Sketching with Patricia

As most people are aware, there are many different "learning styles," or multiple intelligences, as proposed by Howard Gardner. You might remember taking a test in 3rd grade and learning that you were a visual learner, or auditory, or maybe interpersonal (I think I test kinesthetic, which puts me in the wrong career path, I think). In her text, "Strategies for Using Sketching, Speaking, Movement, and Metaphor to Generate and Organize Text," Patricia Dunn applies this concept to the teaching of composition. After reading it, I (skeptically) thought I would give it a try.

My class had read a sample student essay about social networking sites for homework. After lecturing for a bit about their other assigned reading, I decided that we would take a few minutes to push our thoughts in new directions. I told my class that I wanted them to create a visual representation of the essay they read. I explained that it could be a graph, map, Venn diagram, picture, visual metaphor, a representation of your experience reading it,etc.

Here's what they came up (click each picture for a bigger view):

This student writes "This is what was going on in the head of the writer to motivate her to write [the] essay." The picture depicts a person watching the news, (CBS judging by the logo), which is doing a story on Facebook. The person imagines "Only you can stop people [from] being stalked online."

I was especially pleased to see this drawing. The student tried to get into the head of the writer of the sample essay, to understand their purpose and motivation for writing. As many comp theorists might say, there is always a person behind the writing, and this drawing really gets at that truth in a way that a discussion of rhetoric or a close reading would be unable to do. So often students think that writing is always something forced, but this drawing helped the student to understand what might motivate a person to do writing in a real-life situation. (I also liked the allusion to Smokey the Bear).

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This drawing represents the complexities of the Internet as well as a rough sketch of the structure of the essay. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but the sizes of the various parts correspond fairly well to the different sections of the essay: "predators" and "bullies" represent a large portion, whereas "happiness," "responsibility," and "friends" are comparatively small.

In addition to the structure of the essay, I think this picture represents the overall "feel" of the essay as well. By presenting the essay as a complicated maze, complete with predators, dragons, danger, and bullies, the illustrator captures the feeling of fear and danger presented by the essay.

My intention for this exercise was to get people to think in new ways, and this student thought in spacial, visual, and interpersonal terms. Great success.

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This picture made me chuckle when I first saw it, not only because of the humorous situation, but also because it perfectly rendered how I thought of the student essay. The author of the sample presents the internet as a gigantic monster waiting to pounce at any time. Rather than trying to represent the essay's structure, this illustrator chose instead to render the essay's main point, very successfully I might add. This drawing works on a purely visual level, allowing the viewer to apprehend the entirety of the essay in one glance.

Again, the student's choice of how big to make certain objects reflects the sample author's choices as well. In the sample, the Internet is something big, menacing, and de-humanized (and de-humanizing), as reflected by the large monster that dominates the drawing. The human, and by implication personal responsibility, is small in the picture and minimal in the essay. Another very successful drawing.

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The last student writes "This is a map of Paula's argument. IT has all the stops and also shows the crossing idea. The road stops where the author ends; his stone age life. This may help show the organization of their paper."

I think a map is a very useful way to visualize a text, as it allows the viewer to apprehend structure, content, as well as the purpose or destination. This illustration does all of these thinks. I especially like the crossroads he included, labeled "Facebook is Good." This perfectly represents the counter-argument that is only briefly treated in the sample essay, and I think representing this as a crossroads - one that is not taken - is perfect.

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Though I was definitely skeptical at first, as were many of my students, I think this activity was very successful. As I explained to my students, this activity might be out of your comfort zone, and it may or may not help you generate new ideas. However, thinking differently about an issue is always good; it helps you to approach problems in a new way, and if that new way doesn't work, then it helps you appreciate your old methods. Additionally, I explained that this activity was an opportunity for learners who might not get as much from lectures or close reading. My students seemed to appreciate all of that. The activity helped me to think in new ways as well, and I think in the future I will be more open to approaching problems in new ways, ways that are outside of my comfort zone as well.