How can visual imagery support my curricular content?

In my EAP classes students are often reading two to four grades below the seventh grade reading level. In order to provide students with reading texts that are differentiated for reading readiness, I have students choose from among a wide variety of picture books. With thousands of titles available, it is not too difficult to build a class text set around the various units that we are studying. Such text sets offer students books that meet their different interests, learning profiles as well as reading readiness.

Flickr  Okinawa Soba

Visual images are indispensable for giving students the necessary background for many of the books that they read. For example, one popular book that my students read is Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine. This book is a true story about a slave who escaped from his master in the state of Virginia by mailing himself in a box to Pennsylvania. To introduce the book to students, I show them images taken from Creative Commons: an image of two slaves in Africa with chains around their necks, and a map tracing the triangular slave trade route from Europe to Africa, to the Americas and then back to Europe.

 http://www.vvgeocivtrenches.com/images/maps/map.slave.trade.jpg

In addition to serving as background to reading texts, students use images, graphs, and charts from the Internet for their blog posts. The result is a richer product that engages students at a deeper level. However, the trick to teaching students to use images is for them to be extremely selective in their choice of images and words.

 For me, the most memorable demonstration of the effectiveness of pairing visual images with text was the web page of the International School Brussels. The power of this web page is captured in one frame showing a few students of various ethnicities engaged in some activity. (I forget exactly what.) The impact of this frame comes from the pairing of the image with just six words: Everyone included; Everyone challenged; Everyone succeeds. Wow! Anyone wanting to use images should study this frame! The lesson learned is to be extremely selective and strive for just the right pairing of images and text.