References

Emily Brewer

Barnes, N. (2009). Hands-on Writing: An Alternative Approach to Understanding Art. Art

Education, 62(3), 40-46. Retrieved December 3, 2014

This article talks about using a hands-on strategy that could improve students writing in the art
classroom. Pre-service teachers were introduced to the concept of organizing an essay through
detailed description of fine art prints. Data analysis showed significant improvement in writing
related to organization and articulation of specific details (p. 41). Looking closely at art is a
great way for students to start talking about details in depth and will start to ask the question
why? which is very important in the art classroom today.
A fine art print was placed on the table in front of groups of five to six pre-service teachers. They
were asked to record their comments on sticky notes. Students were initially hesitant about the
sticky-note activity because it had been introduced as a writing activity. The use of sticky notes,
however, seemed less intimidating than a blank piece of paper or computer screen. Each group
was to come up with 24-30 comments. Duplicates were not allowed so if students had similar
ideas, they had to be more specific and come out with two different comments.
Each group then talked about how their ideas could be organized into a formal written document.
Large sheets of paper were distributed with the five paragraph headings: introduction,
information, visual elements, interpretation and conclusion. As a group, students categorized
their sticky notes under the appropriate heading, reproducing the sequence of information in
paragraphs creating a critical analysis of artwork (p. 44). Picking up the comments and being
able to hold it in their hands seemed less daunting than the idea of revising an essay, although
moving ideas around is exactly what an author does when revising their writings.
The author found this project to be exciting because it developed from a simple writing activity
into an in depth art experience. Although this activity was designed as a writing assignment, it
quickly became a tool that created deeper connections with the artwork itself. Students spent
more time looking at the art because they had to document what they saw in detail.

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Moorman, H. (2006). Backing into Ekphrasis: Reading and Writing Poetry about Visual
Art. The English Journal, 96(1), 46-53. Retrieved November 11, 2014
Georgia Heard calls language the poet's paint, and many other writers and artists have
commented on the parallels between these two modes of expression (p. 47). Moorman took her
9th grade students on a field trip to a museum where they could find inspiration for their poetrywriting activity.
In the pre-field trip lesson, the students were given a poem to discuss ideas with a partner. They
were encouraged to read through the poem several times, look up unfamiliar words, take notes,
summarize, and sketch what they thought the art piece would look like. When the author
projected the paintings, the students were proud that they could immediately identify their
correlating paintings. Studying the images gave the students more insight into the poems they
read.
At the museum, students engaged in close reading, analysis, interpretation, and descriptive as
well as imaginative writing (p. 50) as they wrote about a piece that inspired them. One student,
Abby, chose to write about Claude Monets Nympheas and wrote the poem to Monet. Another
student, Pamela, wrote about the same painting but speaks for the water lilies themselves. Most
of the students were excited to share, enjoyed listening to each other's poems and guessing which
piece inspired them.
In conclusion, the author found that introducing ekphrastic poetry helped the students become
more observant in their reading, writing and study of visual images. The author wanted to
incorporate the visual arts into her language arts classroom, but this is also an exciting way to
bring writing into the art classroom.

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Landorf, H. (2006). What's Going on in This Picture? Visual Thinking Strategies and
Adult Learning. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource
Development, 20(4), 28-32.

In the late 1980s, Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine developed Visual Thinking Strategies
(VTS) as an elementary school curriculum visual arts program. It encourages thoughtful
participation to support verbal language skills, and writing assignments to enhance the speech to
writing ability. VTS improves verbal and thinking skills, in all students, from struggling learners
to high achievers. Among many other things, it also meets state standards in art, language and
social studies and improves test scores in reading and writing (Visual Understanding in
Education, 2001).
Facilitators begin by presenting an image and asking the following open-ended questions:
Whats going on in this picture?, What do you see that makes you say that? and What more
can we find? Students verbalize their opinions, ideas, and interpretations, and facilitators
paraphrase each students comments back to clarify. In this way any miscommunication can be
addressed at the time presented. Students are also encouraged to support their responses with
evidence, and construct meanings through their own ideas and ideas from their peers.
VTS curriculum has also been successfully used with secondary students, adult museum-goers
and recently with medical students and interns. Convinced of the vital connection between the
humanities and medical education, and intrigued by the notion that facilitated discussion of art
images could help people develop critical thinking and communication skills, Dr. Jo Marie
Reilly, Dr. Jeffrey Ring, and Linda Duke (2005) attended a medical retreat at an art museum (p.
30).
Teachers report that the majority of students who participate in the VTS curriculum learn
to read more quickly, have greater comprehension skills, and are more capable of
expressing whole concepts and completing whole thoughts in a sentence (Curva &
Associates, 2004; Longhenry, 2005). After completing the ten-week VTS curriculum,
students writing improves as well. Students are more likely to write in complete
sentences, which include more observations, to supply reasons to back up opinions, and
to speculate among possible conclusions. Consequently, the VTS curriculum is a valuable
resource in aiding students to improve their reading, writing, and communication skills
(Visual Thinking Strategies, n.d.). (p. 30)

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Franco, M., & Unrath, K. (2014). Carpe Diem: Seizing the Common Core. Art Education,
67(1), 28-32. Retrieved November 23, 2014

Eleven Kindergarten and 1st-grade boys identified as struggling learners and members of a
remedial writing club show improvement in their writing and communication skills through
weekly literacy lessons that begin with artwork investigations using VTS.
While students interacted with complex and exciting visual texts (p. 30), the authors observed
a genuine desire to learn. The students volunteer their own interpretations with excitement and
built upon the ideas of their peers. As this occurs, standard English is rehearsed and wideranging vocabulary emerges to be reinforced through visual scaffolding as the teacher points to
details noted and paraphrases each comment (p. 30).
As students looked at the art and debated their meanings, their understanding of the content
improved and was noticeable through their speech. They had learned to respond appropriately
and respectfully to a small group of peers and collaborated on the meaning of the artwork. They
used the image, prior knowledge, past experience, and one another to make sense of the pictures.
The open-ended questions used in VTS have been found to elicit not only high-order thinking
and reasoning from students in preK and beyond, but also democratic discussion and respectful
debate (Yenawine, 1998). When VTS is implemented regularly and consistently as designed,
"students grow from casual, random, idiosyncratic viewers to thorough, probing, reflecting
interpreters from finding only personal connections -- which is appropriate when they begin -to searching out the intentions of artists and dealing with elements of styles (VUE Staff, 2000, p.
2) (p.30).

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Martens, P., Martens, R., Doyle, M., Loomis, J., & Aghalarov, S. (2012). Learning From
Picturebooks: Reading and Writing Multimodally in First Grade. The Reading
Teacher, 66(4), 285294. Retrieved December 1, 2014

A first grade class participated in a project that explored helping beginning readers understand
the art as well as the written language in picturebooks. Meaning lies within both the art and the
text and the authors believe that both should be explored. The authors share how, through
various reading, writing, and art experiences, the children learned to read and communicate
through art along with written text.
When looking at pages where there was art but no written text the authors would ask the students
Is there anything to read on this page? At first the response was no because the children
associated reading with words. The authors used these opportunities to explore the idea that
pictures can also be read through how the artists uses lines, color, textures and movement along
with other elements and principles of design. If the students didnt read the artistic meanings
on those pages, they would miss meanings critical to making sense of the story (p. 289).
Arizpe and Styles (2003) studied children ages 411 in seven schools to learn how they read the
illustrations in picturebooks and understood the narrative through them. They found that the
children were sophisticated readers of visual texts... [who] understand different viewpoints,
analyze moods, messages and emotions, and articulate personal responses to picture books
even when they struggle with the written word (p. 287).
The children then had the opportunity to create a story themselves using the elements (line,
shape/form, color, value, space/perspective, and texture) and principles (balance, pattern,
rhythm/movement, contrast, unity, proportion/scale and emphasis) of design to construct
meaning.
In the end the children learned that art, like written language, communicates meaning and that
artists, like authors, make conscious, deliberate decisions about the use of the elements and
principles of design. They realized that as readers, they need to read the meanings in the art
along with the words to fully understand a story.

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Mouly, F. (2011). Visual Literacy: Exploring This Magical Portal. Children & Libraries:
The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, 9(1), 12-14. Retrieved
November 23, 2014

This article talks about the importance of using comics, graphic novels and TOON books to
encourage reading in young children. Comics use a broad range of sophisticated devices for
communication. Meaning is not found solely in words, but also in gestures, tone, facial
expressions, and props. The author explains that comics are more than just illustrated books, but
use a multimodal language that blends words, pictures, expressions, color, and sound effect
words to engage readers in a compelling narrative (p. 14).
When creating the TOON books, Mouly went back and forth between educators and the authorartist, to highlight the words that can benefit from picture support. While this multimodal way of
storytelling in literature is helpful for all emerging readers, it can be especially helpful for
children who have difficulties processing purely verbal information. On the TOON Books blog,
a mother of a boy with autism explains that she finds comics help him a lot. Most children with
autism have difficulty reading the others emotions. The author explains that TOON Books can
help with their exaggerated comic style. For example, in the story of Benny and Penny in the Big
No-No! the author shows mouse Bennys surprise, worry and happiness very clearly.
Because the stories of comics are spelled out visually, children intuitively figure out how to
read them. If we understand, and take advantage of, childrens love of comics, that love will help
us on our quest to share our love of books and reading with the new generations (p. 12)

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Williams, T. L. (2007). "Reading" the Painting: Exploring Visual Literacy in the Primary
Grades. Reading Teacher, 60(7), 636-642.

This article explores how to incorporate visual literacy into the primary grades. It focuses on the
authors inspiration from the Tell Me a Picture exhibit at the National Gallery she went to in
London. The artworks were hung at a childs eye level and encouraged children to read the
painting, using their imagination to make since of the scene. All written information about the
work was taken away so that each childs interpretation would not be influenced by details about
the artist, subject matter, materials or the artists intent. The author wanted to incorporate this
idea into her 2nd grade classroom.
The author posted a picture of a painting and proceeded to ask questions like Who are the two
figures on the bridge? Why are they meeting at night in the cold? Are they friends or enemies?
What would be so urgent as to bring them outside at this late hour? Where could this painting
take place? She found that many of the answers were simply describing the picture, not looking
at it like a story. For example, one team wrote, There is a man. Hes standing on a bridge. It is
night. There are lots of stars.
Over the course of the next week, each pair of students read a number of paintings and wrote a
narrative about it. Students came to understand how the definition of reading could include
something other than words. One groups example at the end of the week:
Once it was snowing in Oslo. A lot of people came out of their houses to go to church. Before the
children went to church they a snow ball fight. Some people rode in the carriage. Two people in
the carriage met. The next day they saw each other again and fell in love. They made a time to see
each other that night. When they saw each other that night they told each other their names, the
man said, My name is Andrew. And the girl said My name is Megan. The next day Andrew
saw Megan. Andrew went up to Megan and said Will you marry me? Megan said Yes. And
they got married. The End. (p. 640)

After this experience, students seemed more accepting that a painting can have more than one
interpretation. In the beginning they believed that there was always one right answer. It was only
by having the students write about and share their narratives that they began to see that their
own constructions of meaning were validated by their peers (p. 640). Activities like this help
students move beyond the basic description and develop their critical thinking skills.
Using visual literacy in the content areas is not purely limited to the creation of stories but is an
opportunity for students to expand their knowledge of the world around them (p. 641).

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Feret, A. & Smith, J. (2010). Literacy and Art: Collage for Pre-Service Teachers.
InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 5, 37-53. Retrieved December 1, 2014
This study involved eight pre-service teachers in art education who were enrolled in a content
area reading course while student teaching. Three taught at the elementary level and five at the
high school level. They were asked to observe their class and identify one language-related issue
(listening, speaking, reading or writing) that seemed to interfere with optimal learning and
teaching. This article focuses on the experiences of the pre-service teachers.
Each pre-service teacher created and implemented three lessons to address the problem area
using that literacy skill. For example one participant who identified writing as a hindrance in
high school included a research paper on a sculptor in their lesson. Five participants identified
listening, one chose reading and one chose speaking. The participant who chose to work with
reading skills quickly realized that, Many students at the high school level answer questions but
cannot back up their answers (p. 43). After each lesson, the pre-service teachers were asked to
record their thoughts about what worked, what didnt and what they would do differently next
time.
Four results came from this study. First, the pre-service teachers gained new knowledge about
their students and about themselves as practitioners. The literacy lessons provided a lens through
which they could sharpen their observations and appraise student behaviors (p. 48). Second, the
participants realized that including literacy instruction in art class enhanced creativity and
improved the quality of student projects. One participant said, Students took pride in
remembering lines from the book. It seemed to push them to picture what was being said and that
is great for visual arts (p.49). A third result provided art students with tools to improve the
quality and creativity of artwork. Implementing these strategies indirectly supported the
development of more expressive artists and thus, facilitated their projects (p. 49). The last result
was that incorporating speaking and writing instruction in art class developed the skills of art
criticism. Since art criticism is a very important component of art education, students must be
able to speak knowledgeably about artwork (p. 49).