The visual reality of the world is often not reflected in the classroom experiences of students, creating little opportunity for them to learn how to be critical "readers" of the visual texts that fill their lives. After participating in a provocative summer workshop on Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the…

This article examines the power of composing images as students construct identities and shape their own worlds. It illustrates student empowerment through agency, intellectual engagement, and community investment and suggests that composing with images forms a bridge back to alphabetic-centric composing.

This article presents ways to incorporate the works of artist Edward Hopper in the ELA secondary classroom. Students analyze Hopper's paintings as a text and create their own responses in the form of poetry, short story, photography, and other visual media.

The article describes how one student in a summer enrichment English class used fictional elements and images in comic form to represent her identity and the emotional truth of difficult experiences. The course was taught at an annual summer academy that encouraged academically minded 15-year-old and 16-year-old students to spend three weeks…

The author critiques covers of "Ebony" and "GQ" magazines in order to expose race and class narratives, and he encourages teachers to help students to become more aware of the ways in which other images "connote cultural information." Because of the prevalence of images in contemporary society, it is imperative that…

In the spring of 2010, the author had the pleasure of working with four fifth graders, exploring reading engagement with graphic novels. During her research study, she became inspired by the connections these fifth graders made between the graphic novels they discussed and the film medium and ultimately concluded that this connection contributed…

The emergence of quality multimodal texts such as graphic novels may provide new vistas that allow adolescents access to more complex readings of difficult texts. This is especially true for the large number of graphic versions of Shakespearean text that have recently come on the market. However, it is still unclear as to what students actually…

With the arrival of inexpensive camcorders and even video capability in cell phones, easy-to-use editing software such as iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, and instant universal distribution through YouTube and similar sites, individuals are coming to the point where they can create and manipulate images as easily as they do words. As an English…

Cross-age tutoring, in which older and younger students work together to improve their ELA skills, is not a new concept; Linda D. Labbo and William H. Teale explored it as a tool for poor readers as early as 1990. The author has found that using tutoring with video games also works well. Students have the opportunity to read aloud collaboratively…

Kristien Marquez-Zenkov and James A. Harmon encouraged urban students to take photographs that illustrate the purposes of school, factors that support success in school, and barriers to success. The authors analyzed students' photos and written reflections on the photos to form recommendations regarding teaching approaches that encourage students'…

Anne Burke and Shelley Stagg Peterson argue that "picture books offer a medium for teaching visual and critical literacy across the curriculum." To support this idea, they describe a multidisciplinary unit on World War II that pushes high school students to utilize visual and print literacies to analyze, comprehend, and relate to public events and…

Discusses six crises of verbal language which are imminent due to our reliance on the mass media and our separation from the phenomenal world. (DD)

Historically, comics have been viewed as a "debased or simplified word-based literacy," explains Dale Jacobs, who considers comics to be complex, multimodal texts. Examining Ted Naifeh's "Polly and the Pirates," Jacobs shows how comics can engage students in multiple literacies, furthering meaning-making practices in the classroom and beyond.

In a one-week voluntary summer course, students aged twelve to seventeen eagerly take ownership of their composing processes, learning to connect terms such as focus and point of view to the visual and verbal acts of photography and writing. High school teacher Mike Stracco grapples with how to channel the vitality of his summer course into…

Dawnene D. Hassett and Melissa B. Schieble contend that literacy instruction must include attention to the multiple ways in which print and visual images work together. They propose ways to update accepted reading strategies "with visual texts and new literacies in mind." Using examples from picture books and graphic novels, they expand our…