Lynn Sanders Bustle

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Scattered around Donna's classroom, students work in various degrees of contortion—lying or crouching on the floor, legs thrown out while they create finger paintings representing their interpretations of Paul Zindel's play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1999). Around the corner, in Linda's art room, students crane over pencil drawings, continuously glancing back and forth between their drawings and the still life they have chosen to draw. Down the hall, Nora thumbs through a "signature book" created by one of her eighth-grade students. Each signature book houses a collection of words, pictures, poetry, phrases, research reports, and anything else that the students think reflects the issue of human rights.

Like many teachers, Donna, Linda, and Nora value and incorporate visual meaning-making devices or visual representations into their curriculum to help students learn. They understand that images have become a basic cultural phenomenon—a ubiquitous and influential aspect of the current age (Bustle, 2003). Technological advancements as well as the dominance of film, television, and other mass media offer new challenges for teaching and learning that include a clearer understanding of the role of visual representation. Hammerberg (2001) explained, "Whether or not teachers teach the conventions of printed text in the classroom, conventions of communication are changing in the rest of the world" (p. 214).

As we look into the classrooms of Donna, Linda, and Nora, we have the opportunity to (a) develop an understanding of how and why teachers use visual representations and (b) explore the role visual representations play in the assessment and evaluation of learning.

Explorations of the Visual

The term visual representation is used purposefully to include a wide range of visual meaning-making devices and symbols. Although visual representations are considered important as meaning-making devices across theoretical constructs, little has been done to examine their role in the assessment and evaluation of learning in all areas of the curriculum. Evaluation remains at the forefront of U.S. national debate (Kohn, 2001). Now, more than ever, we need to find authentic and purposeful ways to assess and evaluate visual components and the personal, expressive, critical, and aesthetic qualities that make visual representation so powerful and essential. Recent trends in standardized testing have unfortunately heightened traditional approaches to the teaching of reading and writing, which has further marginalized the role of visual representations in literacy learning at all levels. Marginalization of the visual intensifies as students move to upper grade levels where, over time, they are asked to replace image with text. The value of visual representation decreases as textual representation increases. Coupled with an increased focus on preparation for college entrance exams in high schools, students' engagements with visual modes of understanding decrease even further. It is almost ironic that, at a time when young people are becoming credible consumers of mass media and popular culture, curricular standards and pedagogical practices move further from real-life engagements with media to more traditional approaches to teaching and learning. Hobbs (1997) explained,

Our students are growing up in a world saturated with media messages, messages that fill the bulk of their leisure time.... Yet, students receive little or no training in the skills of analyzing or re-evaluating these messages, many of which make use of language, moving images, music, sound effects, special visual effects and other techniques that powerfully affect our emotional response. (p. 7)

In other words, visual representations—the most accessible, plentiful, and powerful meaning-making devices in young peoples lives—are left largely unexplored and unchallenged in the current U.S. educational system.

It is essential that we educate students about modes of representations that continue to shape their worlds. To do so, educators must first embrace visual representation as a valued tool for understanding not as an accessory, frill, or add-on (Shephard, 1993). Second, educators must carefully examine how and why they use visual representations in their classrooms and explore new ways they might employ them in their practice. Finally, educators need to examine the role of visual representation in the assessment and evaluation of learning. The following contextual vignettes show how and why teachers use visual representations.

Donna: Finger Painting—A Writer's Tool

Activities such as finger painting are common practice for Donna, who views visual representation as just one of many tools students can use to help themselves better understand and represent language. She carefully considers which visual medium will work best to communicate understandings she wants students to experience. In one particular project, Donna wanted students to better understand the relational aspects between characters in the play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Zindel, 1999) and to write more descriptively. She purposely chose finger painting because the medium is not literal. By using finger paint, students were forced to work like abstract expressionists, capturing their character in art elements such as line, color, texture, and shape. (Unlike a paintbrush or a pencil, fingers or hands free the artist to react expressively rather than literally.) This worked well, especially considering the play was about complex relationships.

Donna discovered that the placement of the visual within a larger series of activities is critical. For example, she often takes students through a series of explorations in a single project. They may read text, write reflectively, draw, and write again. In the finger-painting project, students first read Zindel's play and then constructed lists of words describing the characters. Next, students selected one character and created a finger painting representing that character. After completing their paintings, students returned to their list and selected words that best supported their painting. Then they wrote or glued descriptive words from their original list onto the painting. Finally, students wrote a short paragraph describing their work. One student described her painting in this way:

I did my picture about Beatrice, who stands out to me the most in this play. I found her paranoid and angry with the world. This is why I did lots of red. I also did the fire because of this. The blue dots were sort of a brick wall closing her off from the world, or the light. I did a white spot in the middle of the fire because it seemed like she was closing off the part of her self that was helpless and afraid. I did colored lines because she likes to draw attention to herself.

This student used her painting as a guide to explain her text by giving visual elements such as color meaning and describing the placement of visual elements to indicate the character's relationship to the world and others. The finger-painting process gave her new language to describe and better understand characters and relationships.

After implementing this project as well as similar ones, Donna discovered that it is best for students to create "the picture between the writing," because the visual process helps them tap into the words that they might otherwise never find. These projects have reaffirmed her belief that visual processes provide scaffolding that increases motivation and interest; improves comprehension; and fosters higher level, abstract, and critical thinking. Like other teachers, Donna sees visual representation as a means for "leveling the playing field" across ability, allowing all students "to shine."

Figure 1
Finger painting in Donna's classroom

Photo by Lynn Sanders Bustle

Linda: Visual Representation As Skill, Perception, and Art

One seventh-grade art student chose to represent what might, at first glance, have looked like one of the simpler still-life arrangements in class. A second glance revealed how light from an overhead lamp complicated and strengthened the play of light on the bowl, while the reflection of the bowl played out on the surface of the lamp. These subtleties challenged this girl to realistically represent what she saw in still life. To achieve realism in her artwork, she studied and practiced creating value (light and dark), proportion, placement, and the simulation of texture. She has developed a repertoire of skills and visual symbols to represent her interpretation.

This project is typical of those Linda teaches in her classes on two-dimensional art, where she helps students learn how to visually represent understandings of their worlds. Linda defines visual understanding as a process that involves looking carefully at things, developing skills, and studying artists in the field. Just as students study poets to better understand how they might write poetry, students learn about visual representation through the study of artists and the symbols they use to make meaning. In addition, students must develop skills that might include reproducing implied textures and representing correct proportions, use of space, contrast, and so on.

Like other teachers, Linda recognizes the ability of the arts to reach different learning styles, as well as their power to unearth individual expression. According to Linda, "Some students do not learn by reading. If they just read something and they don't experience it with something hands-on, it's very difficult." At the same time, Linda sees strong similarities between art and writing: "Creating [art] is just like the writing process. You break it down into steps. You have a plan—sketches, brainstorming. Even before you write you need an outline." Linda encourages students to write imaginatively using unique points of view to describe or title their artwork. She has found that students have an easier time writing after they create their visual image because it is something that they have experienced, something that they can see, something that is there and that they can write about.

Figure 2
Student art from Linda's classroom

Photo by Lynn Sanders Bustle

Nora: Internalizing Understanding Through Empathetic Engagements With Artful Processes

"My Heart Skips A Beat"

Gone.

How could you be gone?

You fought for your country.

I stood and watched you go.

Each time you left, my heart skipped a beat.

World War II....

I hear on the radio, "The U.S. has entered the War."

You leave; my heart skips a beat....
(by Sarah, an eighth grader)

Sarah creates an image of love and loss through a text that's riddled with questions, punctuated with history, and achingly poignant. Her poem was included in a signature book she created out of colored construction paper, mat board, magazine and newspaper photographs, and duct tape.

Nora constantly works to deepen students' understanding of language arts concepts and human rights issues by weaving together powerful literature, poetry, theater, and visual representations into daily explorations. Although visual representation plays a significant role in her curriculum, Nora speaks more broadly of the emotive power of arts as a whole to help students internalize understanding:

I am totally convinced that having an art type of component is a way for the children to internalize what they've learned. And then to have a venue to express that and to show that is another learning mode, and it's every bit as important as reading and writing and math and music.

On the basis of her experiences, Nora believes that, while traditional research papers help students collect factual information on their topics of study, artistic or expressive engagements help students make deeply personal, introspective, and emotive connections between new information and themselves—and these engagements allow them to internalize information.

Research just because of what it is, is an objective form for looking into a topic. You don't use the word I. You don't say, "I think," "I feel." You don't say, "[T]his is terrible and it makes me cry when I read about it" [or] "People ought not to do these things." Well, that's what I think...that is what the art component does...it internalizes.

Because human rights issues are often fraught with powerful images and textual representations of injustice, students commonly find themselves emotionally grazed if not deeply wounded by issues never before explored. Nora explained, "You're hearing about all of these atrocities and [for] a lot of these children...it's the first time, and they are blown away...." For Nora, the arts are a powerful tool for expressing emotional response to information. The arts serve as expressive scaffolding that taps emotive and affective ways of knowing so that students can begin to make empathetic connections to human rights issues.

Figure 3
A signature book from Nora's classroom

Photo by Lynn Sanders Bustle

Confronting Complexities

Better understanding how and why these teachers use visual representation illuminates some of the complexities surrounding the interpretation of visual representation. These complexities play an important role in the assessment and evaluation of visual representation. For example, the teachers in this article speak of visual representations as both a process for and representation of understanding. I make this distinction because visual understanding occurs on many levels throughout a process of visual creation and through the study of the visual representation itself. For example, students learn while they finger-paint, and they learn by looking at what they have painted. Language allows us to make distinctions between our processes and what we produce; however, an exact time when understanding takes shape along a continuum of exploration and representation is vague.

These teachers are comfortable with the idea that learning may take place along a continuum and that, to best understand whether a student has learned, they often have to look at several forms of representation, such as language, to assess learning. Often learning is not confined to one modality; rather, it occurs through transmediation. "Transmediation occurs when meanings formed in one communication system are recast in the context and expression planes of a new sign system (for example, we take something we know verbally and recast it in art)" (Leland & Harste, 1994, p. 340). Although Donna uses visual tools, her evaluation of learning lies with textual expressions of understanding as she seeks to learn whether students have "made connections" between their visual exploration and their new understanding of language concepts. She asks, "Did they make a connection from their reading to their writing? Do they understand it?" and relies greatly on "how they describe their work" (the oral) to understand what they have learned. In essence, overall assessment of learning still lies with language. Donna said, "I think assessment would just be in their discussion [of their visual].... If they can tell me why they choose something and why they put that on there, I think that is what I would assess more than their artwork."

Nora also recognizes the role of conversation and language-based written reflection as a necessary tool for confirming understanding. Part of this process is supported by her commitment to having students work on visual representations in class. It gives her an opportunity to talk to her students, assess their progress, and evaluate effort while they work. The interaction she has with her students has an impact on their overall evaluation.

Like her content area colleagues, Linda incorporates literacy practices into her classroom. She feels that, just as visual representations in content area classrooms work as scaffolding to help students better understand content, language-related processes serve as scaffolding to help art students better understand art content. Students often complete in-process checklists that act as self-assessments and encourage them to make decisions to revise their work. Students also complete final written critiques of their work and the work of others. Critiques might ask students to define terms, such as contour or texture, as well as evaluate skill level represented in their drawings. Because Linda's content focuses on visual representation, it makes sense that her assessment and evaluation should focus on visual qualities. Her strategies offer helpful insights into possible considerations for the assessment and evaluation in content areas.

Although the teachers tend to focus on the assessment of content area learning, they did consider visual qualities in their evaluations. Nora assesses signature books by looking at completion, effort, and selection of images. She also considers how well the selection of images symbolizes the topic under study, as well as craftsmanship. Craftsmanship might include whether or not pictures are thoughtfully cut out. In contrast, Donna felt conflicted by her ability to assess artwork. She explained that accessing art is very difficult because "What is right and what is wrong?"

All of the teachers cite effort as an important consideration in assessment and evaluation. Teachers are comfortable assessing effort because of their ability to "kid-watch," talk to students in process, and know their students. Effort is defined as "going beyond or doing more." Effort might be demonstrated in their work by putting pictures on both sides of the page or word-processing textual entries.

Suggestions

The teachers in these vignettes can offer us possible strategies, such as the following, for thoughtfully incorporating and evaluating visual representations.

• Reflect on your conceptualization of visual representation and how it fits in your content area. Ask yourself why you are using visual representation in a lesson.
  
  
• Use language-related activities (oral or written) in conjunction with visual representation to better determine if learning has taken place.
  
  
• Carefully consider where, within larger processes, visual representation would best fit to aid in learning and, on the basis of this role, consider the kind of assessment that might best be employed.
  
  
• Carefully consider what visual medium is best suited to the goal of your lesson.
  
  
• Construct and communicate specific guidelines up front to help students with the creation of visuals. Don't assume too much.
  
  
• Construct and communicate criteria for the assessment of visual representation at the beginning of a project. Criteria can be revisited and reflected on in process by providing checklists and other self-assessment strategies. Criteria may change from project to project, yet it might include (a) the demonstration of an understanding of content, (b) completion of the project, (c) effort, and (d) visual requirements (e.g., at least 10 images in a signature book).
  
  
• Choose your words carefully. For example, if craftsmanship is a criterion, carefully define what this means.
  

I realize that we have only begun to scratch the surface of this topic. Yet, I believe that valuing visual representations-regardless of media-lies within our ability as educators to assess our own understanding and to look closely at the learning that takes place as students engage with visual symbols. There is still much to be learned from continued conversations related to visual representation and assessment.

References

Bustle, L. (Ed.). (2003). Image, inquiry, and transformative practice: Engaging learners in creative and critical inquiry through visual representation. New York: Peter Lang.
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Hammerberg, D. (2001). Reading and writing "hypertextually": Children's literature, technology, and early writing instruction. Language Arts, 78, 207-215.
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Hobbs, R. (1997). Literacy for the information age. In J. Flood, S.B. Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (pp. 7-13). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.
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Kohn, A. (2001). Fighting the tests: A practical guide to rescuing our schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 82, 349-357.
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Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2001, January). Do we have your attention? New literacies, digital technologies and the education of adolescents. Paper presented at the State of the Art Conference, Athens, GA.

Leland, H., & Harste, J. (1994). Multiple ways of knowing: Curriculum in a new key. Language Arts, 71, 337-345.
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Luke, C. (2001, January). Re-crafting media and ICT literacies. Paper presented at the New Literacies and Digital Technologies Conference, Athens, GA.

Shephard, R. (1993). Elementary media education: The perfect curriculum. English Quarterly, 25, 35.
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Zindel, P. (1999). The effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds. Topeka, KS: Econo-Clad Books.
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About the Author

Bustle teaches art education at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (Department of Visual Arts, PO Box 43850, Lafayette, LA 70504-3850, USA).

Lori Norton-Meier is the Media Literacy department editor and welcomes reader comments. E-mail nortonme@iastate.edu. Mail Lori Norton-Meier, Iowa State University, Curriculum and Instruction Department, N107 Lagomarcino, Ames, IA, 50011, USA.


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Citation: Bustle, L.S. (2004, February). The role of visual representation in the assessment of learning [Media Literacy department]. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 47(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/jaal/2-04_column/index.html