I feel that in the context of ‘using visuals in the classroom’ I should explain, why I have chosen to head my blog with the artwork by Brighton artist Petrusco (incidentally but equally unintentionally in the same week we started talking about visuals in TE714). I think it is a good example of a visual with multiple layers of messages intended partly by the creator but also leaving room for interpretation by the ‘reader’.

I came across this quite by chance in a side street off the London Road in Brighton and instantly loved it for several reasons. Firstly, I like the message or rather the messages – both visual and text (in my opinion it effectively illustrates how the two modes can enhance each other). It conveys that a change of your mindset – at least at deeper levels (‘revolution’) – cannot be achieved without some significant ‘pain’ (the gun to the head) but that after the initial trauma the result can be something rather beautiful, a new freedom (the butterflies). The ‘join in’ communicates furthermore that changing your mindset is not something that should be kept to yourself. Instead it becomes even more powerful if you do it together with other people. Applied to the context of education it could stand for my belief that education needs a bit of a ‘shake-up’ with less attention being given to individual testing and top-down policy decision-making towards more collaborative approaches that value teachers’ and learners’ input, processes and project work and the emotional component in learning. I recently wrote an essay on the potential of using an experiential learning approach in study abroad contexts – an approach that could be considered quite ‘revolutionary’ as it adovates the kind of things I just mentioned – and I found that both teachers and learners find it difficult, at least initially, to move away from the understanding of teacher as instructor and learner as ‘consumer’ of knowledge bites to teacher as guide/facilitator but not necessarily expert and learner as agent and producer. However, by ‘pushing through’ this intial discomfort and by teachers working collaboratively for support, experiential learning practices can be very rewarding for teacher and learner alike (see for example Kohonen et al., 2001 & Kolb et al., 2014).

Secondly, the image’s location to me seems almost as important as the image itself. The fact that it was simply out in the street, reaching a wide and varied audience in that way, represents a very particular definition of ‘art’ and what/who it is there for. It perfectly illustrates one of Pertrusco’s main messages about art: that it should not be hidden away in galleries, the artist at the mercy of the gallery owner’s decision and the art only accessible to a select few (Petrusco’s eye – Outdoor Activities). Related to this is that the image also addresses the issue of ownership and copyright. The fact that it is signed ‘Agent Petruscioni’ suggests that the individual artist is not considered to be of that much importance. What is important, on the other hand, is that the message of the artwork is spread/shared and that it reaches the intended audience, i.e. everyone. This is what enabled me to easily ‘lift’ it and open it up to a new, different, bigger audience by using additional media – my phone’s camera and subsequently this blog. It also opened up the possibility of using the image for my own context of education and language teaching. As I said, this is a very particular view of what art/the purpose of art is and it raises the question of how one can combine this noble vision with the artist’s need to have some financial recognition of their work in order to be able to continue practising the same.

And lastly, the image felt very ‘Brighton’ and as I do consider myself to be a ‘Brightonian’ by choice – heart and soul – I can use it to show my connection to the city and what it stands for. To elaborate on what I consider to be the spirit of Brighton and just for a bit of fun, here another nice visual – this time a video which recently went viral on Facebook. Interestingly it was first brought to my attention by a friend who did the TESOL course with me last year but who has since (and at the time of sharing the video with me) moved abroad. Hail the power of social media!

“Pure joy on the streets of Brighton” by Ezda Beevers

What would our students make of this?!

I think overall Petrusco’s artwork is a great example of how images can hold powerful messages which can be encoded as well as decoded at different levels with different layers of messages being present, sometimes with the intention of the original encoder and sometimes with new messages being perceived and added by the decoder. As teachers we would do well remembering this when using images in the classroom. There is a lot we can teach our students about the reading of images but I suspect equally a lot we can learn from our students. After all, especially when it comes to ELT, the different cultures and backgrounds our students come from will have an effect on how they read an image and consequently on how we communicate about this image.

References:

Kohonen, V., Jaatinen, R., Kaikkonen, P., et al. (2001) Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Education, Harlow, England: Longman.

Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Englewood Cliffs, [N.J.];London;: Prentice-Hall.

I have just discovered Ryot, an online virtual reality and immersive storytelling company which has recently become part of The Huffington Post. The main idea behind Ryot is to make news stories more personal and to create opportunities for the audience to join in and develop the story rather than just consume it in a detached and often helpless way. In their words:

“We wanted to make the news empowering rather than depressing. To turn people on by what was happening around them rather than turn them off. Throughout RYOT’s journey, we searched for the next technology to bring us closer into the story and we found virtual reality.”(http://ryot.huffingtonpost.com/welcome-to-ryot/)

The short films in particular are very powerful and I could see them being used in class to stimulate discussion and develop critical thinking (if that is appropriate in the teaching context). They are also great for showing off new technology at its most impressive and innovative – virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality (with the App you get 360 video on your phone). I am hoping to look at one film in more detail in future and work on some ideas for a lesson. For now I would just like to make people aware of the existence of the site and give an example of what kind of films there are…

For our last seminar one of the tasks we could choose to work on was to create an infographic to use in class. The other tasks were more to do with exploring what visuals added to language teaching materials and how/to what extent certain textbooks had achieved this. I do not need any convincing that visuals can enhance the learning process (in fact, I believe that the more senses you get involved the better!) and neither does it particularly surprise me that visual messages are often not encoded/decoded successfully, especially if the context is not understood sufficiently or known to the encoder/decoder. So I was quite happy to leave it to the seminar to address these issues.

What I wanted to do was to experiment with my own visual. As usual I was faced with the problem that I did not have a particular class/group of learners in mind for whom I was creating this visual. In this instance, however, this was quite liberating as it meant I could experiment with different elements of the process and the technologies needed along the way without having to worry too much about the result. As it turned out, I am not particularly proud of the end product and I doubt it will ever find its way into my classroom (at least not in its current state). I am, however, pleased with the process that got me there.
Before I looked at the preparation sheet for the seminar I had never given infographics much thought, not reflected on how I ‘consume’ them, not used them in class and definitely not thought of designing one myself. So my first stop was the suggested TED talk by David McCandless which I found absolutely fascinating (The beauty of data visualization – David McCandless). It was amazing to watch how facts/data appeared in a completely new light when they were transformed into visual information. However, in the talk infographics were very much about clever design and aesthetics and I felt that in an educational context and with my task the information element might be the one to concentrate on first.

In order to find out more about how infographics can be used for language teaching I therefore turned to Nik Peachy who provides the following useful definition which can also serve as an explanation why it might be good to use them in educational contexts:

An infographic is a visual representation of, what is often, quite dense statistical information. This is the kind of information which can be very difficult to read as prose/text but which, when transformed to a visual, can become accessible very quickly. (Exploiting infographics for ELT – Nik Peachy)

That made me think of another area I have been wanting to explore: corpora research. I thought that information you gather about language from a corpus is very much about numbers and could therefore benefit from being supported visually. I have never used an online corpus for research or in teaching but love the idea of it being about the language of ‘real’ people in ‘real’ life providing data that can be used by students to make their own discoveries about the language they are learning (I realise that this point is controversial as some put forward the argument that this ‘real’ language loses its ‘authentic’ meaning as soon as it is taken out of its original context, but this is not the place to go into detail).

I found phrasesinenglish.org (via the British National Corpus website) and chose the word ‘learn’ – quite a random choice and probably not the most useful but I am really into ‘learning’ at the moment – theory and practice – which seemed as good a reason as any at the time (especially considering that I did not have a real class in mind, i.e. no real teaching point to make). I then asked for any two-word combinations which delivered the following list:

To turn this information into something visual I used the draw.io programme on Nik Peachy’s recommendation (https://www.draw.io/). I went down the list and created bubbles of different sizes, the size relating to the frequency of the combination. I then decided to leave the visual at that, as I thought that in a proper teaching scenario students could find additional information themselves and choose their own examples. That way they might find out that ‘learn to’ and ‘learn how to’ are used in the same way, that both of these are followed by verbs whereas ‘learn from’ is followed by a noun/nouns (e.g. from our mistakes, from their masters) and that the ‘at’ in ‘learn at’ does not really belong to ‘learn’ but to the phrase following which tends to give information about where the learning is taking place (e.g. at school, at college) or how fast (e.g. at his or her own speed, at different rates). For me the important thing was that students, at least in principle, would be free to make their own discoveries which we could then examine together.

The last stage in my learning process was to find out what format this visual would best be saved in (jpeg or gif seem to be the obvious) and where (e.g. Google Drive or One Drive) in order to share it most conveniently with the other people in my study group but also with prospective students.

In summary, although I am not that happy about the infographic created, I feel I have learned a lot in the space of a week and I am confident that the process could be applied to a real teaching scenario. The task also illustrates how proactive I have become with regards to using technology for teaching. It shows that, if even a technophobe like me is able to come up with at least something over the course of a week, then anything is possible! This goes back to what I said in my very first post on this blog: I like to think of teaching as ‘leading by example’. If I want my students to be curious, I need to give them a taste of my own curiosity; if I want them to be comfortable admitting their ignorance, I need to be able to prove to them that not knowing something does not have to be embarrassing; if I want my students to be creative and proactive, I need to give them examples of something I have created.