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The "Eye Generation"
Submitted by Jim Brown on July 11, 2007 - 9:33am
Rodney sent me this article in the Washington Post, The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It:
Because visual literacy is not required in schools, she says, "this generation's ability to assign meaning to the visual texts of others is passive and still needs a great deal more work. They are easily manipulated as students, consumers and citizens."
In other words, students today need to be taught, through images, how to think critically.
This is a familiar refrain, right? Well, last week I was reminded of how really OLD this type of argument is. I was watching Blackboard Jungle - a film that did a lot to create the category of "Juvenile Delinquent" in the 1950s. The story has been redone a great deal in recent years. Higher Learning comes to mind. But, more to the point, Blackboard Jungle was trotting out this "visual learners" argument in 1955. One of the ways that the teacher in the film reaches his students is by showing them a cartoon and then having them analyze the stories. After having such success with these leather jacket wearing hooligans, other teachers ask him what he's doing differently. I wish I could find the exact quote, but he explains that "kids these days" are visual learners...that you have to meet them on their own terms if you really want to reach them.
My point is this: literacy is more than words on a page. But this isn't a new development. Yes, maybe we're more attuned to different literacies these days, but it seems that the makers of Blackboard Jungle were attuned to these in 1955 as well. It seems that for some time now we've been trying to figure out why it's hard to teach..without really stopping to recognize that it's really hard to teach.
Don't get me wrong. I'm pretty sure that there are some new skills that we have to impart to students in a world of electronic texts. A great deal of pedagogy (my own included) is based on this assumption. However, I think it's also important to keep in mind that some of the challenges we face are not necessarily brand new.
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Washington Post linked to this
In case anyone's interested, The Post actually linked back to this post.
Using Technorati, The Washington Post provides links to the blogs that talk about their articles. Check out the "Who's Blogging" box on the "Eye Generation" article and you'll see a link to this blog post.
Oy
This part makes my head hurt:
So ... how is it that she's "inspired by books" that she doesn't read? Nice cover illustrations? Cliff's notes? Somebody summarizing the plot?
Literacy and transmissibility
One of the things that struck me about this article is how narrowly it imagines the ways we teach "thinking critically." That is, not only are these diagnoses ("kids these days prefer visual media...", and so forth) not new (and, hence, nor are calls that we reexamine our pedagogical assumptions in light of changes in the ways kids interact with the world), we must have a pretty thin conception of the kinds of literacy we teach and practice in our classrooms if we think the skills aren't transmissible to new forms of media. Not that applying skills that we use to read novels, say, can't be supplemented when new forms of texts comprise new elements, but, yeah, since, as Jim says, literacy is more than recognizing and decoding words on a page, we ought to worry about what we've been teaching if it needs to radically change for students to be able to think critically about meanings assigned to visual texts.
Eye-yi-yi
One thing I noticed was the author's claim that "Schwartz is trying to... give meaningful literary lessons to his students using visuals," which comes after he describes an incident in which Schwartz got frustrated with his students and told them to "Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"
This makes me wonder about the relationship between literacies in text and image.
On the one hand, I want to say that resistance to students' engagement and abilities, like what Schwartz displays in the second quote, is maybe a major reason that the "problem" of image literacy remains. I agree with Jim that the visual culture "problem" is not new and that it is hard to teach real (some may say "critical") visual literacy. But I think that maybe part of the staying power of these difficulties is due to "our" reluctance or inability to "go with it" when students start on a track like this. "We" seem to keep saying, at one and the same time, "oh yeah, the kids these days, (or, my fav: "now-a-days") they're so much more visual than us old textual farts," and "darnit, why don't you kids understand how to 'read' images." Is there something wrong with that? Unlike Rodney, I want to think that textual literacy only transfers to visual-acy (?) to the extent that so called "visual culture" is also, largely, still textual culture. I want to think there is something very unique and not-text-like about images and this uniqueness is most important. Maybe "these darn kids" get something that "we" don't.
At the same time, I notice that Schwartz's complaint is just the opposite of one I've heard from people who teach required literature classes. They tend to get frustrated by students' attempts to compare what happens in the texts they read to what happens in their lives. At least some literature professors would, I think, be rather pleased if their students constantly considered how pieces of a text were related to other pieces and other texts.
I don't know, though. In the end, I like movies better. They waste less time.
writing with images
One thing that's been lost in our whole discussion here is this: Why is the study of "visual rhetoric" or "visual culture" (I don't even know what this means, really), limited to CRITIQUE? It seems we often stop at the level of critique and never get to the level of invention....that is, of writing.
Two books I've read this summer have gotten me thinking in this direction: Jeff Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool and Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment. Both Rice and Rickert are concerned with (among other things) cultural studies pedagogies that stop at the level of analysis. This is not the old production vs. hermeneutics debate - it is something much more. If we're teaching in a multimedia age, then we need to be teaching multimedia writing. Rather than critiquing films, maybe we should be having students make them? Rather than critiquing pictures, maybe we should be assigning video essays?
Inevitably, a comment such as mine gets this response: Where's the writing? That is, many will say that what I'm advocating isn't really writing. Considering that writing classes at UT still have to meet the "14 page" requirement, we still have to teach the "essay." Creating a video isn't "writing." Until this changes, our discussions of "visual rhetoric" will most likely be limited to critique...rather than invention.