into the head of a screw and rotate it, so too literacy and thinking tools are built for task-specific purposes. Carpenters use more or less sophisticated screwdrivers (ratchet, magnetic, automatic loading) depending on their ability and the specific demands of the task; students, too, can use developmentally appropriate tools for different challenges.

From theory to practice

Consider the following scenario. Josephine, Grade 3, draws a Level 1 Concept Frame tool (see Figure 1) and lists words about birds under each heading. She discusses the frame with her teacher, who reminds her to list additional words as she learns more about birds.

The teacher then models how Josephine might use her Concept Frame to write a bird report, and makes a mental note to introduce her to a Level 2 Concept Frame tool in the near future.

The next time Josephine makes notes while reading, she will use a Concept Frame tool to help her learn; a tool she can now name and knows how and when to use.

Four selection criteria

The selection of a literacy and thinking tool such as the Concept Frame is based on theoretically embedded criteria. Let’s look at the four most important of these in more detail.

1. Teaching/teacher or learning/learner focused

Firstly, we should be able to identify literacy and thinking tools as either teaching tools or learning tools. Some tools will always be teaching tools, while others, like the Concept Frame, are designed as learning tools (although they might be introduced as teaching tools). Both teaching and learning tools can be designed to achieve deliberate and purposeful outcomes with texts, but only learning tools are designed to help students independently achieve strategic outcomes with texts. If a teacher’s objective is to help students acquire subject-specific vocabulary, then simple teaching tools (games and activities) such as matching a list of words to their definitions are useful. But, if the teacher’s objective is to help students become independent literate thinkers, then the emphasis must be on the acquisition of learning tools.

Learning tools equip students for lifelong learning. The difference between teaching and learning tools is, therefore, like the Chinese proverb: Give a family a fish and they will eat for a day; give them a fishing line and they will eat for a lifetime. Teaching tools are like fish; learning tools are like fishing lines.

2. Text-linked

The second criterion acknowledges the relationship between text-types and specific tools. The criterion states that if a tool evokes the same type of thinking as is required to read, write or talk—a report text, for example—then that tool is probably best used when students read, write or talk reports.

The Concept Frame tool is consistent with this text-linked criterion. This tool helps students write report texts because it evokes attribute thinking—students are prompted to list the attributes of objects, events or ideas. In turn, report texts represent the outcome of attribute thinking—they too classify and list the attributes of some thing. Given that both the Concept Frame tool and report texts evoke similar types of thinking, they should probably be used together.

The Concept Frame tool is designed to help students write report texts because different parts of the Concept Frame (see Figure 1) reflect some of the typical linguistic features of this genre. One feature, usually found at the beginning of a report, classifies the topic: Birds are animals that fly. Students can use information from the un-shaded sector of the Concept Frame to write this part of a report.

Next, students can use information in the shaded sectors of the Concept Frame to write the body of their reports. This information might be written as a simple sentence: Birds can chirp. Or, it may be formed into paragraphs that reflect deeper understandings: Different birds have different sounding chirps. They also have different reasons for chirping. Birds chirp to attract a mate. Chirping is also a way to tell other birds to keep away.

3. Brain-friendly

The third criterion is that literacy and thinking tools should be brain-friendly. That is, they should align with how the brain naturally learns (Wolfe, 2001).

The Concept Frame tool works in a brain-friendly fashion because it reflects our innate ability to store direct experiences as concepts. In support of this finding, evolutionary psychologists note that in every human society, people classify plants and animals into species-like groups.

Many psychologists suggest that the brain stores concepts in the form of connected ‘meaning nodes’ (Blaut et al, 2003). These meaningful connections are, literally, networks of nerves for storing what you know—for storing concepts. Because the Concept Frame reflects the way concepts might be stored in these networks, it can be thought of as brain-friendly. The tool does not ask the brain to do something unnatural in order to learn.

4. Developmentally appropriate characteristics

The ‘developmentally appropriate’ criterion aligns with the need for differentiated instruction and for the design of a seamless K–13 curriculum of tools. Developmentally appropriate tools align with students’ intellectual development and experience.

Level 1 tools probably best suit students in grades 1–3 or students using literacy and thinking tools for the first time. Level 2 tools are designed to challenge the thinking of students in grades 4–8 and should suit students who can already use Level 1 tools confidently and independently. Level 3 tools are designed for use in the secondary school or for gifted and talented students, who will probably begin to use a range of tools in combination.

What these three levels do not assume is that grade-level should determine which tool students should use. If students in grade 3 are ready developmentally, they should use Level 2 rather than Level 1 tools. While developmentally appropriate tools provide challenge levels designed to guide teachers in their planning, the levels should never deny students opportunities to think.

For example, a Level 1 Concept Frame (see Figure 1) can be used as a text-linked pre-writing tool to assess and record prior learning as students use each sector of the completed frame to write simple pattern sentences: A bird can …, A bird has …, A bird is …, An example of a bird is …, or a more complete report text.

Level 2 Concept Frames

Level 2 Concept Frames require students to order the information they have put in each sector of the frame. This order will be reflected in the structure of their report text. They might also decide that some information is redundant or irrelevant and signal this with an X beside the word (see Figure 2).

Level 3 Concept Frames

Level 3 Concept Frames require students to generate additional ideas by using the words in the ‘Examples’ sector to construct questions (see bottom right-hand sector in Figure 3).

Students begin with the name of a bird listed in the ‘Examples’ sector, such as ‘eagle’, and add a sector header word (‘is’, ‘are’, ‘can’, or ‘has’) to ‘eagle’ to construct their question. For example, An eagle is …?, or Eagles can …?or An eagle has …?

Then, students record the words that complete the question in the appropriate sector of the Concept Frame. For example, Eagles can … catch rabbits, so ‘catch rabbits’ would be recorded in the ‘can’ sector of the Concept Frame (see point 6 ‘Catch rabbits’ under the heading ‘Can’ in Figure 3).

Level 3 Concept Frames also require students to group information. Figure 3 illustrates how groups have been made for ‘bad’ things birds can do, and for examples of birds that are ‘meat eaters’ and ‘grain eaters’.

The reward

As the developmentally

appropriate criterion reminds us, the selection of literacy and thinking tools should result in tools at three levels of challenge suited to the needs of students.

The four selection criteria provide some basis on which to select literacy and thinking tools. The use of these tools as an integral component of a classroom program should be prized. Not only does the application of thinking and literacy tools such as Concept Frames lead to attractive destinations, but the journey towards these understandings becomes extremely satisfying and motivating for teacher and learner alike.

References

Blaut, J et al (2003). ‘Mapping as a cultural and cognitive universal’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93, 1, 165–185.

Whitehead, D (2001) & (2004). Top Tools for Literacy and Learning, Pearson Education, Auckland.

Wolfe, P (2001). Brain Matters: Translating the research to classroom practice, ASCD, Alexandria, Virginia.

David Whitehead is a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Carmel Young - USYD

Charting historical understanding

The big question confronting us in history education today lies in reconciling and balancing learners’ versions of the past with the ‘official’ histories they encounter in syllabuses, textbooks and classrooms, writes CARMEL YOUNG.

The last 20 years have seen a veritable explosion of international research into the teaching and learning of history in primary and secondary schools. As a result, we have a much clearer understanding of how young people learn about the past, the settings in which historical understanding flourishes and what engaging history teaching and learning looks like.

Research tells us that young people gain their knowledge about the past from a vast array of sources that include the media, commemorative events, film, historical fiction, computer games and family and community memories. Family and community histories are perhaps the most powerful of these sources because of the way in which they shape the learner’s own story and social identity. As such, ‘my story’ must be seen as the first step towards building historical understanding. The diagram below illustrates how starting with prior knowledge builds on and out from young people’s experiences, connecting them with the living memories of others and the distant past. Teaching in this way helps the learner develop an increasingly complex sense of the historical landscape by moving across time, visiting different people and places, and comparing and contrasting their own and others’ experiences. The diagram also suggests that tailoring history teaching through learners’ eyes positions their engagement with the past in the social world of the community and local area, and should involve them in working intensively with the visual, oral, auditory and physical dimensions of history.

While ‘my story’ is a powerful place from which to build historical understanding, good history teaching and learning also entails knowing and representing history as a unique form of knowledge with its own content, procedures, and ways of defining human experience. This means that history should be presented as a constructed and social activity that involves learners in working with the raw materials of the past and the historian’s tools, questioning, analysing and interpreting historical relics to gather evidence about past circumstances and players. These types of activities assist young people to appreciate the problematic nature of historical interpretation, and that many competing versions of the past exist. In addition, they gain a sense of history-making as a speculative and imaginative process that entails linking evidence, bridging evidential gaps, spinning theories and supporting and communicating these theories in a range of media.

Integrating learners’ prior knowledge with a disciplinary approach to history teaching builds a relevant context and scaffold for furthering historical learning and inquiry. Indeed, research suggests that such an approach not only constructs bridges between current understandings and new subject matter, but challenges learners to reflect on strengths, limitations and reliability of their own memories and viewpoints. In other words, productive history teaching and learning lies at the interface between ‘vernacular’ histories or the lived experiences of the child and the curriculum documents that we interpret on a daily basis. Keeping the learner as the focus for our activities actually challenges us to think about key issues in history teaching and learning: the significance or otherwise of subject matter, ways of connecting prior and new learning, and how we effectively model historical inquiry for particular groups of learners. Starting with the learner is the first and perhaps most important step to creating a supportive context for building historical understanding.

Research indicates that historical understanding begins with the learner’s own story. This diagram suggests how teachers can build effectively on and out from young people’s personal experiences to incorporate new subject matter, extend their understanding of time and chronology, utilise a wide range of source materials and involve learners in reconstructing the past. The diagram emphasises the importance of:

• Regarding the child’s personal prior knowledge as primary building blocks in the teaching learning process. Commencing and returning to the known allows them to reflect on the strengths, limitations and reliability of their own memories and experiences
• Learners developing a complex picture of the past by moving in, out and revisiting different times and places
• Learners engaging with multiple sources and representations of the past.

Carmel Young is a lecturer in history education, School of Policy and Practice, University of Sydney.

Maureen Walsh

Autumn 2004

Talking English

Literacy in the age of technology

http://www.eqa.edu.au/site/literacyintheageof.html

MAUREEN WALSH gives an overview of some of the literature on the paradigm shift in the teaching and learning of literacy with students who regard SMS messages and MP3 downloads as a part of life.

The young person who watches digital TV, downloads MP3 music onto a personal player, checks email on a personal organiser and sends symbolised messages to a mobile phone of a friend will not be satisfied with a 500 word revision guide for [HSC] physics

(Abbott 2003, p. 45).

IN THE FIELD OF LITERACY EDUCATION, there has been growing acknowledgement since the 1990s of visual literacy and the impact of information and communications technology. Students of today live in an environment that is permeated with visual, electronic and digital texts. Along with a textual shift there is now a paradigm shift that is based on the belief that literacy is more than the reading and writing of print. There are several questions such a paradigm shift raises. Is learning and literacy developing in a different way for students who have grown up in a ‘multimodal’ environment far different from that of their parents and teachers? Are teachers, parents and the wider community aware of the implications of new modes of learning? Are teachers working within these new modes of learning and communication or within a learning paradigm that is still reliant on print-based structures?

Changed contexts for learning and literacy

Different terms have been used in an attempt to encapsulate the changing nature of reading, learning and communication within a multimodal environment. Terms such as ‘multiliteracies’ (New London Group 2000; Unsworth 2001), ‘new literacies’ (Lankshear & Knobel 2003) and ‘multimodality’ (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001) have been constructed around particular pedagogical frameworks. In educational publications we encounter a multitude of terms such as ‘digital literacy’, ‘media literacy’, ‘cultural literacy’, ‘technoliteracy’ and, more recently, ‘silicon literacy’ (Snyder 2003) and ‘hypermodality’ (Lemke 2002). Such terminology reflects attempts to explain and understand literacy and learning within changed learning contexts and to establish new learning paradigms.

Several researchers contend that visual texts are impacting on neural networks and changing conceptual schemata (Heath 2000). Educators need to understand the learning implications for students who are growing up in an environment of digital media where communication for children is entirely different from what school offers and prepares them for. Previously we could determine the types of meaning students would need to make from printbased texts. Now we need to investigate the way meaning is constructed through multimodal communication and the different ways learning is occurring for students.

Learning and literacy in a multimodal environment

Multimodal texts are those texts that have more than one ‘mode’ so that meaning is communicated through a synchronisation of modes. That is, they may incorporate written language and images, still or moving, they may be produced on paper or electronic screen and may incorporate sound. Different types of multimodal texts that students commonly encounter in their educational environment in print form are picture books, information books, newspapers and magazines. Film and video have been used in schools for many years but access to the electronic screen, the Internet and digital media vary depending on the technology resources of the school or sector. More often students have access to sophisticated technology outside the educational environment through the Internet, various forms of digital games, DVDs and text messaging.

Within multimodal texts, the function of modes such as image, movement, colour, gesture, 3D objects, music and sound, needs to be examined further. Several researchers are investigating different aspects of multimodality, either as a means of ‘representation’ and ‘communication’ (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001) or as a research tool for analysing classroom communication and learning (Kress et al 2001). These researchers propose that a semiotic theory of multimodality is needed rather than a theory of linguistics to describe the multimodal nature of learning.

Kress and van Leeuwen (1996; 2001) have challenged the traditional emphasis on print in the light of the growing dominance of multimodal texts and digital technology. They contend that a languagebased pedagogy is no longer sufficient for the reading practices that are needed in our information age. Crucial issues being raised by Kress and others are that ‘the screen’ and multimodal texts have developed new ways of communication. Written text is only one part of the message and no longer necessarily the dominant part.

New types of texts require different conceptualisations and different ways of thinking. Kress describes significant differences between the words and images. He shows that, with writing, words rely on the ‘logic of speech’ involving time and sequence, whereas the ‘logic of the image’ involves the presentation of space and simultaneity. Thus the reading of visuals involves quite a different process than the reading of words. Kress and Bearne (2001) have shown that schools foster the ‘logic of writing’ whereas contemporary children’s experiences are grounded in the ‘logic of the image’. In a recent publication, Bearne has shown examples of how students are now producing texts that assume integration of image and word, supplying, sound, elements of gesture and movement as they compose their own meanings (2003, p 98). Bearne contends that assessment processes need to take account of the changes in students’ texts.

Thus the nature of literacy, knowledge and classroom learning needs to be reconceptualised within continually changing modes of communication. Educational researchers need to examine evidence of how students are learning in response to multimodal texts and how this learning varies across different curriculum areas. Will such evidence demonstrate that reading and learning through digital, multimodal texts are consistent with, or different from, school approaches to knowledge and learning? Will the analysis of data provide evidence for developing a new pedagogy for a changed learning environment? What are the implications for teaching? These are crucial questions to investigate for students of today and the future.

References

Bearne, E (2003). ‘Rethinking Literacy: Communication, Representation and Text’ in Reading Literacy and Language, 37:3, November, p. 98.

Callow, J & Zammitt, K (2002). ‘Visual literacy: from picture book to electronic texts’ in Monteith, M (ed.) Teaching Primary Literacy with ICT, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Cope, B & Kalantzis, M (eds) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, Macmillan, Melbourne.

Lankshear, C & Knobel, M (2003). New Literacies Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Lemke, J (2002). ‘Travels in hypermodality’ in Visual Communication, 1:3, October, pp 299325.

Heath, SB (2000). ‘Seeing our Way into Learning’ in Cambridge Journal of Education, 30:1, pp 121131.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London. Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T (2001). Multimodal Discourse, Routledge, London.

Kress, G et al (2001). Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom, Continuum, London.

Snyder, I (ed) (2003). Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, Routledge, London.

Unsworth, L (2001). Teaching Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum: Changing Contexts of Text and Image in Classroom Practice, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Teaching Aids

In particular.... visual aids

* shown to improve methodology
* reduce 'talk and chalk' teaching

Student Learning Research

Meta-study, Marzano 1998 (Marzano Research Lab)

* graphic + tactile representations of subject matter had noticeable effects on learning outcomes.

Constructive Alignment - John Biggs

OUTCOMES-BASED EDUCATION (OBE)

* encourage students to use the learning activities most likely to achieve outcomes intended

LEARNING APPROACHES:

Surface:
* remember a list of disjointed facts
* low cognitive-level activities

Deep:
* went below the surface of the text to interpret the meaning
* engage with content in appropriate and meaningful way

"...students needing to know will naturally try to learn the details, as well as make sure they understand the big picture."

Where does mine sit?
Inbetween surface level and a deep approach?  Am I activating enough cognitive responses for it to be considered deep?

* teaching is not a matter of transmitting, but of engaging students in active learning, building their knowledge in terms of what they already understand.

Graphic Organisers

What are they?
devices that convert complex and messy information collections into meaningful displays [compress-focus-make interpretation]

GO = a supportive strategy for learning, as the brain naturally organises and stores information

GO form powerful visual pictures of information and allow for the mind 'to see' undiscovered patterns and relationships.

TYPES OF GRAPHIC ORGANISERS:

• Concept maps
• Time-sequence patterns
  eg. chain of events, time lines
• Cause-effect relationships
  eg. fishbone diagrams
• Comparisons
  eg. venn diagrams
• Free associations and links among ideas
  webs, mind maps
• Series of events related to each other
  life-cycle diagrams

• Hierarchical organizers, present main ideas and supporting details in ranking order,
• Comparative organizers, depict similarities among key concepts,
• Sequential organizers, illustrate a series of steps or place events in a chronological order,
• Diagrams, depict actual objects and systems in the real world of science and social studies (Marchand-Matella, et al., 1998),
• Cyclical organizers, depict a series of events that have no beginning or end,
• Conceptual organizers, include a main concept with supporting facts, evidence, or characteristics
  (Bromley, et al., 1998).

Paivio, 1991:  INFORMATION STORAGE
"dual-coding" theory (information is processed and stored in memory in 2 forms):

1.  Linguistic (words, statements)
2.  Non-linguistic, Visual