This single statement has stuck with me. Why? I have two sons, one of whom has always hated reading. My other son, Nicholas was an avid reader - I remember him ploughing through all the Harry Potter books in the space of a month while maintaining an A average at school with no problem. My children all attended private elementary school and then moved on to high school in the public sector. This year was Nicholas' year to embark on his high school career. It also marks the year that he stopped reading for pleasure.
I find this devastating and have tried to pry out of him why he no longer reads. Being an adolescent, communication deficits are to be expected, but what I have gleaned from him is that his English teacher has beaten out of him any desire to read. She assigns endless novel studies, she gives tests weekly, and has all students present regularly in front of the class some aspect of the work under study.
Does she at any time allow students a choice regarding their mode of process and production? No. It's 12 font, double-spaced work and oral presentation. Old school. It's important to mention that Nicholas is a good writer as well as a good reader and I feel it's equally important to point out that he refuses to complete his assignments for his teacher. He has gone from a 90% in Grade 8 to a 46%. Devastating, frustrating, infuriating.
Nicholas has become Pacey: "the school reader, a role I play because you require it from me".
At home, Nicholas spends his free time online; gaming or social networking. His favourite place is Minecraft. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why. This is a place where he creates his own reality, lives in a space and time which suit him, and over which he has control. There is no doubt in my mind that for him, visual literacy (among other digital literacies) is what inspires him, motivates him, and helps him to make sense of his world.
Nancy Frey, in Kajder, states that "adolescence has often been described as a journey of self-discovery, a time when adolescents measure the width and breadth of the world and figure out where they fit in that world" (Frey in Kajder, 2006). Clearly Nicholas does not feel that he fits in the world of Grade 9 English. I am so incredibly tempted to try to help his teacher to make the connection between adolescent attraction to visual literacies (and other digital literacies) and the curriculum.
I showed him my Photo Story and, while he told me it was lame, he also agreed that my teacher must be "well cool" to allow this sort of activity in a Master's course. There is no doubt that the use of digital technologies (in this case is a visual narrative) increases student engagement and certainly makes learning more authentic and relevant, "in today's world, literacy includes an understanding of how texts are constructed and how a variety of forms of representation work together to convey meaning". I would argue though that the simple (or not so simple) act of integrating digital tools in the classroom is in no way a guarantee that academic achievement will improve. In the case of the visual narrative, if implemented effectively, certainly students will gain competence in the critical thinking required to synthesize text, images, symbols, metaphors, and sound to create an elegant, logically integrated piece... However, again, this does not guarantee academic achievement. In fact, for as long as the school system remains steeped in old values, it's hard to say if digital tools ever will categorically improve anything more than engagement. The goals of education and the affordances of digital technology simply do not create a happy marriage.
As an aside, I was pondering the view that visuals are this generations's vehicle for writing when it occurred to me that, in the early development of humankind, visuals were also an important vehicle for writing. Think cave paintings. They told stories, recorded facts, and there were no words. Think of the Bayeux Tapestry. It recorded facts in immense and glorious detail. There are very few words, and those that do appear are mainly labels for people's names (Harold) or dates. Even the writing of the ancient Egyptians, hieroglyphs, was image based. Chinese and Japanese writing is in fact symbols to represent ideas. When did writing (the black and white alphabetic sort) take over from visual or image representations? Was it the Gutenberg Press? Whatever it was, we seem to have come around circle, at least vaguely... a wobbly amoebic one?! :)
History of Writing
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