Literacy in the 21st Century
In an article from the Journal Albion, Camille Paglia looks at the impact of modern media on our ability to read, to process, and to interpret images with depth and insight. She describes the activities she uses in her university classes to help students learn to take the time to really examine images in meaningful way, rather than leap from image to image as we typically do with modern media. I don’t agree with everything she has to say (she sees sexual messages in a lot of unusual places, such as statues of saints), but it does provide some food for thought. The article is at www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia_11.3/Paglia_Magic%20of%20Images.htm.
You can find K-12 activities similar to this at the National Archives. To compliment their online collection of hundreds of thousands of historic photographs, documents, and artifacts, they have developed a series of analysis worksheets for students use to guide their observation and investigation of original source materials. The worksheet for photographs starts out with “Study the photograph for 2 minutes.” That all by itself is a hard task for many of our kids! The NARA Digital Classroom site is at www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/index.html, while just the analysis worksheets (for images, documents, artifacts, maps, sound recordings and more) are at www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/analysis_worksheets/worksheets.html.