ABSTRACT

During a classroom-based study, Grade 4 students were provided with multiple opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal texts. Intentionally designed instruction during the research included a range of activities focused on specific elements of visual art and design. Student participants read and discussed, and wrote about selections of children’s literature during Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. The Sea Book was one of the books featured during an interdisciplinary unit on Ocean Literacy, a component of the overall case study research. Content analysis of the students’ responses about the trade book revealed their capacity to engage in five synergistic visual reading skills. As well, data analysis revealed how the students perceived, described, and interpreted the use of color, visual point of view, typography, framing and line in Milner’s artwork as fulfilling multiple, and often concomitant, meaning-making purposes. The findings demonstrated that instruction about how to read and understand visual representations can enhance students’ knowledge and interpretation of content conveyed through multiple modes of representation, and develop students’ capacity and agency for critically reading visual and multimodal texts.

摘要

在课堂学习期间，4 年级学生获得了多种机会来发展他们的视觉意义创造技能和能力，以及他们对多模态文本的审美理解和批判性思维。研究期间有意设计的教学包括一系列专注于视觉艺术和设计特定元素的活动。学生参与者在语言艺术、社会研究和科学期间阅读、讨论和撰写儿童文学选集。海之书是海洋素养跨学科单元中的一本书，它是整个案例研究研究的一个组成部分。对学生对商业书籍的反应的内容分析揭示了他们参与五种协同视觉阅读技能的能力。同样，数据分析揭示了学生如何感知、描述和解释米尔纳艺术作品中颜色、视觉观点、排版、框架和线条的使用，以实现多重且通常伴随的意义创造目的。研究结果表明，关于如何阅读和理解视觉表征的教学可以增强学生对通过多种表征模式传达的内容的知识和解释，并培​​养学生批判性阅读视觉和多模态文本的能力和能动性。