Using visuals to teach challenging texts

As part of a recent English language arts unit on technology, I decided to reach back 150 years and teach my 12th-grade students excerpts from a densely worded philosophical treatise on the virtues of simplicity.

The reading, of course, was “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. Certain sections of the famous book, first published in 1854, read like a “greatest hits” of American maxims, including most famously: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Still, I was concerned that students might struggle with some of Thoreau’s more dense passages, such as those in which he praises the “portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances [and] find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.”

You don’t read sentences like that in “Twilight” or “A Child Called It.” Thoreau’s language may be challenging, but his ideas could not be more relevant. The questions he raises about labor and materialism remain timely in this age of recession and iPods. Furthermore, in the brave, new teaching world of “rigor” and “informational texts,” “Walden” has been identified by the Common Core Learning Standards as an exemplary book.

As Thoreau was writing about how man’s “labor” leaves him “no time to be anything but a machine,” I did what all fluent readers do: I created a visual image in my head.

This one happened to be of Charlie Chaplin in the film “Modern Times” spinning speedily through the gears of machinery as he attempts to repair the mechanical beast.

“How can I get students to create similar images as they read?” I wondered. Then I thought: “Why not show them the Chaplin image and have them brainstorm about how it might be connected?”

Using images to create connections to a text can open up a wide range of possibilities for readers of varying levels. From kindergarten to 12th grade, comic strips and famous paintings, advertisements and movie stills can convey complex ideas in accessible ways.

During the Thoreau reading, I also included an image of pop singer Nicki Minaj and an excerpt from her song “Moment 4 Life,” which talks of “fly[ing] with the stars in the sky,” and how “to live doesn’t truly mean you’re alive.” These sentiments echo Thoreau’s vivid nature imagery as well as his fear that “when I came to die, [I would] discover that I had not lived.”

And even though Thoreau was no friend of technology, it can certainly be beneficial when it comes to helping students understand his ideas.

Images such as these can be posted in front of the class on smartboards or projection screens. If you have a little more time, they also can be downloaded from a site such as Google Images and embedded into a word-processing document that contains excerpts of your assigned reading. This way the images can be manipulated or edited, or space can be provided for students to reflect upon connections between the image and the text, or even create their own images.

Indeed, using diverse visuals in the classroom opens up a wide array of possibilities when it comes to differentiated assessment in all subject areas.

Instead of assigning essays or short-answer questions, students can use some of the visuals you incorporate into your lessons as models to create their own products. And this

needn’t simply be an “easy way out” for students who lack the motivation to write. Visual products can combine text, images and ideas in highly sophisticated ways. Models can easily be found in political cartoons, movie posters, museum websites, newspaper advertisements and magazine illustrations.

I always keep a pile of old newspapers and magazines at my home and in my classroom in case an image-based activity or lesson (even if it’s for just one student) seems to fit well with a given assignment.

Yes, we live in an age where students must be able to write in order to pass standardized tests, but imagery can still be very useful. Image-based learning should serve as an enhancement, rather than a substitute, for writing. The best writing, after all, is filled with vivid visual images.

A writer by the name of Henry David Thoreau knew a thing or two about that.