In this section, I would like to consider some important aspects and qualities of vision that may drive an effective instruction in the classroom. Visual information is more easily digested than printed information (a written text) because of the way the human brain works. We are bombarded with visual images in everyday life, though we often do not realize that - these are the conventions of visual culture. Donald Hoffman explains the genius of human vision in his theory of "universal vision."
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The validity of this theory is proved by the successful application of various visual materials in teaching children, particularly in teaching English Language Learners. However, some visual material may appear complicated to decipher and understand, and it therefore requires students' interpretations based on their prior knowledge and the emotions aroused by a certain image. This point, in my opinion, makes my unit interesting to teach because the teacher can find out students' unique constructed meanings of the photographs we study.
People in today's civilized world live in a visual culture. It seems that in the twenty-first century our "global village" has employed human vision in more sophisticated ways and has taken visual technologies to new heights. Taken for granted, the sense of vision not only allows people to experience the old-fashioned ways of looking at people and objects, but it also exposes them to advanced technologies when spectacular visual effects on TV, in movies, concert halls, and public places cause child-like excitement. Our kids' eyes are glued to computer screens, which display rapidly changing images of high-tech games. Virtual reality seems to be slowly but surely replacing reality, and it is beyond our power to stop steadily developing technological progress. "One of the most striking features of the new visual culture," Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, "is the growing tendency to visualize things that are not themselves visual." It seems that our vision contributes to this fact. It possesses a "remarkable ability to absorb and interpret visual information" which becomes even more critical in "the information age."
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The need of the modern society to visualize existence is inevitable. We are going to create more and more tasks for our vision through the invention of new technologies. But if we cannot change this circumstance, can we try to learn how to deal with it intelligently? Can we take it seriously and try to understand how to treat visual challenges appropriately? I want to believe we can. Mirzoeff notices that "visualization of everyday life does not mean that we necessarily know what it is that we are seeing."
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He talks about the necessity to treat visual culture as an independent field of study.
Most of us are visual learners. Ann Marie Barry, in her article "Perception Theory," points out that our brain perceives visual images with more readiness than it does a written text: "Brains, it seems, were built to process visual images with great speed and to respond to them with alacrity. They did not evolve to process written verbal symbols in the same way."
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She restates the words of Michael Gazzaniga, who wrote: "Brains were not built to read. Reading is a recent invention of human culture. That is why many people have trouble with the process […]. Our brains have no place dedicated to this new invention."
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It seems that the sense of vision has a unique ability to absorb and process the surrounding world to a higher degree than the other senses. According to Lynell Burmark, "people are able to process visual information 60,000 times more quickly than textual information."
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These points seem to be accurate because I have noticed that my students become immediately interested if they are offered a visual object to work with, and, on the contrary, that they do not show a particular interest if they are confronted with a print text.
Students understand what they see even if they do not possess English in a full measure. Hoffman talks about "innate rules of universal vision" that are "part of the child's biology, and allow the child to acquire, through visual experiences that might vary from one culture to another, the rules of visual processing. The rules of visual processing, in turn allow the visually competent child or adult to construct specific visual scenes by looking."
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According to Hoffman, all children in the world are born and develop "universal vision" that enables them to construct meaning from the visual images around them. He draws a parallel with the argument, devised by the linguist Noam Chomsky, for rules of universal grammar that permit the acquisition of language: "The rules of universal grammar allow a child to acquire the specific rules of grammar for one or more specific languages."
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An example of a practical application of this argument is the fact that the bilingual program in the New Haven Public Schools district promotes the acquisition of English through teaching native speakers of Spanish in Spanish in a kindergarten class, gradually reducing the amount of the native language over the course of the thirty months of the program; by the middle of the first grade, a teacher in a bilingual classroom uses 50% of Spanish and 50% of English. The premise is that students transfer their knowledge of a native language, such as a relation between concepts/objects and words, a letter-sound relation, grammatical patterns, and concepts of print, to their second language. Similarly, even though children are born in different cultures, having the same "innate rules of universal vision," "rules of visual processing,"
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they are able at first to construct the same visual scenes. For example, a student who is a native speaker of English and an English Language Learner understand geometrical shapes in the same way because they draw them in the same way. In this sense, the motive to use visuals in a classroom becomes especially justified: the seen is more helpful and preferable than, for instance, the heard. In my curriculum unit, photographs are a starting point to produce language and to perfect it further in writing. Beginning with photographs is justified because they do not wholly depend on the language mastery, but involve "the innate rules of universal vision."
The support of English Language Learners with visual materials is really vital in an academic setting, in an English Language Learners classroom in particular. A wide range of visual materials includes photographs, drawings, charts, graphs, maps, a variety of graphic organizers, videotapes, and, of course, the Internet. The use of visual support is one of the most popular and long-used curriculum adaptations that have been readily adopted in a foreign/second language learning world. Burmark points out: "Visual literacy becomes a powerful teaching ally in classrooms where not all students speak the same language. In many schools in the United States, especially in states like California, Texas, and Florida, more and more students speak English as a second language. In these situations, visuals become a kind of international, universal language that brings meaning to an otherwise incomprehensible cacophony of verbal expression."
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The rich arsenal of visualization strategies that bilingual students have already developed helps them organize their thoughts in a meaningful way that enables them to recall information effectively. Using visuals has long been a kind of "second nature" in a second language teaching, and, honestly, I cannot imagine my lessons without the application of some type of visual support. For example, when my students read a non-fiction article about a proposed experiment of planting an acorn on the Moon, I draw a picture of the Moon (as a big circle) and an acorn (we check a picture dictionary for a picture of an oak tree and an acorn) that grows in a greenhouse and produces carbon dioxide and oxygen. I jot down words that describe what a plant needs to grow: water, light, carbon dioxide, and soil. We then discuss which of these the Moon has and which has to be brought there for the plant. The article explains that if an acorn grew into a tree on the Moon, its branches would break through the walls of the greenhouse and both oxygen and carbon dioxide would enter into the Moon's atmosphere, and I draw this process.
By contrast, visual material itself may present a complicated matter when the images under study are difficult to decipher and interpret, and they become a challenge even for native speakers of English. In this case, it is very interesting to hear students' different interpretations of these images. Many researchers and scholars, beginning with Plato, believe that objects encountered in everyday life are just copies or interpretations of the ideal of those objects. In other words, each person sees what he or she is able to see depending on his or her prior knowledge, not what the object really is. For example, if a child who is not familiar with a submarine sees it in a picture, he or she may identify it as a shark or a whale or any other object that looks similar to a submarine in some way. Thus, according to Dennis Dake, "all visual images are essentially ambiguous in the human brain and all configurations are therefore liable to more than one interpretation."
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Hoffman in his book Visual Intelligence tells us that vision is constructive. He explains that "visual intelligence constructs what you see": "you construct your visual experience of objects."
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Other researchers, Walker and Chaplin, go further when they define "vision": they believe that vision is not only a physical phenomenon; its outcome involves participation of other senses - taste, smell, touch, and hearing - as well as of any notions of an object that a person may have: "Once signals have passed the retinas it no longer makes sense to speak of 'the visual' in isolation. […] The fact that we perceive one world rather than five (corresponding to each of the five senses) suggests that inside the brain/mind visual information from the eyes merges with information arriving from the other senses, and with existing memories and knowledge, so that a synthesis occurs."
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So, vision is a complex process with a different result for each person because each person has unique senses and a unique knowledge of the world around him or her. From my everyday encounters with my students and my own personal experience, I know that even a not very conspicuous object may arouse a whole spectrum of emotions, reminiscences, and associations. All of us have different past and present experiences and knowledge; therefore when we look at a picture, for instance, we "construct" a different, even slightly different, but nonetheless dissimilar notion of the image. In other words, we attach different meanings to the same picture.
Rick Williams, who refers to the words of Ann Marie Berry in her book Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication, points out another benefit of the use of photographs in my unit. He suggests that visual processes are not rational: "The implication of this is that we begin to respond emotionally to situations before we can think them through."
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Damasio, as Ann Marie Berry notices in her turn, supports this claim: "Virtually every image, actually perceived or recalled, is accompanied by some reaction from the apparatus of emotion."
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It is my hope that even with some lack of contextual knowledge students will be able to respond with their emotions when viewing a photograph, connect it to their previous experience, and express this synthesized product in writing.