What Is Image to Word - Word to Image?
Image to Word-Word to Image is an exciting new program using standards-based art education experiences to improve comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and image making for children. The program is sequential and designed to help both teachers and students make meaning of other people's artifacts and images through talking and writing about art.
The Image to Word-Word to Image project strives to improve literacy through image making, and to improve image making through writing. The project's objectives are to:
- Offer workshops to assist teachers in using standards-based art education as a vehicle to improve literacy (both verbal and visual).
- Create curriculum resources for educators that will aid in improving image making, reading, and writing skills.
- Exhibit examples of children's writing and images, which reflect their cultures and their whole worlds.
The hands-on Image to Word-Word to Image workshops for teachers help integrate art and image making into the present curriculum. The workshops are sponsored by Pacific Center for the Arts and Humanities in Education (PCAHE).
Why Integrate Art and Language Arts?
The Standards, published by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association in 1996, provide support for integrating art and language art. The following statements from the commentary offer guidance for the development of correlated art and language art activities:
- Students need frequent opportunities to write about different topics and for different audiences and purposes - in art, students can write about a variety of topics related to the works of art studied and can produce works that address different audiences and purposes.
- Students develop their knowledge of form and convention in spoken, written, and visual language as they create their own compositions and critique those of others - in art, students develop knowledge of visual language, create their own works, and critique their work and the work of others.
- Students who explore cross-disciplinary connections develop a working terminology to describe language structure as they become more thorough readers and more effective writers - in art, students explore cross-disciplinary connections, become more visually literate, more thoughtful thinkers, and more effective writers.
- It is essential that students acquire a wide range of abilities for raising questions, investigating concerns, and solving problems - when writing about art, students acquire a wider range of skills for expression, both verbally and visually.
Standards-Based Art Education includes:
- Art History, which offers the opportunity to talk about and study one's own culture as well as the culture of others.
- Art Criticism, in which students can talk about images using the language of art (elements and principles).
- Aesthetic Inquiry, which offers experiences to talk about the nature of art.