A Visual Lexicon: A Language Learning Must Have!

Why do language instructors artificially separate text and speech from the visual lexicon? 

A lexicon is a catalog of a language’s wordstock and the rules or grammar that dictates the combination of the stock of words into meaningful sentences.

Our visual language is the system by which communication uses visual elements to be effective: pragmatics, semiotics, gestures, images, diagrams, maps, and other forms of nonverbal communication. Speech or text does not act alone effectively, not without the help of emoticons, anyway.

The structural units of visual language includes line, shape, color, form, motion, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space, and proportion. The same structural elements that create our written language – add sound and you have our spoken language. These are also known as the formal elements in art analysis.

Notebooks of all those listed. Found at this link.

Therefore, a visual lexicon is the collection or ‘visualstock’ and the elements or visual-grammar that dictates the combination of intersecting visual elements and text/words to create meaningful communication.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s 15^th century sketchbooks are famous examples of visual lexicons. Other famous visual lexicon notebookers that changed the modern era include Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, and Albert Einstein.

Creative genius is found at the intersections of the visual and verbal. Our entire Internet culture exists at the same intersection: it is the living love-child of these innovators’ notebooks (read Steve Job’s biography – official and unofficial).

Interbreed and Interrelated: Intertextuality.  

Image found here. 

The idea of intertextuality suggests that all images relate to other cultural texts such as books, poems, other images, movies, commercials, and music, etc. (See Wilson, 2003, citation below). 

Turn intertexuality inside out: an utterance never exists without relating emoticons, images, books, poems, other utterances, movies, commercials, and music, etc.

Million dollar question: 

So, why are so many EFL/ESL instructors telling our students’ to check their visual lexicons at the door to learn language (and then wondering why their students fall asleep at their desks)?

Encourage the development of your students’ visual lexicons.

Some scholars suggest that L2 learners need a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words for a good working knowledge of the English language (as well as an understanding of syntax, morphology, and pragmatics, etc.). Most L1 English speakers are thought to have a vocabulary of 20K or so words.

Encouraging students to build and maintain visual lexicons increases their meaningful encounters with words or even the meaning of sentences or phrases. For example, an assignment can be on creating visual lexicons based on a series of idioms or ideas.

One of our visual lexicons for Orientalism. Found at this link.

In an intermediate level class, my Korean university students created visual lexicons based on the concept of Orientalism. They also applied critical thinking skills to further break down the image and its meaning. 

My students can now discuss their opinions on the concept of Orientalism by analyzing an image. The proficiency level of these students ranged from intermediate-low to advanced-mid.

 A visual lexicon was created to bridge the huge proficiency gaps between the students in the class. All of the students saw an increase in their ability to use academic vocabulary, and some students saw a dramatic improvement in the sophistication of their sentence structures (verbal and written).

Facilitate your Da Vincis and Einsteins to produce their online notebooks…   

Technology is crucial to the development and long-term maintenance of visual lexicons. 

Mural.ly collaborative project. 

Pinterest.com is a great tool to collect, store, and organize images whereas Mural.ly is a user-friendly location to produce visual essays. Mural.ly is an excellent resource for large collaborative mind maps or to help students outline presentations and essays.

This semester, my novice level students produced family introductions on MindMapper.com, a mind mapping app that is cellphone friendly. All the students posted their family MindMapper.com on our class Facebook.com timeline with pictures of their family (or pictures who they wished their family to be).

MindMapper "My Family" assignment. 

Posted on our Facebook timeline to share with classmates. 

There are a litany of the other social bookmarking, mindmapping, and intertext apps that will help you and your students' to build visual lexicons. 

Resources

Wilson, B. (2003). Of diagrams and rhizomes: Visual culture, contemporary art, and the impossibility of mapping the content of art education. Studies in Art Education, 44(3), 214-229.

Media Literacy: Teaching Our Students to Swim

Why Media Literacy? 

Would you throw your students into a pool without swimming lessons? Then, why would educators allow our students to drown in advertising when we can throw them the lifesaver of media literacy? Let's pass down the knowledge that our kids can use to construct the vehicles to ride out the storm…

Find at: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134

There are 52 million kids under 12 in the United States – the equivalent to the height of the baby boomers – and these children spend a total of 40 billion dollars a year on everything from music to electronics to clothes; and more importantly, these toddlers to tweens directly influence (are you sitting down?) over 700 billion dollars a year in spending (Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, 2004). 

So, it comes as no surprise the amount of time and energy that is spent by advertisers attempting to successfully market to these overly influential –yet extremely susceptible- cohort of buyers.

I think what was more surprising is that the government deregulated advertising under the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan deregulated advertising? The same man who testified in the McCarthy hearings, which resulted in extreme censorship in Hollywood during the 1950s, deregulated advertising in the 1980s? Interesting.

http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/

The deregulation of advertising opened the door for juvenile marketers to create campaigns that saturated children’s lives. Campaigns that began with the creation of a children’s television show whose sole purpose of existence was to infiltrate every pore of a kid’s imagination with a litany of products from bed sheets to food to shoes branded with their favorite characters (Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, 2004).

Raising Kids in the Ruckus

My kids grew up with Power Rangers, all the Disney characters, Power Puff Girls, Sponge Bob, all the anime characters, and whatever else was the flavor of the month. And admittedly, I was influenced to buy everything from branded toothbrushes to macaroni and cheese (that tasted better, I swear).  

 

http://www.psmag.com/

During this same time, I was a waitress trying to make our lives better by getting my university degree; and I had a natural inclination for decoding popular culture, social movements, and gender issues.

I was teaching my children to read media literacy while I learned to be outraged by consumerism, patriarchy, and classism. Yet, I kept buying the branded kids' wares; it was just easier. It absolved my guilt of not being able to keep with the Jones as a single Mom – even Walmart carried Disney. 

So, my point is that the American hypocrisy runs shift and hard even for the advocates. 

The art classroom: Media Literacy Lessons 

Chung and Kirby (2009) define culture jamming as an act of detournement, a counter-revolution against the mainstream media constructs to reveal the hidden agendas of advertisers. Examples of detournement include performance art, subverisements, and flash mobs. Chung and Kirby (2009) turned their art classrooms into a space of detournement by asking their students to rebrand corporations’ logos and slogans to reveal the real agenda behind advertising campaigns, as an act of resistance power of symbols used for consumerism. Students produced such subverisements as matching the Toyota logo with the slogan, “Global Warming”; and another student wrote “obesity” in the famous font associated with Coke-a-cola. For more go to the journal, Art Education, January 2009. 

In Killing Us Softly 4(2010), Jean Kilbourne continues her campaign to educate people on the impact of advertising on women, ultimately on all gender roles. Kilbourne reveals the “stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes – images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality” (reference the study guide found at the Media Education Foundation). 

So, one question that art educators -invested in teaching media literacy- can ask is: how can we teach students “to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relations to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence” (Killing Us Softly 4 Study Guide, Media Education Foundation)?

 

http://iamguiltless.blogspot.kr/

What would the visual landscape look like if all of the gender-biased advertisements were removed from magazines, the mall, television, and movies? How would advertising campaigns based on empowering women’s self image of themselves look like? How would advertise campaigns based on positive gender roles for both men and women manifest?

After a series of media literacy lessons on power relationships, gender roles, reductionism, and decoding of advertising, ask your students to take ads and/or fashion layouts from a high-end magazine (like Vogue) and reimagine what that layout would look like with healthy, powerful gender images. Students should incorporate the original image in the final composition as an act of subverisements and resistance of its intention to disempower. 

http://www.almostallthetruth.com/

Also, students should be given the option to take the campaign off the page into such actions as flash mob or performance art. This will provide students with a sense of agency and resistance against the flat, dimensional-less images that are designed to assault their concepts of what body really is in everyday action; they are provided the opportunity to take body image off the page and into their lives. 

Mural.ly: Visual Essays for intermediate EFL Students

My intermediate EFL Korean university students are using Mural.ly to create collaborate visual essays on culture. We learned four different components of culture: universal, specific, transcultural, and localized. They used Mural.ly to identify, illustrate, and explain how the different parts of culture interact/overlap.

Their final project on culture was to create a visual essay that compared and contrasted transcultural and localization. Transcultural is an idea/object that is imported from another culture. Localization is when a culture takes that idea/object and makes it uniquely their own.

The hard work of Group 3: Kim Seoul Yeon, Kim SeHee, & Kim In Jae

The collaborative visual essay process on apps like Mural.ly, if structured properly, facilitates students learning visual literacy, critical thinking skills, and the creative process.

None of the students have done anything like a visual essay before. Today, they discussed how this course design is the exact opposite of their Korean education. I explained to them that when you are first learning this kind of visual processing it is like me asking, “Can you please tell me where the air begins and the sky ends?” But eventually, they will begin to be able to identify the different kinds of clouds, air molecules, what the different color of the skies mean…eventually, they can see where the sky ends and the air begins.

The hard work of Group 3: Kim Seoul Yeon, Kim SeHee, & Kim In Jae

Next, we are going to learn about “remixing.” They are going to find out the sky and air are inseparably interconnected together - just like they thought it was in the first place. We are coming full circle with a new kind of clarity.

During this initial learning period about remixing, the students will write and comment on each others’ blogs. I consider this online journaling. We will use Blogger for its user-friendly interface, but the discussion will monitored similarly to a Blackboard discussion. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about netiquette as they students are quite lovely.

We began the remix discussion early by watching this video (as in follow this link) that shows one of their favorite western action movies (Matrix) was actually an American localization of a transcultural movie genre created by their neighbors (and refined by the Korean film industry as well). 

Digital Citizenship Week: October 21-25, 2013

I don’t know about you… but I said and did some questionable things as a kid. I don’t think any of them would have landed me in jail… What does throwing eggs at cars get these days?

Brooks-Young (2010) believes that children are the same as ever. They make the same mistakes and celebrate the same achievements, but the world that they are navigating is dramatically different.

I was born in 1967. You can do the math. Also, you will note that it was the pre-cellphone and PC era. I was so unwired that I actually played outside from sun up to sun down “within yelling distance” for lunch and dinner.

Cameras? Cameras were some kind of treasure that we’d discovered to capture our friends’ smiles and laughter… we gave the roll of film to our parents and two weeks later an envelope of pictures magically appeared. Half of the time, we had forgotten what pictures had been taken. An envelope of pictures was discovery. 

Slow Technology provided a Built-in Timeout

It wasn’t that long ago when there was a built-in timeout to “stop, drop, & think about it” before doing something stupid with that picture, text, or letter…

Any impulse control related brilliant brainstorms that we had as kids that involved letter writing or image taking was stalled due to delivery time. It was impossible to execute such schemes in real-time, unless your Dad worked for the FBI. Therefore, any of our most brilliant ideas were scrapped due to the boredom as we waited on the technology lag time.

It was just easier to go toilet paper their house (which I don't recommend as I think it is a crime now). 

Everything online is Public

So, is it really possible, even as an adult, to conceive that everything that we post on Facebook/online is public? I mean, do you really understand how people see your posts as you make comments on your friends' cute picture? 

Or as my technically illiterate friend did… she posted an entire personal letter on her Facebook wall thinking that was our private message system... her clients were able to read the very personal letter until she realized what she had done. Thankfully, there was so social fallout.

But mistakes really do happen and a lot of people see your comments about the things y'all did in high school together... TMI. 

Digital Citizenship

Admittedly, I only listened to my parents after my grand ideas failed. But having the information to reconcile my impulsive decision-making with real world consequences was crucial to my ability to grow up into a decent citizen. Thankfully, I had filed away lessons on citizenship to be referred to at a later time.

So, the lessons on digital citizenship matter. It is like when my Dad stopped littering because he got tired of hearing me quote what Mrs. Johnson said about litterbugs. 

Image borrowed from Common Sense Media, 2013. 

Here are a litany of online resources to inspire a wide-range of lesson plans for about any age groups that gives your students the information to file away:

Common Sense Media.

Edutopia.com Digital Citizenship week.

Edutopia.com Digital Citizenship Roundup. 

Digital Citizenship gone awry.

Last night, two of my Korean university students explained that cyberbullying becomes extreme after high school in South Korea. High schools students are much more likely to be bullied in person than online. But something changes dramatically after high school and the chances of becoming a victim of cyberbullying increases even further after graduation from the university.

In Korea, online disinhibition doesn’t appear to be the rampant childhood problem that it is in the United States. In South Korea, there is now a cyberpolice force that handles defamation, along with other online crimes. Cyberbullying appears to be illegal in South Korea.

Cyberbullying is not illegal in the United States. Instead, cyberbullies are prosecuted under stalking and harassment laws. I could only find a cyber enforcement unit under the FBI.

So, what about the parents? 

So... if online disinhibition appears to be just as much an adult problem as a childhood issue… Then a cold-hard reality is that some children might be encouraged by, or modeling after, their parents. 

Therefore, one question for educators is how does your digital citizenship curriculum address the adults' digital citizenship habits that might counter your lessons? And where do students go for help with these matters, if the adults in their lives aren't acknowledging the possible impact of their own online misbehavior on their children?  

FBI Cyber Division. Image borrowed from fbi.gov. 

Online Privacy: A Relic

Cyberbullying

Celebrating Connected Educator Month (October)!!

To connect or not connect, that is the question of the modern educator…

In “What ‘Connected Education’ Looks Like: 28 Examples FromTeachers All Over”, Katherine Schulten provides a litany of positive ways that social media (Facebook to Edmodo) can be integrated into a wide variety of classrooms.

Three teachers used Edmodo to ask students to explore individual profiles of 19^th-century immigrants. The result was the students showed empathy, as well as “demonstrated deeper understanding of the mechanism by which immigrants sought cultural and societal integration in 19^th-century America” (Schulten, 2013).

AFTER THOUGHT: Wouldn’t an amazing next step be exploring the profiles of contemporary immigrants and refugees? The faces of the 19^th-century immigrants were historically much different than those coming to the United States today.

An English Language Learner (ELL) instructor at a community college is asking students to use their cell phones to take images of new vocabulary and idioms that they encounter outside of the classroom. They are using social media to build their own word lists, as well as bridge the real world with the classroom.

AFTER THOUGHT:  I would love to see those students use the images to produce storyboards that narrate their stories (fiction or real time/past or present).

Why so much hate? 

Social media is banned in the majority of the school districts across the United States.

Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District reinitiated a $1 billion plan to put an iPad in the hands of all students. The first attempt failed because the students cracked the security settings that had locked out Internet and social media. Officials quickly confiscated all the electronic devices once they discovered the breech.

So, the unified school district wants the students to use disabled iPads to their fullest potential? I just keep getting the image of someone tying my feet together and yelling, “Run! Run!”

My daughter has long since graduated from high school (last January), but I have several memories of being asked for math help. You have lost me after basic algebra (although I can hold my own in statistics – the brain is a perplexing place to function).

After the initial eye-rolling and teenager let-down, her fingers would start wildly tapping the keyboard like a mad-scientist on the brink of world destruction when an “Ah-Ha!” would echo triumphantly through the apartment… one or several of her friends had tutored her via a variety of virtual resources from social media to video to watching real-time examples on a shared virtual document or brain storming app.

They didn’t do her homework for her. They actually helped her study virtually. They did for her what I could not.

According to Patricia Deubel (2009), the National School Board Association published studies that showed that “almost 60 percent of studentswho use social networking talk about education topics online and, surprisingly,more than 50 percent talk specifically about schoolwork.” An unofficial survey of my daughter’s social networking habits, I can easily buy into that statistic.

Social media was crucial, and still is, to her academic success.

BUT what are students doing the other 50% of time?

The answer to that question depends on what author or resource that you decide to read.

My daughter and one of our
favorite students, Se-Ra. 

Susan J. Brooks-Young (2010) argues that social media replaced all the banned public gathering spaces where youths can no longer congregate. Brooks-Young cites a collection of curfew and loitering laws that make it near impossible for students to gather, be loud, and socialize without getting into trouble with the lawman.

Insert old Western Sheriff here saying, “Why, our town shuts down at sunset and only the outlaws and teenagers roam the streets in this here parts… and I know how to take care of the outlaws and teenagers… Why, yes I do.”

Social media – good, bad, or ugly – is the public social space for millions of teens (and now people over 35 are no longer social media strangers – we have to figure out what our kids are doing somehow).

Many authors are contributing social media with the negativity and disassociation. In The Winter of Our Disconnect, Susan Maushart cites that our bodies actually produce chemical reactions when in a conversation with someone (while in the flesh) that doesn’t occur virtually. Scientists claim that depression and other ill effects can set in without face-to-face conversations. 

Maushart also goes on to identify examples of teenage violence that the perpetuator contributed to “just needing to feel alive” or some such, after being isolated in his virtual world, and apparently, was taken aback when her son could relate to such thinking.

SIDENOTE: I must admit that I don’t know any teenagers who use the dialect that Maushart is trying to capture in her epic life's tale of a family off technology… it is just makes me uncomfortable reading it (and I don’t know why).

Let’s get serious for a moment.

Both authors noted that the number one issue online is cyber-bullying and there has been a rash of accusations (accompanied withpictures of proof) followed by young suicides that have verified that the virtual world is just as weighted as the empty streets once used to be for GenXers (and all generations before). Playground bullying has been taken an unfortunate new sophistication.

Are educators more likely to identify potential cyber-bullying, if they are on the same social networks as their students? What is hall monitoring in the iGeneration age? 

Evidence has also been found that the students feel more connected to their instructors when they are on regulated social media together, as part of their class projects and curriculum. I have found that my university students are more responsive and accountable. It shows in their work and attendance.

I also know that my daughter would have never made it through math without it…

How effective is to always power-down every time that they enter into a classroom? Do we really have their attention or just their obedience?

As an educator, I prefer to have their attention.