How To Collages?

By Author: ander
Total Articles: 56
Comment this article

Including visuals is sometimes as simple as reexamining how we accomplish routine classroom assignments. Take research, for example. The traditional approach to teaching students how to research and paraphrase sources tends to be rather linear. Students find information on their topics, write down their sources, and then attempt to put what they found in their own words. Unfortunately, this often leads to hours of frustration as teachers discover paper after paper that simply lifted information from the original sources. Angered, the teacher returns to the classroom, scolding the class for their laziness. Then, when the next group of papers comes in, the process repeats itself, leaving the teacher even more upset. Plagiarism is an issue that English teachers Tag Heuer Replica across the country battle on a regular basis, particularly with the advent of the Internet. Some students very consciously choose to follow that easy route, anxious to get their papers turned in and out of the way. But for others, plagiarism occurs because they cannot figure out ...
... how to avoid doing it. For these students, the linear path leads to a direct transfer of information, resulting in papers that sound almost identical to the original sources.

Brock was one such student. When we asked him to research his idol, Jackie Robinson, Brock followed the traditional research route. He combed the Internet looking for sources and even brought in a book from home. And when the time came for him to turn in his paper, it reflected none of Brock's admiration. Rather, the paper was a re-creation of his three sources, albeit rearranged with words changed here and there. When we approached him, it became obvious that Brock had not purposefully cheated on the assignment. Tears filled his eyes as he promised he had not cheated. He had, he said, simply read through the information and then written it down on his note cards. Brock had such a memory for written text that even when he was not looking at the screen, he recalled most of what he had read, and because he knew he needed to get the information down, he wrote what he remembered. Brock needed something to break the linear path. Fortunately, incorporating visuals into the research process can do just that.

As one way to break the linear path and to incorporate visuals into the research process, we asked students to select a topic, searching for information just as they had always done. Instead of taking notes on the information they discovered, however, students began flipping through magazines, seeking out images to represent the key facts. This forced students to activate their background knowledge as they worked to build connections between the images in the magazines and the information they needed to convey. More often than not, students had to be creative in their illustrations because the likelihood of finding a picture of Jackie Robinson playing baseball or a Holocaust victim working behind barbed wire was slim. Then, on note cards or half sheets of paper, they would affix their pictures. Each collage Tag Heuer Replica Watches represented a single idea or fact. After creating the collage, our students turned their papers over, and, using the images as a guide, they wrote one to two sentences explaining the images and citing the original source. The process required them to focus on the ideas and facts represented in their sources and not on a word-for-word replay. Most important, it broke the linear path between the written text in their sources and the written text of their papers. By taking the time to work with the information in a visual format, students were able to separate themselves from the language ( the source, which resulted in language of their own By the time they finished with the process, they had collection of images they could arrange and rearrange as they began organizing their ideas for their papers.!