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- Recommended Reading
- Reading Images
- Understanding Comics
- the rise of the image
- the fall of the word
- The Alphabet Versus the
- Goddess
- Try these School Tools
- Sensory Notes
- What's the Big Idea?
- Target Notes
- Grahpic Notes
- Episodic Notes
- Timeline Notes
- daVinci Notes
- Required Software
- Adobe Acrobat Reader (Free)
- RealPlayer (Free)
- QuickTime (Free)
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- Join the Conversation
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- Additional Resources
- Reading the Media
- Recommended Readings
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Overview
An important part of the arguments made throughout Illuminating Texts is that ours is becoming a more visual, image-based world. Links and resources found on this page are central to that argument. Images are not limited to photographs but mean, instead, any content we are asked to read for its visual details. In this context even an original document like the Declaration of Independence could, in part, be read as an image. Other examples of images that require reading might include: memorials, photographs, art works, and maps.
Digital Companion
Assignments
These assignments provide a range of examples of the kind of skills and activities that teach students to read images.
- Assignment: The Art of Persuasion: Originally done as part of a unit on propoganda while reading All Quiet on the Western Front with sophomores, this assignment asks them to read (i.e., analyze, compare, interpret) images, then create their own. We focused on German and American propoganda posters from World War Two and public service announcements.
- Assignment: Reading a Photograph: While studying Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, my sophomores were also studying the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, especially his poems in Dien Cai Dau which deal with his experiences in Vietnam.
Resources
These are "tools" I use in my own wor and, more importantly, in the classroom. Look here for tools to help you plan, design, prepare, read, write, or think. When possible, I include exemplars of students' work to show you how these tools can be used.
- Worksheet: Reading Photographs: This link takes you to a worksheet created by the National Archives staff. They provide additional worksheets to help you read other types of documents. Click here to see their complete list of worksheets.
Links
Miscellaneous links to sites that will help or interest you and your students.
- National Geographic Mapmaker (Reading Maps and Information): This award-winning site offers access to more maps than you'll ever read and offers suggestions on how to read them and other types of geographic information provided.
- The Dorothea Lange Photographic Archive: Housed at the Oakland Museum, Lange's photographs provide a powerful and useful set of images for the classroom. Many teachers studying the Depression and authors like John Steinbeck will find this site invaluable.
- Making Sense of Modern Art: "Focusing on key works in the Museum's permanent collection, the newest version of MSoMA provides an engaging guide to modern and contemporary art." (from SFMOMA web site)
- Reading a Memorial: The Lincoln Memorial This page is part of the National Archives' Digital Classroom resources. The Lincoln Memorial has been used for so many symbolic occasions, events that created some of our most enduring modern images (e.g., the March on Washington culminating in King's "I Have a Dream" speech) that it is worth taking time to examine the image of the monument itself and how that image is used by different groups for symbolic purposes.
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