Fostering visual literacy skills with wordless picture books

Blog

By Dr. Elke Schneider

What is visual literacy?

Visual literacy (VL) is a well-defined discipline that requires critical, aesthetic, and socio-emotional interpretation skills based on individual comprehension of visual images. These are all essential for being a successful literate citizen that can handle the massive visual flood of information related to image-rich digital media. For one, VL skills include the ability to identify and interpret messages explicitly or implicitly given through still images (photos, posters, drawings, paintings, sculptures) or moving images (videos, films, TV shows, performances). Critical, aesthetic interpretation of how visual features such as colors, visual perspectives, or specific art media (i.e., watercolors, collages, sketches, charcoal drawing) impact a reader/viewer emotionally is a crucial VL skills component. The expressive side of VL skills refers to the ability to create visual images that present information in either still images (drawings, sketches, graphic organizers/charts, photos) or moving images such as short video clips. According to research, both receptive and expressive VL skills are best taught explicitly.

Why do we need to explicitly focus on developing visual literacy skills?

In this day and age, the non-stop availability of visual imagery via digital devices presents students’ brains with the task to quickly, accurately and critically interpret massive amounts of visual imagery surrounded by no, minimal, or much printed texts. Therefore, it is paramount to assist students in learning to carefully filter through so much visual information so they do not fall prey to manipulation and misinterpretation of implicit or explicit messages embedded in visual materials. Moreover, research has shown that educators require more explicit training in strengthening students’ visual literacy skills. For middle and high school students, VL skills are essential in every subject area and thus are included in middle and high school ELA standards.

What are wordless picture books?

Wordless picture books (WLPBs) are books that present information solely through visual images. Some images may include wording as part of an image such as a poster with a message. Only book flaps and covers include traditional printed text such as book title, author name, publication information, and a summary about the book. Examples of WLPBs appropriate for middle and high school students are shared in Table 1. They include selective ideas for disciplinary integration in ELA, social studies, science/geography.

Table 1: Examples of WLPBs for VL practice

Why are wordless picture books useful in middle or high school?

Public misconceptions about WLPBs include that they are only appropriate for young children and not challenging enough to working for adolescent students. Moreover, explicit VL skills do not need to be taught explicitly. These misconceptions contradict research findings that highlight how interpreting WLPBs contain an intricate amount of explicit and implicit information that requires developed VL skills to comprehend. Furthermore, it entices middle and high school students to apply varied sophistication in oral and written engagement with these WLPBs. Research also points out many benefits for middle and high school students:

VL practice with WLPBs allows for in-depth engagement with essential middle and high school English Language Arts (ELA) Standards through VL practices such as retelling/summarizing image information, inferencing, predicting and revising prediction, compare-contrast, cause and effect interpretation of visual imagery.
These VL practices with WLPBs prepare students for applying acquired critical VL skills in other content areas such as social studies, geography, or science where a mix of visual and written information need to be processed and analyzed (see Table 1 for examples).
WLPBs offer learning standards-based critical literacy skills through VL practices regardless of reading, writing, and speaking abilities, content or socio-cultural or background. Thus, with WLPBs everyone has equal access to practicing their development of visual literacy skills, including multilingual learners.
It is easier to activate intrinsic curiosity to engage with the visual information because everyone has an equal chance to engage uniquely with the content with a variety of acceptable interpretations rather than only one right answer.
ELA skills practices with WLPBs can be easily scaffolded. For students with more basic skills, only a select number of images could be used, simpler sentence frames for oral or written responses can be provided. More advanced students can benefit from and be challenged with more complex sentence structures to use, and more complex and detailed prompting questions. For ideas to prompt questions that strengthen VL skills with WLPBs, see Tables 2. For sentence frames to be used when verbalizing interpretations of WLPB images, see Table 3.
WLPBs allow for easy assessment of students’ critical, aesthetic and social-emotional comprehension and interpretation skills without being hindered by low writing skills. Oral performance rubrics can contain criteria such as ability to (1) summarize sequence of events, (2) make and revise predictions, (3) formulate questions, (4) describe emotional impact of images, (5) draw inferences, (6) connect story parts to personal experiences/ other real-life events, (7) use detailed descriptors to relate social-emotional story components and express empathy.

Ways to foster active use of visual literacy skills using WLPBs

For each of the VL skills areas, namely aesthetic skills, affective skills, critical thinking, and text comprehension, the following tables provide a) ideas for questions to activate students’ in-depth engagement with a WLPB (Table 2), and b) sentence frames with simpler and more complex structures for students to use to share their interpretations including dialog structures to discuss similarities and differences in story interpretations (Table 3). The sentence and dialog structures can be available to students on flip charts, table tents or flash cards to use during discussion time with each other or in response to teacher questions.

Table 2: Questions to activate critical engagement with visual imagery

VL Skill area	Ask students …
Aesthetic skills	how the author created a certain mood (i.e. suspense, fear, worry, excitement, joy) with colors, perspectives, item or character details and how that impacts the reader/viewer. to identify how the author created the images in a page or in the whole book why they like or not like certain images what question/s they would like to ask the illustrator? Why?
Affective skills (compassion, emotions, relation to self, world, others)	how they experience characters, events and why they feel like that how they or others they care about were in the situation of certain characters in certain situations and why. how they would change the story for a different or the same main message. to relate to a character, story event, emotion presented based on a personal experience or what they have watched on TV/in movies before. to create questions about a story step, character.
Critical thinking	to give reasons for opinions/interpretations and prompt for direct connection to details in the WLPBs. to compare and contrast their interpretations with those of peers. Prompt them to get reasons that relate back to details in the imagery and their personal experiences. to predict, or revise a previous idea to make connections to other readings or learning experiences in other disciplines in school, or outside of school or world events what they sense (smell, hear, taste, feel) when they look at certain pages and why that might occur to share what the story means them personally and why.

Table 3: Sample sentence frames for discussions that foster VL

VL Skills area	Sentence frames for students
Aesthetic skills	Simpler structures: The color/s make me feel…/ wonder if… /realize that… I like the image on page…. because… I feel I look at the page from (above, below). This makes me feel… More complex structures: I think the author used …. (water colors, thick paint, chalk, different paper) to make the reader think that…/feel as if…. The top down/bottom up/eye-to-eye level perspective causes an impression of…./makes the viewer experience….. The color/s of… evoke the feeling of… because…
Affective skills (compassion, emotions, relation to self, world, others)	Simpler structures: The detail from image reminds me of … (something in my world, another character in a story/historic event, current event) I feel for…. because…. If I were in this situation, I would…. More complex structures: The expression of…/event on this page causes me to think about … This story makes me want to …. help… by…..ing…. I can relate to… because I saw/read about… that…/I experienced something similar when….
Critical thinking	Simpler structures: I wonder/would like to know why… /if… I like/don’t like what…. did/happened because…. I predict/conclude that… because More complex structures: Seeing…(detail from image), I wonder if/why/when… Looking at (detail from image), I predict/infer/conclude that… I agree/disagree with how … (character action) because….
Story comprehension	Simpler structures: This page/story is about…./tells me that…. First, …. (action in story) and then…… (next action), then (next action). Lastly, (last action, resolution).… More complex structures: The main message of the story is…. I conclude this because…….catches my attention because…. Looking at… (detail from image), I get the impression that…. I think this story wants me to realize that…. T he story begins with….Then, …..Afterwards, … because…, the story continues with…, … Finally, … (more variety of transitions and sentences)
Dialog structures	Expressing Agreement I agree with you because I felt/thought…. I also wondered about…/asked myself why…. I also interpreted…. to mean… Expressing Difference Interesting. I see this totally differently. I understood (evidence from story)…. to mean.…. because… I understood/reacted to …. differently. For me, …… because…. As opposed to your interpretation/prediction/inference/reaction, I …predicted/inferred/ thought/felt…. because… I hear you- but I see … (character/problem/…) differently. For me, … because…. Comparing- contrasting When I compare your interpretation to mine, I see we overlap in…. But we see… differently. While you think…, I think…… Why do you…? How come? Even though I agree with you on…. , I interpreted…. differently because… For example, … Compared to what you said about…., I concluded…. Asking for clarification What exactly do you mean when you say….? Let me see if I understand you correctly. You are saying that….. Am I understanding this correctly? You mean to say….. Summarizing a peer’s comment So, in sum, you think…. because…. So, from your perspective, … because…. So, your group interpreted… Therefore, you…. Referring to a section in the book (to provide evidence) I infer/predict/ conclude that… I say that because on page x…. On page x/, do you see how the illustrator….? That makes me think/conclude/predict/infer that…. That gives me the feeling that… On the right/left top/bottom/in the middle of page…/, I noticed that… The…. on page x in the middle caught my attention because… This makes me think/predict/conclude/infer that….

For over 20 years, Dr. Elke Schneider has been a professor of literacy, special education, and multilingual learner education at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Nurturing Key Critical Literacies Through Visual Arts Pedagogy

Teaching

This post is written by Linda Cato. You can find out more about Linda at the bottom of this post.

The classroom is charged with an energy of quiet focus: ten students patiently mixing rainbows of watercolor on paint trays and carefully painting in rows of squares on pieces of large, gridded paper. The students work around one large “studio table” created by pushing together several desks, which allows for ease as they assist and encourage each other through what was initially seen as a painstaking task, but is now met with curiosity and reflection.

“I never knew I could mix so many colors with just three! And I never knew that I could see my feelings!” says one student.

“To be honest, I thought I was gonna hate this, but I feel so calm right now,” says another.

Visual arts pedagogy holds the inherent potential to foster literacy across disciplines, while also nurturing key critical literacies such as hope. Art making (and all creative work) is, in its greatest sense, an act of hope, a powerful pathway by which we bring forward what lies beyond words, engage in bold envisioning, and exercise the right to dream. Educator and scholar Jeff Duncan-Andrade defines critical hope as the ability to assess one’s environment through a lens of equity and justice while also envisioning the possibility of a better future (Dugan, 2017; Duncan- Andrade, 2009 as cited in Bishundat, Philip, and Gore, 2018). Following my curiosity regarding the classroom as an incubator of personal and community well-being, creativity, and literacy, I have been striving to design projects which nurture both critical literacy and critical hope, with a nod to SEL and visual art standards. My goal is to walk a path of discovery alongside my students, whereby we build the capacity and language to craft essential and provoking questions and invite expansive answers through our creative journeying, while laying the foundations for personal and collective transformation and growth.

The unit, based on watercolor technique and color theory, set us on a path of self-reflection and connection. Introduced towards the end of the term, it bridges what we have seen and heard from the artists explored in this course (Kusama, Wiley, Butler, Glinsky, Gee’s Bend Quilters, among others), linking their experiences to the students themselves, with a focus on the storytelling power of color. Color, along with other forms of creative expression, is a powerful tool that can be used to express personal narrative, work with challenging emotions, and foster positive states of mind. (The Foundation for Art and Healing, 2022).

We began by looking at and responding to art that emphasizes the color red. Students offered insights as to what the red felt like to them, and what stories the red was telling in each painting. For some students, red felt like agitation or anger, for others, celebration and love. From their discussions, it was clear that they understood the personal nature of color as well as its potential to evoke emotion.

After our initial discussion, I passed out large sheets of watercolor paper and asked each student to create a grid on the paper, using rulers and pencils. I then began a demonstration of how color families can be mixed from three root primary colors – red, yellow, and blue – modeling the creation of a watercolor rainbow of colors of varying brightness, intensity, and opacity. I used the demonstration as a think-aloud, reflecting out loud as I worked, using vocabulary specific to the visual arts discipline and this lesson (“I see that mixing complementary colors has a specific effect on the value of color”) and taking time to pause and look at my work in order to offer reflective questions,”I wonder how the story of this orange will change if I add two drops of green?” and “Ohhhh that looks a little more like a shadow color, gives me a low-energy feel”…. I also note that “As I fill in this grid with all these colors, I am reminded of how many emotions arise throughout my day, one after the other….. “, connecting the activity to wider learning and laying important groundwork for the individual reflections and class discussions to come.

After completing about a quarter of my grid, I invited students into the process, continuing to work alongside them for several minutes. Pausing my work, I circulated around the room, engaging students in reflection and inviting questions. Once students had filled in the grids, we paused for a mindful reflection on the process and on the myriad of colors that covered the table. Referring to the Feeling Wheel (Wilcox, 1982) they named their colors with the corresponding feeling, writing the emotion on each square. We closed the session with students sharing their completed grids along with insights into their experiences and learning, acknowledging not only how different the grids are from each other, but also how beautiful and satisfying it is to see them all together.

*Example of completed color grid: all colors are mixed from a root primary triad, and each color named based on the connection of color/emotion, specific to the student artist.*

The next step in our exploration was to create a self-portrait using the color mixing techniques. We began with a group share, with students identifying and sharing the dominant moods they have experienced over the past week. Most students reported feeling tired, sad, bored, and stressed. I invited the students to consider how we might use color to connect to states of joy, peace, calm, and ease while demonstrating some techniques they might use to sketch out the silhouette of a head and neck, which I then divided in half by drawing a line down the middle of the face from top to bottom. Once all students had completed their drawings, we referred back to the Feelings Wheel. I invited the students to choose one emotion they had felt in the past days, and then identify a contrasting emotion and to write them on their drawings, on either side of the face. Next, students were guided to mix two different palettes, each representing one of the emotions they chose to express. Using their mixed colors, they painted in the portrait, one half at a time.

As the class worked with care and focus, I circulated around the room, responding to questions and comments. When all the portraits were finished, we shared the art and some words about the overall experience. Some expressed surprise at how their mood lifted as they worked on this project, and overall the class agreed that they experienced feelings of hope after representing themselves in colors connected with positive emotions. The group share was definitely a moment of connection for the entire group: we had touched a moment of collective critical hope. Through the shared creative experience and dialogue, students understood multiple perspectives while still connecting to self.

Given the concerning statistics regarding adolescent mental health, it is imperative that we are supporting our students in their awareness and understanding of their emotions, helping them develop the skills and tools they can use throughout their lives. In this particular instance, creative work is the vehicle of exploration. Creative expression supports the development of emotional literacy by inviting curiosity and reflection. Emotional literacy is directly tied to critical literacy in that it empowers individuals to deepen their own self-awareness while equipping them with tools of self-advocacy. Critical literacy in turn lays the foundation for critical hope as students find courage to envision, engage in new ways of experiencing, and exercise their self-efficacy.

References

Bishundat, D., Phillip, D. V., & Gore, W. (2018). Cultivating critical hope: The too often forgotten dimension of critical leadership development. New directions for student leadership, 2018(159), 91-102.

The Foundation for Art and Healing, artandhealing.org 2022

Willcox, G. (1982). The Feeling Wheel: A Tool for Expanding Awareness of Emotions and Increasing Spontaneity and Intimacy. Transactional Analysis Journal, 12(4), 274-276.

This post is written by Linda Cato. You can follow Linda on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/lindacatoarts/.

Linda currently serves as a high school visual arts instructor with the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District, after relocating to NC from the desert Southwest. Following a strong interest in schools as spaces of wellness and healing, Linda recently completed certification in Social Emotional Arts through the UCLArts and Healing program. Linda’s wish for all students who pass through the classroom is that they touch joy and possibility, and experience the power of inquiry and bold imagining. Linda is also also a mixed-media visual artist with an active studio practice. The created art is grounded in observation and experimentation, and considers the interconnectedness of human experience, spirit, and the natural world.

Cover image credits.

Webinar: Transdisciplinarity as a Gateway to Critical Literacy

Announcements

Literacy in the Disciplines, 6-12 (LiD) is pleased to announce our next after-school Webinar Series session.

Traversing, Transforming, Transcending, and Transgressing wicked problems in the classroom.

Many critical societal problems are neither simple nor easily solved; they are wicked problems (Zellner & Campbell, 2015). A wicked problem is a social or cultural challenge that involves many social systems and groups, has unpredictable outcomes, and defies typical problem-solving techniques (Rittel & Webber, 1973). To address real-world, wicked problems, a transdisciplinary lens is needed to support educators and students as they engage with content in ways that extend beyond traditional academic boundaries (Alford & Head, 2017). Students experience deeper learning and start thinking outside the box when their teachers collaborate to present different aspects of the same subject across various disciplines. (Mauser et al., 2013). A transdisciplinary lens allows one to construct meaning in more authentic contexts where
disciplines intersect, combine, and work together (Rice, 2013). This session will define transdisciplinarity and provide teachers with techniques to expand critical literacy opportunities in their classrooms.

When: This webinar was held on Tuesday, December 28th, 2022, 6:00 – 7:00 pm ET.

The slide deck for the presentation is embedded below.

The video recording of this session is available below.

Cost: Free. LiD6-12 is funded by the South Carolina Middle Grades Initiative.

This session featured Dr. W. Ian O’Byrne.

Cost: Free. LiD6-12 is funded by the South Carolina Middle Grades Initiative.

This session will feature Dr. W. Ian O’Byrne

Dr. W. Ian O’Byrne (@wiobyrne) is an associate professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. His research focuses on individuals’ dispositions and literacy practices as they read, write, and communicate in online and/or hybrid spaces. Ian is the author of many journal articles and book chapters focusing on initiatives ranging
from online and hybrid coursework, integrating technology in the classroom, computational thinking, and supporting marginalized students in literacy practices. His work can be found on his website or in his weekly newsletter.

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Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Webinar: What does Critical Literacy have to do with my Teaching?

Announcements

Literacy in the Disciplines, 6-12 (LiD) is pleased to announce our next after-school Webinar Series session.

What does Critical Literacy have to do with my Teaching?

Learning through a critical literacy lens encourages students to take steps toward identifying potential solutions to current, real-world problems (Vasquez et al., 2019). They can do this when educators ask
them to explore “personal, sociopolitical, economic and intellectual border identities” when they read (Bishop, 2014, p. 52), and to promote valid, thoughtful critique of the power structures they either are subjected to or that are upheld in their classrooms. This session will define critical literacy and provide frameworks and techniques for teachers to begin exploring this concept in their classrooms.

When: Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022, 6:00 – 7:00 pm ET.

The recording of this event is embedded below.

Cost: Free. LiD6-12 is funded by the South Carolina Middle Grades Initiative.

This session will feature Drs. Rachelle Savitz and Jennifer D. Morrison.

Dr. Rachelle S. Savitz is an associate professor of reading/literacy at East Carolina University. Her scholarship investigates teacher self-efficacy, literacy within the disciplines, and the use of culturally sustaining pedagogy and practices. She worked across the grade levels as a reading teacher, literacy coach, reading interventionist, and music teacher. She has three published/in-press books and has been published in such journals as Teaching and Teaching Education, Literacy Research and Instruction, Whiteness and Education, and Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. She serves as the President of LiD 6-12.

Dr. Jennifer D. Morrison is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina and a National Board Certified Teacher. She worked as a middle and high school English teacher and instructional coach for 19 years. Her research agenda focuses on teacher induction, literacy attainment (particularly digital and multimodal), and teacher inquiry processes. She has been published in such journals as: English Journal, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Talking Points, Principal Leadership, and Educational Leadership. She serves as the interim Vice President and Secretary of LiD 6-12.

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Seeing Themselves in the Text: Exploring How Critical Literacy Aids in Student’s Examining Their Position in the Spaces They Occupy

Teaching

By: Steven Jernigan, South Carolina English Language Arts Teacher

In her 2021 inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb,” poet Amanda Gorman says, “We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black / girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can / dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.” The quote establishes Gorman’s position in the pageantry as the public figure representing art and youth and diversity, while also fully cementing that position in the context of the arduous journey it took to get there – her personal history and the country’s alike. There’s more in that poem – and moment – that is worth dissecting and poring over, but it is that line specifically – high visibility and positioning oneself within the narrative – that there lies a connection between culturally sustaining pedagogy and student’s emotional wellbeing. Author Jennifer Buehler (2019) writes, “We are always making sense of our own and others’ lives in terms of storylines that tell us what to expect in social situations” (pg. 12). Here, Gorman is providing the narrative and the storyline wherein Black children – Black girls specifically – can be seen and heard and admired. One must ask however, what happens if that narrative is not the dominating one in the classroom? It should lead to educators asking questions of their practice such as: What storylines and narratives are we presenting to our students? Furthermore, what are these stories conveying about a student’s own position in the classroom and the world around them?

Narratives in the ELA Classroom

During my time as an English teacher, these questions have served as the basis for most of the teaching decisions. The texts we choose to read in class, if not directly offering students the ability to see themselves in the classroom, are often centered around discourse and writing where students examine and analyze their position both in the classroom and broader society as a whole. Authors Baker-Bell, Butler, and Johnson (2017), in their article “The Pain and the Wounds: A Call for Critical Race English Education in the Wake of Racial Violence,” highlight how English teachers “invoke racial violence when we don’t cultivate critical media literacies that Black and Brown youth can use to critique, rewrite, and dismantle the damaging narratives that mainstream media has written about them” (pg. 124). While the call here is to provide students with the tools and knowledge for how to identify and rectify the power structures they are subjected to and perhaps even uphold, the consequence of not doing so should not go unnoticed – the continued upholding of a system that enacts violence on the bodies of Black and Brown youth. And while that consequence provides enough justification for critical examination in the classroom, it is worth noting that research (Andolina & Gonklin, 2019; Scriuba, 2014) suggests engaging students in such practices promotes the building of empathy, importance of community, and need for equity within our students.

Creating a Culturally Sustaining ELA Environment

In specifically addressing these questions and concerns in my classroom this year, I and the other English 2 teachers have centered our world literature curriculum around the pairing of whole class text with student choice, YA novels. As a whole, our school has actively engaged in students doing some version of self selected, independent reading. At its best, this practice was used to dedicate one day a week to sustained reading with perhaps a whole class discussion follow up. At its worst however, it was used to fill time after quizzes and tests. While there is nothing inherently wrong with using time after assessment as an opportunity to get students to read, we felt that this year there was something more we could do. So, we went about finding YA books that fit with the more traditional texts that had been a part of the curriculum for years. In our reading of Shakespeare’s Othello for example, we are having students choose from a selection of works that sit systemic racism as a central conflict in their narratives. We are then setting aside one day a week to the readings of these choice texts. During these readings, we will also be breaking students up into groups where they will participate in conversations around text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world comparisons. In addition, the students will be maintaining blogs as a space to talk about their conversations and overall impressions from their study of the two works of literature. A project similar to this – students created text sets that related to central ideas of their two novels – was done with the reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; those projects allowed for some excellent conversation around the ways in which societies – both our own and others – struggle with progress and tradition.

Aside from fully revamping a course’s entire curriculum however, there are other ways to get storylines and narratives into the classroom that have students examine, critique, and see themselves in the world they occupy. In my English 3 American Literature course, this has been done by examining poetry like Amanda Gorman’s. In looking at poetry as both a form of argumentation and as emotional expression, students are reading Gorman’s and Angelou’s inaugural poems to see how poets – Black poets specifically – were using their craft to discuss and critique American society. The students are to not only examine the argument present in both these works, but to identify challenges and obstacles that are present in their own lives and communities that could be addressed with poetry too. While the dream would be to have a room full poet laureates that all have my class to thank as their genesis, the overall goal is for these students to see themselves as agents of change in their own world – to position themselves in places they are heard, seen, and appreciated.

The specific practices offered here sit not as quick fixes to systemic, holistic problems, but rather as a push to get educators to acknowledge the narratives and stories elevated in their classroom. As noted in Kristina Montero’s book review of Paris and Alim’s Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (2017), creating a more equitable world for our students means rooting out the white supremacist and colonial practices that have and continue to pervade our field. Doing so, requires self-examination and identification of our own role in the maintenance of a system that oppresses and silences. In other words, the work is inward as much as it is outward. As noted by Gorman however, “For there is always light / If only we are brave enough to see it / If only we are brave enough to be it.”

References:

Andolina, M. W., & Conklin, H. G. (2020). Fostering Democratic and Social-Emotional Learning in Action Civics Programming: Factors That Shape Students’ Learning From Project Soapbox. American Educational Research Journal, 57(3), 1203–1240. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219869599

Baker-Bell, A., Butler, T., Johnson, L. (2017). The Pain and the Wounds: A Call for Critical Race English Education in the Wake of Racial Violence. English Education, volume 49 (2), 115-129. Retrieved From https://library.ncte.org/journals/ee/issues/v49-2/28917.

Buehler, Jennifer (2019). Positioning Theory: Exploring power, Social Location, and Moral Choices of the American Dream in American Street. In R. Ginsberg and W. J. Glenn (Eds.), Engaging with Multicultural YA Literacy in the Secondary Classroom (pp. 11-21). Taylor and Francis Group.

Montero, M. (2019). Creating Cultural Sustenance in the Classroom: A Review of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(6), 698–701. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.956Sciurba, Katie (2014).

Texts as Mirrors, Texts as Windows: Black Adolescent Boys and the Complexities of Textual Relevance. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 58( 4), 308– 316. doi: 10.1002/jaal.358.

About the Author

Steven Jernigan has three years of teaching experience and is currently an English Language Arts teacher in Greenville, South Carolina and a Graduate Student in the Literacy Masters Program at Clemson University.

Book reference	Content description	Ideas for use in content areas
Tan, S. (2007). The arrival. Arthur A. Levine Books. ISBN: 978-0439895293 Virtual version: short https://youtu.be/vAay4myoEDE?si=KVj4wH2VR9mxl6pT	Through detailed imagery in red charcoal drawings, readers learn about the emotional and physical hardships of one immigrant’s journey who in the end reunites with his family. Over 60 detailed images of immigrants of all ages in the end pages allow for varied, adolescent-appropriate critical aesthetic, social-emotional reflections.	*Social studies: migration history of the United States; relating images to historic events (i.e., WWI, II imprisoner treatments) ELA: sequence of events for one or several characters, identifying emotions orally and in writing, cause-and effect, impact of different visual perspectives and aesthetics on the interpretation of visual information Geography: identifying criteria for, cause and effects of ports of migration, drawing cause-effect graphics for geographic locations Science*: Using facial expressions of characters of various generations to discuss aging processes and causes;
Wiesner, D. (2006). Flotsam. Clarion Books. ISBN: 978-0618194575 Virtual version: https://youtu.be/3MTKWnxzqvM	In intricately detailed, often fantasy-driven water-color images, readers follow a teen who discovers an old camera at the beach that reveals lives of those who owned it in the past.	*Social Studies: Identifying details of photographs for historic fact interpretations ELA:* Usingimage details, practice describing details of sequence of events, items and characters with reasoning, or cause-effect, meaning discoveries of factual and fantasy elements. *Geography: Researching where the camera was prior to getting to the teen with reasoning based on photographs in the camera. Science*: Researching flotsam items from the story and others that can be studied scientifically; discussing the impact of water, salt/nature on certain materials over time.
Wiesner, D. (2011). Tuesday. Clarion Books. ISBN: 978-0395870822 Virtual version: https://youtu.be/JtQ4DdzCZMA?si=aI2OrD-T2nE9wulJ	On a Tuesday night, frogs fly on lily pads to town to visit the town causing confusion before returning to their pond. The next week, pigs seem to be doing the same. This fantasy is illustrated in colorful, realistic watercolor technique displaying expressive, detailed animal and human faces.	*Social studies: Impact of the unusual on communities; cultural symbolism of frogs/pigs ELA: Discussing fantasy elements and their explicit or implicit message through colors, perspectives and actions in visuals; personality studies of characters; symbolism Science:* Discussing the importance of gravity; researching what dreams are and how imagery gets created in the brain; life cycles of frogs
Banyai, I. (1998). Zoom. Puffin Books ISBN: 978-0140557749 Virtual version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgi-RCEjOLw	Via detailed, colorful images, readers are taken in surprising image sequences from a farm to a city, a ship, and an island providing ample practice	*ELA: Making predictions with supporting details and reasons; making hypotheses based on retracing evidence Science: Discussing how hypotheses are made, on what revising hypotheses is based, and how hypotheses are tested based on detailed images Geography:* Discussing where on earth the different sites could be and how they could relate using details provided in the images *Social studies*: Discussing differences, similarities and historic events that influence community lives; discussion of time period based on details in imagery
Banyai, I. (1998). Re-Zoom. Puffin Books ISBN: 978-0140556940	Readers are taken on a twisted image journey from an Egyptian pyramid to a jungle and a beach by zooming out of color-and-detail rich images that invite predictions turning page by page.	*ELA: Making predictions with supporting details and reasons; making hypotheses based on retracing evidence Geography:* Discussing where on earth the different sites could be and how they could relate using details provided in the images *Science: Experiencing how hypotheses are created and tested based on interpreting images; comparing jungle habitats to desert habitats in Egypt; discussing how perception is impacted by angles of selections if imagery; Social Studies*: Engaging in Egyptian culture studies based on detailed images and beyond