“ Ekphrasis and the Internet: Connecting the Verbal and
the Visual with Computer-mediated Student Projects in an Undergraduate
Humanities Class”
Donna
Reiss
Tidewater Community College, USA
Art
Young
Clemson University, USA
In her exploration of ekphrasis, the relationship between visual and verbal arts,
Amy Golahny reminds us that references to the interconnectedness of the language
of pictures and words date at least from the fifth century B.C. when Simonides
said, "as in painting, so in poetry". In the first century B.C., Golanhy adds,
Horace said that "painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture".
Further consideration of the concept of ekphrasis by Murray Krieger and W.J.T.
Mitchell brings our attention to this verbal-visual relationship up to date.
However, at the end of the twentieth century, most undergraduate education in
the humanities continues to approach these art forms separately or to focus on
student-generated text alone for developing and communicating ideas.
The ease with which the Internet now allows students to exchange, create, and
manipulate text and images offers new opportunities for engagement with the
composing process. Because our goal as teachers of undergraduate writing and
literature classes is creative as well as critical communication and because our
pedagogy emphasizes active learning processes, we introduce our students to
computing in and about the humanities. Dialogic writing within and beyond their
classes enables students to enter into new discourse communities and to explore
collaboratively the concepts of their courses. Creating, selecting, and
manipulating visual images alone or in conjunction with text introduces students
to expanded and contemporary composing processes. Publication of their
compositions on the Internet provides them with an audience of other learners.
They need not strive to be professional poets or painters to be makers of poems
and paintings as a way to learn.
Although our students may read Blake at a Website or in an edition illustrated by
his own drawings or read Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" accompanied by a
reproduction of Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus, the relationship between the visual and verbal has not been
emphasized in undergraduate higher education, where science textbooks are likely
to have more illustrations than literature anthologies. How do humanities
teachers dramatize the connection between the visual and verbal for our students
and thus help our students understand the interrelatedness of the linguistic and
graphical arts? How do we revive their own creativity and cognitive skills with
words and pictures? After all, our students probably illustrated their own words
in elementary school but are seldom invited to do so in college.
New technologies, in particular the World Wide Web, are bringing words and
pictures together for us and our students in ways that might bring those
connections back to our college classrooms. Document design now extends beyond
the one-inch margin requirements of MLA student manuscripts. Instead, our
students are learning with us about screens and color and negative space and
visual communication as integral to rather than decoration for the word.
We will describe undergraduate literature and writing projects in which
student-generated words and graphics are central to communication of ideas. In
these projects, publication of their compositions on the Internet encourages
students to reflect on the connections between technology and art, word and
image, private and public writing, and their own creative and critical
processes. These projects give students opportunities to perceive and to
communicate visually, orally, textually, kinesthetically - in other words, they
provide multisensory learning experiences.
Theoretical foundations for student-generated compositions in this project come
not only from Golahny, Krieger, and Mitchell but also from chapters on teaching
in Learning Literature in an Era of Change: Innovations in
Teaching. Terri Pullen Guezzar ("From Short Fiction To Dramatic
Event: Mental Imagery, The Perceptual Basis of Learning in the Aesthetic Reading
Experience") applies the theories of Rudolf Arnheim and Allen Paivio, who argue
that privileging the verbal over the visual limits our cognitive development and
that separating verbal from visual perception fragments our understanding of and
communication about literature. Pedagogical theory is featured in "Figuring
Literary Theory and Refiguring Teaching: Graphics in the Undergraduate Literary
Theory Course," where Marlowe Miller maintains, "Graphics help students
conceptualize complex and abstract theories so that they can identify the
central concepts and assumptions of those theories."
Two accessible resources for teachers thinking about integrating new media into
undergraduate education also are useful for encouraging colleagues to
incorporate the Internet as a learning environment and to make computer-mediated
student projects integral to the learning process. In Seven
Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education: Implementing with
Technology, Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C. Ehrmann describe
ways the following tenets can be incorporated into computer-mediated
instruction: contacts between students and faculty, reciprocity and cooperation
among students, active learning techniques, prompt feedback, time on task, high
expectations, respect for diverse talents and ways of learning. Cooperation
among students and active learning techniques as well as respect for diverse
learning styles all are supported by multisensory student online publications in
which students create original works of art or combine text and images to learn
and to communicate their learning.
Additional encouragement for teachers and students comes from Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches
to Culture and History by Randy Bass, director of the American
Crossroads Project, Georgetown University. Bass identifies "six kinds of quality
learning" that "information technologies can serve to enhance": distributive
learning, authentic tasks and complex inquiry, dialogic learning, constructive
learning, public accountability, and reflective and critical thinking. Once
again, collaborative student-generated projects are emphasized as effective
learning strategies.
Teaching at two quite different types of institutions, Donna at a large
multicampus urban-suburban open admissions community college on the Atlantic
coast of Virginia and Art at a selective land-grant university emphasizing
agriculture, engineering, science, and technology in the foothills of South
Carolina, we both have found that opportunities to compose and share text and
images has enriched learning for undergraduates. Examples from the work of our
own students and of our colleagues' students will demonstrate some ways that
novice scholars learn "from the inside out" by creating, selecting, combining,
and manipulating text and images in electronic environments.
Using either a live Internet connection (preferable) or files on disk displayed
through a Web browser as well as an overhead projector, we will present and
analyze student work that illustrates the conjunction of visual and verbal
knowledge and its significance for introducing undergraduate students to the
artistic life of their community and to computer-mediated composing as well as
for fostering their creative and cognitive development.
<http://onlinelearning.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/projects/achalc2k/ >
References
Rudolf Arnheim. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Randy Bass. Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History. : , 1998.
Arthur W. Chickering Stephen C. Ehrmann. “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as
Lever.” . 1997. : .
Arthur W. Chickering Zelda Gamson. “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate
Education.” AAHE Bulletin. 1987. : .
The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts from the Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Amy Golahny. : , 1996.
Terri Pullen Guezzar. “From Short Fiction To Dramatic Event: Mental Imagery,
The Perceptual Basis of Learning in the Aesthetic Reading
Experience.” Learning Literature in an Era of Change: Innovations in Teaching. Ed. Dona Hickey Donna Reiss. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2000. 74-86.
Murray Krieger. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Marlowe Miller. “Figuring Literary Theory and Refiguring Teaching:
Graphics in the Undergraduate Literary Theory Course.” Learning Literature in an Era of Change: Innovations in Teaching. Ed. Dona Hickey Donna Reiss. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2000. 61-73.
W. J. T. Mitchell. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Allan Paivo. Imagery & Verbal Processes. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1971.