VISUAL THINKING: OBSERVATIONS OF FILM EDUCATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR GLOBAL LITERACY

At Northeastern Illinois University’s Chicago Teachers’ Center (CTC), with funding from the United States Department of Education, high school students (grades 9 to 12) from Chicago Public Schools were exposed to film and the filmmaking process through a series of hands-on, immersion experiences. A system of inquiry and design, developed at CTC over a ten-year period, was used to guide the cooperative making of short student films. Students were asked to (1) conduct a deep exploration into themes and experiences that were personally meaningful and (2) explore the medium of film and how it can be used to express this content.

Observations of this process suggest that film was being treated as a language with a vocabulary and syntax of its own. Image composition and sequencing were employed in ways that seemed congruent with the use of words and grammar. There is much in the literature about “Visual Literacy” and the importance of being able to “read” images and use them as a means of expression. (e.g. A. Bamford, 2003; S, Stokes 2002) But experience in this student work begs the question, “Can the solving of communication objectives through the generation and manipulation of images have a positive effect on the communicator’s organization of thought, aptitude for critical analysis, and capacity for expression?” And if so, might these advances transfer back to the critical understanding of traditional text-based works and films?

As CTC looks ahead to further exploration of student work in filmmaking, this hypothesis is guiding the development of a suggested model for text to visual migration (and back again) through content-mapping (identification of key points in a verbal narrative or film), transitional objects (concrete aids for visualizing content), and frame-by-frame thinking (the ability to understand and express content through a series of sequenced visual or narrative compositions). Furthermore, under consideration is an adaptation to middle school environments (grades 6 to 8) to begin to see if such migration might be universally applied across age groups and disciplines. This leaves us with the question, if students are able to think and express themselves in both verbal and non-verbal modes, will they be better prepared for global communication and citizenry?