History With Visual Literacies

• In Event: 65.079 - Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 65.079-2 - Reconstructing Disciplinary Literacy From the View of Multimodal Literacy

Abstract

History instruction can and should utilize informational text, including visual images, to enhance both content knowledge and literacy skills and practices. Teachers and teacher educators often overlook the use of images as an opportunity to enhance students’ literacy skills while maintaining – or restoring – the role of history/social science curriculum (Barton & Levstik, 2008; Brugar, 2012; VanSledright, 2002). In this study, the researcher examines two courses in which the teacher educator utilized disciplinary literacy strategies for helping preservice teachers teach social studies content through multimodal practices focused on visual images.

This study draws on perspectives of multimodal literacy that originate with Debes and Fransecky’s (1972) premise that reading images has a set of principles that can be taught and learned. Scholars of visual literacy argue that the prevalence of visual communication makes it imperative that schools begin to prepare students to “navigate, evaluate, and communicate with visual information” (Avgerinou, 2009; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Engaging in multimodal inquiry with visual images involves a type of disciplinary literacy in which teachers can help students derive meaning by looking at those images with historical significance (Barton & Levstik, 2008; Brugar, 2012; Levesque, 2008; VanSledright, 2002). The use of images offers teachers important and rich opportunities to extend students’ skills in understanding informational texts, and the disciplinary practice of examining evidence in historical and social science contexts (Barton & Levstik, 2008; Levstik & Barton, 2005; National Governors’ Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010; Seixas, 1998).

The methodology for this study was patterned after Grossman’s protocols of representation, decomposition and approximation of practice for professional education (Grossman, 2009; 2011). To assist beginning teachers in learning to enact a visual literacy protocol, the researcher identified the components of instruction that the beginning teachers needed to learn to engage in visual literacy instruction in the history classroom (decomposition), identified useful ways to model visual literacy practice for the beginning teachers (representation) and provided opportunities for the beginning teachers to engage in visual literacy practices in increasingly more authentic settings (approximation of practice).

The data sources for this study include lesson plans from the teacher educator and the preservice teachers. Power Point slides from the teacher educator, and videotapes of preservice teachers’ enacting visual literacy lessons integrated into strong disciplinary practices. To analyze the data, the researcher did a comparative analysis of written feedback from the teacher educator, preservice teachers’ lesson planning, enactment and written reflections on planning and teaching the multimodal lesson in classrooms.

The results of the study show that preservice teachers benefitted from increasingly more authentic approximations of practice in preparing to teach multimodal disciplinary literacy with visual images. Additionally, preservice teachers required specific instruction on selecting appropriate images for instruction in the history/social science classroom. The data suggests that teacher educators can include specific planned opportunities in the education classroom that enable beginning teachers to utilize multimodal strategies with their students as a part of disciplinary instruction.

Author

• Cathy Michele Johnson, Indiana University - Southeast