Deborah L. Boughton
On the scoring rubric for the Response to Literature section of the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) the word perceptive appears three times, always to describe exemplary performance. To demonstrate excellence, our students are expected to develop perceptive interpretations, make perceptive connections and defend perceptive judgments about literature. My tenth-grade students also use vision as a metaphor for a deep level of understanding. They describe what these perceptive readers do as the ability "to read between the lines." I think they are fond of this expression because it acknowledges that making an inference involves recognizing and seeing what is implied by the text beyond what is spelled out in a literal or concrete way. By the time students reach high school, we expect them to be more adept at independently probing and analyzing text. While we want them to ground their thinking in the text, we expect them to see beyond it to its cultural and historical context, the character's motivations and conflicts and the author's probable intent. For some students, especially those that still struggle to decode what the text literally says, grasping the text's deeper meaning can be frustrating and discouraging. When my students and the creators of the CAPT use vision as a metaphor for understanding, they describe a kind of seeing that involves not only the eyes, but the heart and the mind as well.
The aim of this unit is to demystify the process of interpretation by making the act of critical thinking more visible to students. Students will spend as much time reading artistic images as they do print texts. Because most of my students do not have a background in art history, thinking critically about art will level the playing field. A high level of reading comprehension is not a prerequisite. Students who struggle to decode verbal texts can be astute observers and practice analytical thinking when they are dealing with an image. As they gain confidence in their ability to "see between the lines," they will begin to read literature more critically and to make inferences that capture both the concrete and the abstract features of the imaginative texts they encounter.
Many of the strategies I describe in this unit were developed by museum educator Philip Yenawine and cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen. Their student-centered instructional model, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) has enabled even very young students to engage in critical inquiry about art. Studies have shown that the habits of mind that students develop in VTS sessions -- such as making observations and drawing inferences, recognizing the validity of other perspectives, developing claims and supporting them with evidence -- transfer to other disciplines.
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VTS can be used effectively with both visual and verbal texts. In fact when artistic images are paired with pieces of literature, students begin to recognize the features of composition that are common to both modes of expression. By bringing attention to elements that visual and verbal texts share -- like theme, tone, point of view, symbol and characterization -- the teacher can help students see both the artist's and author's craft more clearly.
I will begin the unit with a discussion of how VTS can be particularly effective in prompting students to make logical, text-based inferences, to acknowledge the validity of multiple viewpoints, to recognize the cultural and historical context of a work and to infer the author's/artist's intentions. In an introductory lesson, we will examine Pieter Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus c. 1558 and two poetic responses and to the painting, one by W.H. Auden and the second by William Carlos Williams. Brueghel, Auden and Williams each commented on humankind's tendency to ignore the suffering of others, a theme that will lead us to explore how artists and writers view the world through a particular historical and cultural lens. Students will examine artwork from a recent exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, in addition to two pieces from the permanent collection. After viewing two images of New Haven from the 1800's, students will try their hand at creating an image of New Haven that reflects contemporary social issues. Our study of social and historical context will certainly bring up the issue of stereotyping: uncritical generalizations about people that deny their individuality. The final section of the unit will focus on how people can be portrayed with varying degrees of complexity. Using novelist E.M. Forster's classic definitions of round and flat characters as a guide, we will examine traditional and contemporary portraits of people to determine how the artist hides or reveals various aspects of character. The graphic art will help students to see different degrees of complexity in characterization.
