What do you see?

By Mary Caldwell

Recently I began a “looking” activity with my students. These activities are simple things that you can do as a teacher, guardian or parent that will get your student/child involved in taking notice of their surroundings. It helps make them more aware of things and it also helps them to develop a complete understanding of what’s happening around them. For instance, I walked into the school building yesterday with something noticeably different about my appearance. The adults gave me a second look but couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but just “knew something was DIFFERENT”. My students on the other hand took a quick assessment of my appearance and immediately identified what was wrong or out of place. 

(Suggestions that you can use in your classroom: A missing shoe, earring, glasses, backwards sweater or jacket)

The following week, I did a visual literacy exercise with my students that was straight forward. I didn’t provide a title, I just simply asked them to look at a print of a painting and ask for them to tell me what the painting was about. Here are a few of the statements I received, “They’re fighting”  “He’s trying to kill him”… “It’s not good, they are about to fight”….Then I asked them do you think this happened in the past, present or future? Their quick response was unanimous with the “past”. I then asked them how they came up with their answer know and one young man replied, “just look at their clothes…he’s wearing a dress with shoulder pads and he got a sword” This painting was obviously not in the context that they were used to seeing. Next, I asked how this same scene would look if it was painted with people from their communities. How would it be different? I got great answers in response as to how the weapon would be different as well as the clothes and the type of house the people would be in. 

Doing this exercise literally invited them to think abstractly and use any prior knowledge that they owned themselves to decode what was really happening in the painting and also think about any changes that could be made to it to establish the painting differently.

What do you see?

Donato Creti
Alexander the Great Threatened by His Father, probably 1700/1705
Samuel H. Kress Collection
1961.9.6

Donato Creti Alexander the Great Threatened by His Father, probably 1700/1705 Samuel H. Kress Collection 1961.9.6

Image from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.2011

http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=46105&image=8876&c=