Bringing Text to Life: Using Sensory and Emotional Images to Enhance Comprehension

The old adage, "A picture is worth a thousand words" is certainly one that we are all familiar with. Regardless, of whether you are young or old, from Detroit or Osaka, images play a powerful part in all aspects of our daily lives. Its no wonder that using images in the classroom has tremendous learning opportunities regardless of grade or content level. In her book, entitled, Mosaic of Thought, Keen and Zimmerman present the case for increasing the use of images in the classroom to advance comprehension, build community and to increase engagement in the classroom. This idea of creating images has tremendous value in even traditional science and math classrooms, while abstract topics can have pictures or images to aid in comprehension. Images are particularly important in the social studies, world history or civics classroom, where images such as September 11 (who can forget the images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers), war-torn, Third-World countries and war-stricken areas such as the Congo and Iraq can not only add in comprehension but also engage youth in social justice. While I appreciate Keene's belief that "text comes alive through the creation of sensory images" its critically important to note that the teacher should facilitate the conversations that take place afterwards. I appreciate her paraphrasing exactly what a teacher should say but I also believe that it is essential that there a prepared set of framing questions help to guide the conversation. I also found it helpful to have a set of standard questions to facilitate conversations or even more importantly a set of positive responses for when students shared their thoughts. "Great, thinking," or "I really like the way that you.... (include specific example)" and craft a set of framing questions just in case the conversation gets stagnate. I would like to hear others speak to the other concepts and experiences presented in this particular chapter, especially related to the composing sessions, the characteristics of such sessions, some of the challenges and opportunities that rest in implementing these strategies, how these ideas build on the ideas of previous chapters, how you might implement these particular strategies in your content area? I also really appreciated the section entitled, "Beyond Reporting on the Book" as this is SO important for our work with youth that students have the opportunity to see there final products as having real value in the world. How might students create authentic pieces of work that might bring value to communities? Please really try to stretch your mind and practice and think about how you might engage students with businesses, non-profit organizations and public and private institutions so there work has value.