Campus Voices
Middle School
For three weeks every fall, seventh grade English students find themselves doing something quite unexpected in an English classroom. They spend most of their class time observing slides of visual portraits. In a darkened room, teachers project images of these rich and complex images on the screen and ask three basic, but clearly defined questions: “What do you see? What do make of what you see? What can you understand about the artist’s choices?” Students study paintings by El Greco, Copley, Sargent, Wilson, Van Gogh, Jordaens, and others. As they answer the questions together, students create a thorough understanding of the painting on both concrete and more analytic levels. They learn that hasty observation leads to superficial, sometimes unsupportable inferences. Careful, thoughtful, energetic observation leads to interesting, imaginative insights. We ask students to be clear, thorough, and precise in their thinking. This requires that we do something countercultural; we slow down. During class we may spend up to forty minutes examining, studying, and collectively inquiring about a single image. It’s hard work, and it leads students to the satisfaction of knowing something deeply.
What students come to realize is that we are practicing literary analysis by studying visual art rather than by reading a written text. They hone their close reading skills by observing, making inferences about, and analyzing visual portraits. This approach to teaching reading began several years ago when my colleagues and I were discussing typical seventh grade obstacles to close reading. Students tend to skim, get the gist, and miss key details that would provide deeper insight into the text. Another major difficulty young readers encounter is their skepticism that key details in a text can signify more than their most concrete meaning. “The clock on the dresser doesn’t tell us anything about the character. It was just there.” They are incredulous that these details are anything more than accidents or inevitabilities in the piece of fiction. So, by replacing written text with a visual one, we offer students a way to practice their critical thinking in another medium. Throughout this process, the students write about what they see, and they find that sloppy, imprecise language is inadequate to describe the complexity of what they understand. They find that they must choose words carefully in order to express their ideas accurately.
The culmination of this work is our November trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. After a teacher-guided tour of European and American painting galleries, students choose a single portrait to study for the entire hour that we are in the museum. Often students will find themselves alone in a gallery, sitting on the floor (or if they are lucky, on a bench), carefully learning about this image. They take notes and sketch, often discovering that their time in the museum is too short; the more time they spend with the painting the more interesting it becomes. Their homework assignment is to review their notes and sketches, reflect on what they have come to understand about the subject, and write a story from this person’s point of view that illustrates something about his/her character.
Ultimately, this work with portraits forms the intellectual touchstone for the remainder of our work together with stories, novels, and poems. The most exciting moments for me, however, are those in the classroom when observing slides of portraits a student “gets it” and realizes the power of learning comes from taking the time to explore a subject deeply.
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